I just participated in a discussion with thereisnospoon and hekebolos about the terms "moderate" and "centrist" and how they played out in yesterday's debate on Meet the Press between Markos and Harold Ford. You can listen to the discussion via podcast over at Political Nexus.
We all know that the debate between the DLC and the blogosphere for the soul of the Democratic Party is not one about liberal versus moderate; it's about inside versus outside, about a few oligarchs versus a panoply of voices.
But by way of extending the discussion, and showing how DLC rhetoric actually harms people, allow me to posit this question: what has happened to this country?
We're smaller...
U.S. adults lost their position as the tallest people on Earth to the Dutch, who average about two inches taller than the typical American. In fact, American men now rank ninth and women 15th in average height, having fallen short of many other European nations.
"Americans, who have been the tallest in the world for a very long time, are no longer the tallest," said John Komlos of the University of Munich, who has published a series of papers documenting the trend. "Americans have not kept up with western European populations."
Our life expectancy is greatly diminished:
Americans are living longer than ever, but not as long as people in 41 other countries.
For decades, the United States has been slipping in international rankings of life expectancy, as other countries improve health care, nutrition and lifestyles.
Countries that surpass the U.S. include Japan and most of Europe, as well as Jordan, Guam and the Cayman Islands.
"Something's wrong here when one of the richest countries in the world, the one that spends the most on health care, is not able to keep up with other countries," said Dr. Christopher Murray, head of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.
We're fatter...
Adults in the United States have one of the highest obesity rates in the world. Nearly a third of U.S. adults 20 years and older are obese, while about two-thirds are overweight, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.
And our kids die young at an alarming rate:
A relatively high percentage of babies born in the U.S. die before their first birthday, compared with other industrialized nations.
Forty countries, including Cuba, Taiwan and most of Europe had lower infant mortality rates than the U.S. in 2004. The U.S. rate was 6.8 deaths for every 1,000 live births. It was 13.7 for Black Americans, the same as Saudi Arabia.
These are very dangerous problems for a country to have. Some would consider them the product of decadence, of a rich society that rests on its laurels, grows fat and happy, and allows the world to pass them by. But I think there's more at work than that. Consider, for example, the fact that the only man in the country that gets his full allotment of vacation time is the President of the United States. Most of us don't use up our annual meager vacation time at all. We're not fat and happy, we're overworked and driven, fat because we spend all day in front of our desks, distracted by Paris Hilton's conspicuous consumption and the entertainment media's shoving it in our face to want to reach her level by consuming more and more, in turn making us a culture of worker bees who shut up and go shopping.
And this is a direct antecedent of a political culture that reflexively resists change and supports only the most narrow of solutions.
America's shrinkage in height and life expectancy relative to the rest of the world has at least partially to do with the fact that we're the only industrialized nation on Earth without a universal health care system. But I also think that this insistence by the elites who rule our discourse for "sensible bipartisan solutions" ends up narrowing the bands of opinion, at least on the left. The belief from these elites is that we live in a fundamentally conservative country where "real Americans" can only be found in the center of the nation, literally and figuratively, and that voices on the far left represent some sort of fringe element instead of the mainstream of America on many issues (health care, getting out of Iraq, etc.). The nutjobs on the right can literally advocate anything and it isn't met with as much fervor, because they are typically arguing for an entrenchment of the status quo. Where anyone argues for REAL change, the elites see them as unserious and silly and unfit for public discourse (see Kucinich, Dennis).
For example, what passes for a radical solution to this health crisis in America, in the boundaries of acceptable discourse, is something like John Edwards' public/private competition idea, which puts for-profit insurance companies and government-run healthcare plans before Americans, and offers them the choice of either. This may eventually create a universal, not-for-profit system. But imagine if Margaret Thatcher, a conservative, offered this up as a policy prescription in the United Kingdom. There would be riots in the streets if she attempted to give away part of the healthcare system to for-profit private enterprise.
Part of this is the fact that we're moving toward a fairer healthcare system from a for-profit one, while in England it would be the opposite. But clearly, the band of options within the bounds of acceptable discourse are incredibly narrow in this country. Anyone offering real change against entrenched interests is dismissed as a not very serious person, including Edwards, even though he winds up to the right of every self-described conservative in Europe. I submit that this is a direct cause of the fetish of centrism. There is an elite political class in America who believes that the best policy, by default, is the policy which merges various proposals into a bipartisan stew. This not only ends up with a whole that is far lesser than the sum of its parts, but prevents any big, meaningful change on the challenges facing the nation. Conservatives and liberals don't bicker for the sake of bickering - they have substantive differences about where they want to take the country, and the "third way" is often the worst possible way to address those differences. Therefore our political leaders feel the need to create some triple bank-shot compromise on health care as a STARTING POINT for the debate. The same on immigration. On energy. On a host of issues. And as a result, people get shorter, sicker, and dead sooner than other places around the world. Our quality of life suffers, because the dog-eat-dog nature of America's subsidized, unregulated economic structure is still so prevalent and unquestioned among our elites. Our financial markets remain wedded to their suicide pact with speculation because elites help their own by rejecting their so-called "principles" of personal responsibility and bailing out their friends and neighbors to maintain stability, which is code for the rich staying rich and the poor staying poor. Our internal infrastructure, and quality of life improvements for large masses of people, are neglected because the views of the "serious" foreign policy establishment and the defense-industrial complex remain ascendant among bipartisan centrists, meaning more war, more military buildup and less money in the budget for anything else.
We have one party that is openly hostile to any progress whatsoever, even in the realm of basic settled science circa 1859, and we have another party that too often listens to the views of establishment Beltway elites who block meaningful change in the name of "centrism." Markos really got to Harold Ford when he connected John Breaux and the DLC's embrace of the Bush tax cuts to the bridge collapse in Minnesota. That was a piercing truth. When centrism rises, the country crumbles because the status quo is maintained and nothing of meaning gets completed. When unity is the only thing valued, you see crackpot ideas, like needing the indiscriminate murder of 3,000 citizens to happen again to get the groupthink going, given serious scrutiny, and ideas like providing for the basic needs of people laughed off as terribly unserious or communist or worse.
The rejection of this fetishized centrism, this desire for an oligarchy of self-elected elites, has already started in the country, but the entrenchment is so deep, and the links to the will of transnational corporations so intense, that it will take a concerted effort for decades to break the back of this dangerous ideology and get the country moving again. We still do have a working conservative majority thanks to the bias toward the status quo represented by our centrist elites. We are starting to see change here but the progressive movement cannot let up for a minute.