Partisanship

If you want to understand why I prefer Edwards to Obama, you need to read what Corrente has to say about Paul Krugman.

The bulk of the afore-linked piece is a Shorter Krugman -- a summary of the argument you'll find in Conscience of a Liberal. Corrente hits all of the major points Krugman makes, except for his commentary on the role played by racism.

The bottom line: The billionaire owners of this country created the Conservative Movement as a means to siphon off all of the gains in productivity achieved by American workers over the last generation. Conservatism is a true movement -- a religious movement, a political St. Vitus dance -- in a way that Progressivism (a word so rarely used it still feels like a neologism) never was. Like any other successful religious movement, it had a priesthood:

And if you got hooked into that network, you got the cradle-to-grave protection typical of socialism: You always had a job, whether as a “fellow” or “scholar” at the AEI, a shouting head on Crossfire, as a columnist, as a contractor, as a political appointee or staffer, or as a lobbyist, and so on and on and on. You always got funding. You were made.

The result:

But now, with no checks, the winger billionaires have begun to roll us farther back to the Darwinian conditions of 1890s Gilded Age, and, with the destruction of habeas corpus, roll us all the way back to the time, before the Magna Carta, when the king’s word was law. Any limitation, any limitation at all, on the corporate powers that create the income streams from which the billionaires feed must be removed; hence the nonsensical idea that corporations, as fictive persons, have free speech; hence the aggrandizement of executive power, with huge and secret money flows to well-connected firms; hence the destruction of Constitutional government. (All this takes place against a background of looting and asset stripping on an imperial, Roman scale, of which the “subprime” “crisis” is but the latest of many examples.)

Have you ever read a better precis of What Went Wrong? I don't agree with everything Corrente has to say, but these two quotes make me want to give a blog a standing ovation.

The problem with Obama is his plea for non-partisanship. He keeps calling for "unity" with the Beast. Not possible. The Beast of laissez faire is red in tooth and claw and wants only to prey. Part of me hopes that Obama is playing it like Putney Swope, biding his time while waiting for the day of power -- and that, when power comes, he'll be a very different man: "Rockin' the boat's a drag. You gotta sink the boat!"

Maybe. But I doubt it.

Here's Krugman himself, writing in Slate not long ago:

But any attempt to change America's direction, to implement a real progressive agenda, will necessarily be highly polarizing. Proposals for universal health care, in particular, are sure to face a firestorm of partisan opposition. And fundamental change can't be accomplished by a politician who shuns partisanship.

I like to remind people who long for bipartisanship that FDR's drive to create Social Security was as divisive as Bush's attempt to dismantle it. And we got Social Security because FDR wasn't afraid of division.

Bipartisanship was more thinkable before the growth of movement conservatism, before Friedmanism replaced Keynesianism. By the standards of his day, Nixon was a partisan pit bull; by the standards of our day, he was a moderate.

Krugman reminds us that the current weakness of movement conservatism is temporary; we still live in a country in which self-proclaimed conservatives outnumber self-proclaimed liberals by a two-to-one factor. In many parts of this nation, the citizenry still gets much of its news from Rush, Fox and JesusMedia Inc.

Hence, the Ron Paul cult. Hence, the Bloomberg feelers. The Beast is looking for a way to jettison Bush while still keeping laissez faire as the state religion.

If a Democrat wins in 2008, the opportunity for true and lasting change will be measured in months, not years -- and perhaps weeks, not months. The billionaires own most of the media. They hire people who are so damned clever that they could sell horsecrap to horses.

Even after throwing Americans out of their homes and forcing them to live in cars, the billionaires control what people hear on the car radio.

Which means that even the homeless will continue to believe the Great Lie that laissez faire is the solution, not the problem: "Curl up in the back seat of your Honda, little plebe, and don't blame the rich for putting you there. If they wealthy pay no taxes, maybe they'll be so grateful they will let you share a one-bedroom apartment with five other people."

That's why I prefer Edwards to Obama. Obama wants to reach out to the enemy. Edwards wants to reach out to the enemy's teeth with a hammer.