The Fear Card and the Guilt Card
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A little while ago I did a piece on tweeting the fear card, and the attempts of certain supporters of the Democrats in this year's elections to persuade dissatisfied and angry progressives that severe damage will be done to the country if the Republicans take over the House, the implication being that severe damage will not also be done if the Democrats retain control of the House. As the election has approached the fear card is being supplemented by the guilt card.
The guilt card asks whether angry progressives won't feel guilty If Republican neanderthals like Bachmann, O'Donnell, Angle, Paul, Joe Miller, Johnson, Webster, etc. beat fine Democrats like Russ Feingold and others. And then it suggests that if you don't want to feel guilty you have to get out there and work for the Democrats, so that the great evil of a Republican victory will be averted and we can have two more wonderful years of Democratic rule.
I really have the same answer to both the fear card and the guilt card, and they are my own fear and guilt cards for Democratic Congresscritters and a Democratic President. First, aren't you afraid of turning the country over to the neanderthals again and going back to the Bush policies? Won't you feel guilty if you lose to the knuckle-draggers, and completely blow the golden opportunity for change the American people gave you in 2008?
If you are afraid, and you do will feel guilty, then don't berate me or other angry progressives for whining. Just stop whining yourself and do what it takes to get our votes. It's easy.
First, in the Senate, get your lazy butts in gear and use the nuclear option to get rid of the filibuster. Second, pass the economic program I've written about here. Third, pass a bill defining legal persons incorporated by States and operating in Interstate commerce in such a way that they cannot fund political messaging. Fourth, pass HR 676 Medicare for All. Fifth, pass EFCA. Sixth, dissolve the Catfood Commission. There is no long-term deficit problem. It's a myth. Forget about it!
Next, for us angry progressives let's keep two things in mind. First, hctomorrow's post of September 14th. He places our voting decision in the November elections in the context of experimental research on Game Theory, and likens our situation to an iterated prisoner's dilemma game in which the best immediate tactic is to defect against a cooperating partner. He points out that the Democratic Party's game against us progressives is to ask us to cooperate, indeed to use any sort of appeal to get us to support them, while they defect from any promises they make to us and act to please the interests that fund their campaigns. He also points out that in an iterated prisoner dilemma situation, such as the one we find ourselves in, it is self-defeating for us to continue to support the Democrats, however persuasive their fear and guilt cards may be.
Continued cooperation with them by us will not secure cooperative behavior on their part, but according to a vast amount of experimental evidence will only result in further defections of Democrats from our interests. To get their cooperation we have to engage in defecting behavior too. That is we have to stay home, or vote for third parties, or even vote Republican, because only then is it possible for them to learn that their strategy of continuous defection won't work. Prisoners Dilemma research has shown that defection will bring occasional cooperative behavior on the Democrats' part. When that occurs the indicated response by us should be cooperation. But not until then.
To these notions, I want to add my own view that if we accept that we need to defect from the Democrats to show that if they don't cooperate, we won't either, then this election is a better time to do it than in the election of 2012. Then, both the Presidency and the Congress will be up for grabs. In 2010 however, the most likely result of elections where we defect is that the Democrats will lose only the House.
Today, Jim Moss makes the case that the 2010 elections won't give the Republicans so much power that they can repeal anything they want too, and also that control of the House doesn't mean very much, since with the filibuster still intact in the Senate, most legislation gets blocked or watered down anyway. He's right! This is not that critical an election. If we defect from the Democrats now, we can see how they behave over the next two years, do our best to develop the framework of a real third party, then, If they continue to defect, we can decide whether to go back to them again or pull the trigger, and end the Democratic Party, as we know it, for good.
(Cross-posted at All Life Is Problem Solving and Fiscal Sustainability).
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Comments
Funny-Peculiar
What's funny is that Dem partisans want to have it both ways.
If the Dems win, then there's the promise of great things--but when they don't do them, it's because the GOP obstructs everything. Realism, doncha know. But, vote for them anyway, because that's the best we can do.
If the Dems lose, well, that's SO BAD, because the GOP will be able to do whatever they want, because they're so effective at overcoming Dem obstructionism with their ruthlessness and their bullying.
So yeah: Dems in power, too weak to overcome the GOP. Dems out of power, too weak to obstruct. But somehow both of these states of affairs mean I should vote for the Democrats.
Yes, it's motivation
Kind of speaks to the motivation of the two sides. The Ds have been using fear, guilt, and anger cards to get progressives working for them. Since the progressives never defect, the Dems think, "where can the "effin retards" go? Until we show them we're willing to experience the pain we'll get with the return of Republican rule, they'll keep thinking we have nowhere to go and they'll keep ignoring us.
The Dems have actually done us a favor.
How so? By making it very clear, through their recent verbal bludgeonings, that the party has abandoned us.
And why is this good? Because, unlike the mathematical analysis of the Prisoner's Dilemma, in real life it's hard to say exactly when your partner has defected or cooperated. When election time rolls around, traditionally incumbents like to point to what they've done as evidence that they are on your side. But now they're making only a half-hearted effort to do this. They have openly "defected".
So it's quite clear that the rational strategy, "tit for tat", is for us to defect in this election.
Good point
But, I don't think it's been hard to say that they have defected.
-- It was apparent when they continued the bailout of the big banks, and allowed them to change the mark-to-market accounting rules and falsely inflate their balance sheets, and when they failed to take them into resolution.
-- It was apparent when they passed a stimulus only half the size of what was needed.
