Liberal Washing

Salon writer David Sirota wrote an interesting article last week about a concept he calls liberal-washing, “about wrapping corporate America’s agenda in the veneer of fight-for-the-little-guy progressivism, thus portraying plutocrats’ radical rip-off schemes as ideologically moderate efforts to rescue the proles.” The idea is that corporate America sells a form of reverse populism that screws the middle class while not only getting Republican support but sufficient votes and cover from “liberal” lawmakers. This is often done with a famous liberal offering their strong endorsement from Clinton’s support for tougher crime laws and long mandatory sentencing, welfare reform, media deregulation and banking reform to Edward Kennedy’s co-sponsoring of No Child Left Behind.

But the trend runs even deeper, with everything from the anti-union stance that emerged in the 70s to the transformation of responsibility for retirement from employers to employees (with the much touted 401(k) and 403(b) plans). It includes the privatization of public goods like prisons, education and gas & electric, the deregulation of markets, tax cuts for the wealthy, attacks on environmental regulations and, of course, one piece of legislation after another choosing employers and corporations over citizens and democracy.

Sirota notes a number of more recent examples including the NSA Surveillance program that Diane Feinstein supported, the Center for American Progress coming out to support Goldman Sachs and Machiavellian CEO Lloyd Blankfein (“shared social goals in areas like housing, clean energy and — most recently — preventive social services.”), New Jersey Senator Cory Booker liberal-washing the private equity industry’s predatory business model and anti-public school agenda and prominent union leaders supporting Rahm Emmanuel’s run for mayor in Chicago. It also reminds me of Pew and the recent revelation that they are supporting cuts to public employee retirement plans, supporting the agenda of one of their funders while hiding behind seemingly “objective” research.

The reality is that too many liberals are for sale and the “New Left” era that Clinton and Blair initiated 20 years ago was simply a way to move the entire political spectrum to the right, allowing Bush and later Cameron to rise to the highest office and implement a radical right-wing agenda that no longer felt radical. Liberal washing also moves to the level of discourse, with anyone talking about race either labeled a race-baiter or racist, anyone discussing class called a socialist or charged with engaging in “class warfare” and any discussion of raising taxes on the wealthy, beyond the scope of reasonable (even when it involves ending what was supposed to be a temporary cut to begin with).

As we watched the Tea Party loons attempt to shut down the government to force feed even more cuts, Democrats finally stood strong, but only because the Obama administration had finally had enough. The reality is this sort of action would have been unheard of 40 years ago and the media reaction shows us how far to the right we have moved. The attacks on liberals are endless from every corner of the public sphere, including the conservative media, the supposedly “liberal” media, on radio, in schools and now, increasingly, in higher education.

“Liberal washing” simply serves to further legitimate the conservative revolution and effectively does so by not only convincing moderates to support these policies of the 1 percent but by pushing many moderate democrats to play along as well. The question that emerges is whether there is any way to stop this push to make America the land of the few that solely supports corporate and elite interests. The answer is certainly yes, but it requires finding compelling progressive voices that can infiltrate the increasingly insular media and DC landscape – and ensuring that those voices are not just engaging in empty rhetoric. The left needs to reorganize and fight back before it is too late. One hopes they can actually learn to sit in a room together and do so, as the splintering into a thousand fragmented pieces merely reinforces the rightward tact that continues to take us further and further away from the dreams of freedom and democracy that many of the founding fathers envisioned for our future.