Martin Luther King, Jr. vs. Rodney King

There are two rather fundamentally opposed ways of viewing the political process, and they are playing themselves out right now across a range of important issues as Democrats figure out how to try to govern. You can take either approach to absurd lengths, of course, but at the end of the day when you are trying to get things done in politics and government, you have to go with one strategy over the other fairly consistently on the big issues.

The first approach is the sort of pluralist approach outlined in some of the classical political theory texts such as the Federalist Papers. It argues in essence that to get things done, you bring all the competing interest groups to the table, and work out a deal that everyone, or at least the broad majority, can live with. Everyone gets something, everyone has to make some sacrifices.

There are multiple problems with this model in this moment in American history. The biggest is that certain interests -- Wall Street, the insurance industry, big energy companies -- have amassed such enormous power that it has become way to easy for them to push aside the less organized and far less wealthy interests represented by poor and working class people, consumers, labor, etc. The other big problem is that one of our two major political parties has become thoroughly captured by those big business interests I mentioned above, and has become equally that their best bet politically is just to say no to everything and hope the Democrats fail.

The other approach is to make a decision about, in the words of a great old labor song, "which side are you on?" This approach has clearly been adopted by the Republican Party: they know they are on the side of the insurance industry in the debate on health care, for example.

It's an approach that has its downsides, too: it makes powerful people very angry, and those powerful people have lots of resources to bring to try and beat you; it goes against the DC conventional wisdom machine in a big way; it doesn't always look pretty. And on a great many small issues that don't have big special interests caring deeply about them, or haven't been blown up into big symbolic fights, the whole bipartisan pluralism thing works pretty well sometimes.

Here's the deal, though: when you are dealing with really big issues, issues of a historical magnitude like health care reform and taking on the big banks and climate change, history is pretty clear that you have to pick a side -- the side opposite the big special interests -- and beat them. Frederick Douglass and the abolitionists and Abe Lincoln did not sit down with the southern slaveholders and negotiate a deal with them: they literally had to go to war to defeat them. Alice Paul did not, after almost 90 years of suffragist struggle, negotiate a deal with those opposing women's right to vote, she literally chained herself to the White House fence. FDR did not work out a compromise with the bankers and those opposing Social Security: he literally "welcomed their hatred." And Martin Luther King, Jr. and John Lewis did not sit down to negotiate the end of Jim Crow, they sat down at lunch counters instead, and marched and rode Freedom buses, and forced a decision: civil rights wins, or Jim Crow wins. LBJ didn't pass Medicare and Medicaid by negotiating with the AMA, he just rolled them.

The other uncomfortable thing about choosing a side on these big battles: there are real consequences to doing it. If we break up the big banks and restructure the system that incentivizes reckless trading gambles, we might have more high finance done overseas. If we actually do something about climate change and health care, we might lose industry jobs in the big coal, oil, and insurance states. There are always downsides to every policy choice you make. But if you are clear about which side you are on, you can live with those tradeoffs. If you are on the side of regular people in their fight against the big special interests, and you have to make a difficult policy choice, the tradeoff gets easier to make.

At the end of the day, I am pretty convinced that Barack Obama and the Democrats in Congress are going to have to roll some people. They will have to choose sides. As my friend Drew Westen says, Democrats have a lot better chance if they sound like Martin Luther King (who spoke about why we can't wait) than like Rodney King (whose message was "why can't we just all get along?").

Comments

[tnkeating]

Mike you got to be kidding yourself if you think only one poltical party is tied to the lobbyist and big business. All one has to do is look at who benefited from the last bailout and stimulas bills, big business.

[DaveC19]

The problem is Obama is too weak. He is afraid to stand up for anything and just caves at the slightest opposition. I really hope he will "man up" but I am not counting on it. When he caves on a public option for health care you will know there is no hope.