Friedman bloviates

Commenting on the passage of the Health Care bill, Friedman tries to make the necessary conservative framing of our current political environment a boon (though one he thinks he's coming up with on his own [asshat]):

That is why we need political innovation that takes America’s disempowered radical center and enables it to act in proportion to its true size, unconstrained by the two parties, interest groups and orthodoxies that have tied our politics in knots.

I think this is pretty much what Walter Lippmann recommended in the early 20th century--a democracy governed by experts rather than people. But the end result of this is all the lobbyists and interest groups do their best to present their position not as "interested" but as the objectively better position for everyone (i.e. hegemonic common sense.) Dewey recognized the problem of this and instead recommended that the government be charged with expanding education and access to information such that more people would be informed and reach a more enlightened conclusion about what needed to happen. But this, too, can get hijacked.

In any case, the only way that Friedman--or Cass Sunstein and his pal Obama--can recommend something like the radical center (or as Mark Satin called it the Radical Middle http://www.amazon.com/dp/0813341906/) is if we already agree not only on how to accomplish the goal, but on what principles and ideals we should try to accomplish. All Friedman seems to do here is throw together a bunch of policy angles that would appeal to a variety of already centrist constituencies. The actual balance between them and how they are regulated and measured after the fact are devilish details in themselves; but when you have people who, for instance, want to abolish public schools altogether (or who would oversee their destruction if it seemed politically viable--like the current education secretary) then it is evident that all the talk about raising standards and increasing accountability is in no way an honest approach to reforming education: it is just ideological cover for privatization.

In other words, there is no true balance here, just ceding the center to the right (which, in my opinion, is one of Friedman's most often executed moves). If the "radical center" of health care reform is to have "market reforms" to keep costs down, then you've already given up the basic ground of the struggle--namely, should health care be a commodity regulated by the free market, for profit corporations instead of a public good overseen by public institutions; likewise, if reforming energy is limited to offshore drilling while we build more nuclear power plants, it is difficult to see what's centrist about this: all it does is adopt the rhetoric of the environmental movement to give cover to the expansion of two industries counter to its very principles. I have no faith that the people who want to have offshore drilling and nuclear power have any interest in either energy independence or any environmental purpose--and it shows zero creativity on Friedman's part to limit our options in this way.

All I think this proves is that the left is so disempowered and illegitimate in US culture that, in order to have even a half measure of rational public policy (i.e. in order to allow the government to do anything at all) they must be ready to concede 90% of the principles behind the policies they would support. And in the current congress, I have complete confidence that 90% of those in the Democratic party would gladly concede this since they never held those principles all that strongly to begin with. I suppose the same argument could be made of certain GOP senators as well, but they appear this way only in relation to a much more active, visible base (and one animated for political purposes to make the current administration appear as fascists so Republicans can ride in on a horse of freedom--a strategy that will likely backfire if they win the 2010 midterms). The recent democratic bill is basically a plan taken wholesale from a republican plan of five years ago, yet current republicans refuse to support it because now even that is too leftist. In that sense, even the "radical center" proposal of abandoning all principles on the left (public option, support for abortion rights, etc.) is pragmatically unacceptable to the minority party--a party who is drumming up animosity with the hopes that it will win them political points. The democrats are rightfully unafraid of abandoning their principles since they will obviously face no political repercussions for doing so: winning is enough, no matter what the prize.

Friedman is as much a symptom as a booster of this set of circumstances. Is he not basically a product of Clinton's instantiation of Gidden's "Third Way" with "American characteristics?" Globalization, Lexus and the Olive Tree and all that? And are we not immersed in a crisis that has been facilitated by that very package of policies? Then how is returning to that "radical center" going to help us out of it? If we begin from the premise that there is nothing valid in the radical left and anything that was previously a liberal left version of social democracy is still too far to that side (where merely raising taxes is "socialism") the idea of the radical center is only radical in its elision of any actual options for change. Calling for a radical center is just a kind of journalistic pablum meant to create balance by blaming both sides equally rather than actually engaging with ideas and arguments on an objective plane of rational political judgement. (Though I think Friedman has famously proven he can't be trusted to engage in this--not because he's shifty, but because he's a buffoon: http://www.nypress.com/article-19271-flat-n-all-that.html )

The fact is that the center has shifted so far to the right that to ask for a radical commitment to it on even these pragmatic principles means obscuring not only the causes of the crisis, but the radical potential for reform and realignment that should be produced by the crisis. I think the Health Care bill is clear evidence of where the radical center leads us and I don't think it is a path we should be taking. On the other hand, it seems to be the path we're on already, which makes Friedman just a Monday morning quarterback.