Chait's enigma

Chait's entry last week about Obama as the GOP's next slated conservative--"But you know who really does have a scary socialist agenda threatening to destroy all we hold dear about America? Hillary Clinton"--is spot on, partly because, as Chait notes, the Republican Cause of fear-escalation requires such recalibrations of old fears to make room for the new, but also because presidential histories will instantly grasp the frame as essentially correct.

Chait guesses at the GOP's future, reset assessment of President Obama as "a prudent moderate, seeking to expand government only when there is demonstrable need and the opportunity for a bipartisan solution."

Yes, the GOP's revisionist hypocrisy will be breathtaking. But the revisionism itself will be perversely apt, will it not? And that really does throw into question the ideological meaning of modern progressivism. Is it, in deed, the new conservatism, which is the far older conservatism merely masquerading as progressivism? And if this is so--which I would agree is the case, and, apparently, so would Chait--whither a distinctly defined progressivism?

Comments

[Peter G]

It is probably better to think of this continuous process not as revisionism so much as evolution. A Darwinian response, as it were, to a changing political environment. And evolution produces some pretty grotesque creatures too.

[pamelabrown53]

Peter G,

I'm skeptical at your attempt to include the republicans as adapting to changes in the political environment. Way too intellectual. I think that a superficial glance at presidential politics would reveal little has changed from the inception of our democracy.

Interesting that Chait used M.Gerson when just over the weekend I read an article by Gerson who described Bill Clinton as (paraphrasing) one of the best natural politicians ever and Barack Obama as ruthlessly efficient.

As per p.m.'s last paragraph I'd be willing to entertain the idea that we progressives (liberals) are the new conservatives while the "conservatives" are nihilistic radicals.

We're "conservative" in that we wish to conserve ideals such as equal opportunity, an economy that is strong because it supports the many over the few and a striving for a more perfect union. E Pluribus Unum.

[Peter G]

I wish to clarify. The Republicans are rather deft at adapting to political realities else they wouldn't have succeeded as well as they have. Demographic realities, not so much. Evolution is a blind process and so are the Republicans. Evolution does not look to the future it exists only in the now. Not all Republicans are blind either but enough that they have put themselves into a box Houdini couldn't get out of. And I too agree with PM that ultimately progressives become the conservators of social programs against erosive ideologies that seek to reduce if not destroy them. When there is no group whose rights need championing what other goal does one have them to keep those rights? Yesterday I got into a debate about the post racial society. My view is that such a thing will never exist. But as the demographics of the US change and non-whites become a majority of the US population, dog whistle racism will cease to be a viable electoral strategy for anything but the most local of offices. And then Dr King's promised land will be reached. That doesn't mean racism disappears. It means that it recedes from the public domain. Endemic but never again epidemic.I rather hope to live to see that but actuarial tables say otherwise.

[Robert Lipscomb]

It is not about the GOP. They will be hIllary's road bump.

In football, you run the ball in the first, scond and third quarters so you can run over the other team in the fourth quarter. Obama has presented the most ambitiously progressive agenda in a generation and is out on the stump promoting it.

When we celebrate Hillary's landslide victory, the celebratory legislative cake will have already been baked.

GOP leaders have been reduced to complaining about Obama trying to destroy their party.