Author Destroys Fascist Pretense

Barack Obama is Not a Liberal and Sarah Palin is Not a Conservative

"Question - White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs recently derided liberal critics of the Obama Administration as the “professional left.” Was he talking about you? What do you make of this line of attack?

I’m not sure Gibbs has a coherent idea of what he means by the “left,” but if opposition to permanent war, extrajudicial assassination of American citizens, boundless state secrecy, and unlimited corporate bailouts constitutes “leftism,” then so be it. True to their Clintonian principles, President Obama and his advisors have spurned the Democratic Party’s liberal base and have sought to govern by appropriating the policies of the Republican right. Just as Bill Clinton enacted NAFTA and destroyed welfare, Barack Obama has pushed through a health-care program that was inspired by the Heritage Foundation and largely written by the insurance lobby—and he shows every sign of being willing to vandalize Social Security in the name of deficit reduction even though the program has nothing to do with the federal budget deficit. Obama has embraced the Bushite war on terror and has refused to roll back the unconstitutional executive usurpations that so outraged his supporters. And yet Democrats expect liberals to toe the line and shut the hell up lest the Republicans take advantage of their dissent. In fact, for the most part, the “professional left” of policy intellectuals, public interest advocates, and opinion journalists have done just that."

"Question - One of the key dilemmas in American politics today, you write, is the disappearance of conservatives and the emergence in their place of “pseudo-cons.” What is it about Sarah Palin or Newt Gingrich that can’t be squared with the traditional definition of conservative?

Alas, jingoistic demagogues like Palin and Gingrich are nothing new in American politics. What’s interesting is the obsessive insistence of such right-wing agitators that they are conservatives when, in fact, almost nothing about them is conservative in any traditional sense. They are extremists who display no sense of affection for the past; no humility or skepticism about their revolutionary proposals; no sign of the compromising and practical spirit that is so characteristic of classical conservatives; no awareness that capitalism itself is the most powerful force for change in the history of humanity. By today’s incoherent standards, even Edmund Burke himself would be derided as a bleeding heart, welfare-state socialist. As political writers as disparate as Theodore Adorno and Richard Hofstadter have observed, the funny thing about pseudo-conservatives is that they champion the very forces that are destroying what remains of traditional American ways of life. What’s ironic, given their rhetoric, is that pseudo-cons like Gingrich and Palin have no use for core American values such as the rule of law, freedom of religion and association, or for the idea that the Constitution follows the flag. They champion torture, extrajudicial assassination, unconstrained domestic surveillance, and a thoroughly monarchistic vision of the presidency; they happily encourage wars of aggression, demand that native-born children be stripped of their citizenship, demonize a religious minority, and then have the audacity to accuse their opponents of being anti-American."

"The absence of authentic conservatives in our politics serves to ensure that our national debates are largely carried out in the realm of fiction; pseudo-conservatives take on pseudo-liberals in symbolic battle over cultural ephemera when what is really at stake is which of the two corrupt parties will win the privilege of representing the interests of the superrich."