Author Page for Scott Lemieux

You May Be A Complacent Fake-Liberal If…

There’s not much to say about this; I agree that it “comes across like something written by a teenage D-List “Youstabee” during the peak glory of the Summer of War.” Particularly instructive is–especially with respect to foreign policy–how much of what defines an “extremist” is based on virtually unfalsifiable attributions of motivations rather than on specific policy preferences (you know the routine–”OK, you were right about the Iraq War, but you’re saying that because you hate America, so it doesn’t count!”), as well as the inevitable dismissal or arguments made in an insufficiently “civil” manner–these are the favored strategies for those would would prefer not to engage with substantive criticism on the merits. And to the extent that there is specific content, the people it applies to have virtually no influence in American politics, which makes arguing against them not terribly productive. To get something constructive out of this, perhaps we can create a more specific typology: the characteristics you’re likely to have if you’re the kind of respectable pundit who can be the token “liberal” at prominent national publications and Sunday talk shows:

• During the run-up to an exceptionally disastrous war when prescient anti-war voices are scarcer in the mainstream media than people of color at a Nader rally, you can never get around to using your prominent media outlets to clearly disagree with the war, you do find time to suggest that you agree with the war, and yet years after the fact when the war is both an abject disaster and highly unpopular you suddenly start patting yourself on the back for having courageously opposed the war all along.
• Even as you nominally opposed the war after it became easy to do so, you can somehow never find anybody else who opposes it in the right way–”it’s easy to assume that they are rooting for an American failure,” you claim, never naming any names or giving any quotes–and maintain that another Freidman is somehow always required for people to be Serious.
• You claim that people who oppose the Bush administration’s illegal warrantless wiretapping program are as “out of the mainstream” as people who think that Terri Schiavo was three days away from walking out of the hospital, despite easily available public opinion data that shows the opposite.
• You make the transparently illogical assertion that the increasing insecurity of the contemporary job market makes the privitization of Social Security more desirable. (I guess this kind of reactionary and unpopular position isn’t outside the mainstream–and certainly not comparable to the Schiavo wingnuts–but is “speaking truth to power” or something.)
• You claim, based on inferences gleaned from George Bush’s alleged “authenticity,” that the result of Bush’s election would be “‘a quiet, patient, and persistent bipartisanship,’ with no big tax cuts or Supreme Court ideologues” and suggest that “Bush could easily retain Lawrence Summers at Treasury and Richard Holbrooke at the United Nations.”
• You dismiss fundamental economic issues that might matter to people not in your highly elevated income bracket as “jobs, health-care, and blah-blah-blah.”

Nobody could hit every one of these, could they?

…Ezra: ” Who is Joe Klein arguing against here? Even a left-wing strawman would find this recitation of his positions a smidge reductive. And to say that “it would be wildly stupid for me to get into a pissing match by naming names” is basically irresponsible. Either Joe Klein is arguing against real human beings with a role in the national dialogue or he is not, but until he names some names, the context of the conversation suggests he’s talking about the left wing blogosphere — he’s simply retaining plausible deniability around his insinuation.”