Harold Meyerson looks at the progressive fizzle. Where's Obama? More to the point, where are his supporters?
In America, major liberal reforms require not just liberal governments, but autonomous, vibrant mass movements, usually led by activists who stand at or beyond liberalism's left fringe. No such movements were around during Carter and Clinton's presidencies. For his part, Obama won election with something new under the political sun: a list of 13 million people who had supported his campaign. But he has consistently declined to activate his activists to help him win legislative battles by pressuring, for instance, those Democratic members of Congress who have weakened or blocked his major bills. To be sure, loosing the activists would have brought problems of its own: Unlike Roosevelt or Johnson, who benefited from autonomous movements, Obama would be answerable for every loopy tactic his followers employed. But in the absence of both a free-standing movement and a legion of loyalists, Congress isn't feeling much pressure from the left to move Obama's agenda.
Maybe the internet, which played such a big part in getting Obama elected, is responsible for the fade-out of progressive energy. This blog has commented, de vez en cuando, on how much yakkety-yak the left does online but (compared to the '60's and '30's) how little we actually accomplish.
Have we decided talking about it is enough? Or that supporting MoveOn is a sufficiently noble alternative to actually moving our butts and getting something done? As Meyerson has noted, Congress isn't feeling much pressure...
The construction of social movements is always a bit of a mystery. The right has had great success over the past year in building a movement that isn't really for anything but that has channeled anew the fears and loathings of millions of Americans. If Glenn Beck can help do that for the right, can't, say, Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann help build a movement against the banks or for jobs programs? It might well be too little too late, but without left pressure from below, the Obama presidency will end up looking more like Carter's or Clinton's than Roosevelt's or Johnson's.
I'm sure we have plenty of excuses, though, and we're smart and wily enough to know how to toss the blame elsewhere. For a start, wasn't Obama supposed to do all the hard work for us?
