Worth Fighting About

In a recent piece in the Washington Monthly, Kevin Drum asserts that American politics is essentially stalemated because there are no "grand issues" under debate. The liberals have nothing left to accomplish, and the conservatives have failed in their attempts to overturn liberalism - because the voters would never tolerate it. He concludes with the following:

Although the heat of battle often obscures this, the unhappy reality is that modern American politics is mostly played at the margins. In practical terms, we're no longer fighting seriously over grand principle, we're just fighting over who gets the most toys. The fact that Impostor—perhaps unwittingly—lays this so bare makes it a worthwhile read not just for its intended conservative audience, but for liberals as well. If progressives ever want to break our current political stalemate, they're going to have to open a new front.

I really don't understand what Kevin is talking about. The erosion of civil liberties, the decline of the Middle Class, the perversion and decay of our democratic institutions, a deteriorating environment, the crusade being waged by the American Taliban, the compromising of the New Deal & American prosperity by globalization, the death of the labor movement, and our ludicrously bad educational system - all of these major problems don't constitute issues significant enough to warrant "serious" politics?

There are 2 things wrong wth Kevin's analysis. The first is that the conservatives have in fact been quite successful in undermining the accomplishments of 20th century liberalism. They just haven't been able to do so in any naked way because of the risk of electoral retribution. Instead they have just gradually squeezed liberal programs to death, accelerated trends that undermine the New Deal settlement, used executive orders to weaken regulations, and are packing the Courts full of people who will at best uphold moves to weaken liberalism and at worst just overturn the 20th century.

The second problem with Kevin's perspective is that he doesn't seem to grasp the full implications of the Nixonian politics of the Republican party. These guys simply have no respect for democratic, centrist, consensus-based politics. They have built an awesomely corrupt political machine while doing everything they can to short-circuit any potential accountability. The democratic process itself might not be "sexy" enough to rank with the Civil Rights Movement, but how different is it to say that a group of people are being systematically disenfranchised through segregation as opposed to making elections generally meaningless? If it quacks like a duck, etc.

Kevin is right about one thing - the conservative agenda in particular and America's contemporary problems generally haven't been enough to really inspire the attention of the voters. Where he goes wrong is to assume that our problems don't deserve that kind of attention. It is exactly this public disinterest with our contemporary challenges that make this era so worrying and allows conservatives to be so successful. There is no big, dramatic attack on the American way of life. Instead there is a creeping, incremental assault on everything we thought we stood for. It's the basic "frog in the pot" problem: a sharp increase in temperature will inspire us to act, but a slow worsening of conditions will just encourage our torpor - until we are dead.