-- It was apparent when they took Medicare for All off the table in the Spring of 2009.
-- It was apparent when they failed to pass a credit card interest rate limit and then gave the companies 9 months to raise our interest rates before the law came into effect.
-- It was apparent when they passed an hcr bill that bailed out the insurance companies, wasn't even going to be operative until 2014, and failed to do very much of substance about fatalities, bankruptcies, and foreclosures due to lack of health insurance that actually pays inflated medical expenses.
-- It was apparent when they passed a finreg bill that solves none of our real problems with the financial system.
-- It's been apparent in the way they've treated the two wars and in the way they've handled questions of accountability and violations of civil liberties and human rights, and in their refusal to even investigate past criminal behavior. And finally,
-- it was apparent in their stupid bipartisanship dance and refusal to use the nuclear option to get rid of the filibuster so that they could liberate themselves from the drag of the 'left wing" of the Republican Party and the Blue Dog Democrats.
So yes, now is the time to play tit-for-tat.
Yes, glaringly apparent.
But the Obama fans who surround me don't (or -- in some cases -- didn't) see it that way. So I'm glad, in a horrible kind of way, to see the administration shoving it into their faces.
My view is and has always
My view is and has always been that no voter owes their vote to any politician or political party. It is up to the candidate and the party to give us positive and sufficient reasons to vote for them, and if they can't, end of story. Fear and guilt are negative reasons and don't enter into the equation.
So when I am told I must choose corporatist Democrats or risk corporatist Republicans, my response is NOTA.
The "don't sulk" card
Yesterday, O played the "don't sulk" card, too. The problem with all these moves is that they turn around the chain of command. We are not participants in O's company of which he is the CEO, and we are also not members of a football team he coaches. We are his bosses. We hired him and every member of Congress to serve us. If we think he hasn't served us well the response to that shouldn't be the various BS cards he is handing out. the response should be whatever further action he has to take to make us happy bosses.
First on that list has to be getting rid of the filibuster and after that second has to be passing what is obviously very good legislation for working people quickly, before the election. No excuses. No rationalizations. Just performance is what we need to vote for the Ds again.
Taking the hit
What the Obama administration shows is that the Ds are so bad it makes more sense to "take the hit" and try to break them then it does to keep enabling the legacy parties. I can't see why anybody would have an ounce of guilt about trying to put fear into them, especially after they try to put fear into us. And heck, on Social Security at least, the Ds were a heck of a lot better in opposition!
Better in opposition!
Yes, yes, yes!
Now, there's pragmatism for you.
Why were the Ds better in opposition?
That's what I wanna know. I do think Nader was wrong in 2000 and again in 2004. But something really seems to have changed. What? Was it really the fact that the Wall Street donors finally started donating en masse to Dems? Was it Obama? What?
Two words
Social Security.
On the D's in oppo -- Right answer, wrong question?
I think gq's question may not have been the one (I think) you answered ("what makes you think the D's were better in opposition?"), but rather "what made the D's behave better in opposition?"
I'm not a political analyst, but I'll throw some hypotheses out there:
They behaved better because they didn't have to fear the consequences of their efforts bearing fruit and pissing off their wealthy donors.
They behaved better because they thought (knew) it would fire up the base and get our support for their reelection campaigns.
They behaved better because they didn't have a party leader who puts a premium on "bipartisanship".
They appeared to behave better because the news media, always seeking stories of conflict, gave a lot of play to anything they did in opposition to the Republicans.
They appeared to behave better because the housing bubble created an apparent alignment of interests between their big donors and the electorate.
I'm tapped out. Comments? Brickbats? Alternative explanations?
Obama
has set the tone. At the beginning, if he had acted like a New Deal Democrat, and gotten rid of the filibuster, he could have rammed through all kinds of good legislation and we'd all be very happy with the Dems now.
Instead he turned leadership over to Reid, Pelosi, and the lobbyists and bleated about bi-partisanship.
I don't mean to imply there's nothing with the Democrats, only that they could have been led down the right path if Obama had become what some of us hoped he'd be.
I'd put a bit more negative slant than that.
Obama's procorporatist leadership and tactics made it impossible for Pelosi and Reid to do anything, even if they had wanted to. It's not at all clear to me that they wouldn't have passed more liberal legislation if Obama had indicated he wouldn't block it. I believe it truly was the WH preventing more liberal versions of bills getting created - e.g. HCR, lack of TARP restrictions, banking regulations, etc.
Yes
I think that's all true.
They were
much better in opposition. Then they defeated Bush's privatization effort.
question for lets
Hi- I noted your comment in a discussion uh, somewhere else, in the context of this piece.
I was intrigued by it, because it never occurred to me before, and I think it's worthy of discussion at Corrente. Maybe you could expand, maybe others will weigh in. I'm still mulling it over. You said:
~~~I know. I think the problem is that many progressives don’t believe in retribution, or punishment, or revenge, or nasty, messy, verbal conflict. A lot of Ps think that it’s always about positive reinforcement, positive thinking, positive, this, positive that. Let’s not be negative. Let’s look forward, not backward, and so on.
Unfortunately if defectors don’t get defection in return, they’ll keep on defecting.~~~
Hi VG,
I'm afraid I have not much more say about this. It is a speculation. Subjectively it seems to me that liberals changed after 1972, and that the fighting liberalism of previous years had largely died. Maybe it was the professionalization of the D Party and the receding influence of the Unions.