No Shame for Canada

This has been percolating in my brain for a while. Matt Yglesias wrote a while back:

Last night, I went to see Stars... It occurs to me, however, that while Canadian indie rockers have been having a field day with American politics for the past five years, it may be time for them to give it a rest. With Stephen Harper now in power north of the border, a little less smugness is in order from our new Montreal-based overlords.

Why? Because our new Prime Minister - the most conservative we've had in decades - is still to the left of Joe Lieberman? Because his power is constrained by the weakest minority government since the 1970s? Because he might be able to partially dismantle the already-existing universal health insurance system that we have here?

No, I think I'll keep my smugness, thank you.

More seriously, I think this speaks to a serious problem among American liberals/progressives - the inability to understand just how fucked up American politics are by conventional political standards. This isn't just the Republican party, either - the Democrats are unable to advance serious moral arguments about (for example) health care or the war in Iraq because American culture is no longer receptive to moral arguments in favour of fairness, or against mass murder.

And here I will drop my Canadian smugness for a moment and say that we in Canada have abandoned the moral argument in favour of health care for more than a decade now. We - like our southern cousins - have been reduced to making arguments about economic and policy efficiency, when the argument that will win is simply that health is a right, and the government is the only body that can protect and enforce that right. This is what Tommy Douglas said here in Canada, and it's what no American leader has been willing to say - and stick with.

And I haven't even touched on the American fetish for the death penalty, or treating their women like chattel.

The funny/sad thing is, there was a time when the American liberal was able to make strong, moral arguments against the power of wealth. Unlike today's "to be rich is glorious" Democrats, there was a time when the Democratic leadership understood that the power of wealth was directly and irreconcilably opposed to democracy.

That time? 1933.

Yet our distress comes from no failure of substance. We are stricken by no plague of locusts. ... Plenty is at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply. Primarily this is because the rulers of the exchange of mankind's goods have failed, through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men....

The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.

Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. The joy and moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits. These dark days will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves and to our fellow men.... Small wonder that confidence languishes, for it thrives only on honesty, on honor, on the sacredness of obligations, on faithful protection, on unselfish performance; without them it cannot live.

That's Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in his first inaugural. No Clinton-era liberal, he. Just in case you don't belive me that Roosevelt was as radical as his first inaugural suggests, here's the kind of things he kept saying, for years:

I am not for a return to that definition of liberty under which for many years a free people were begin gradually regimented into the service of the privileged few. -Fireside chat, 1934

We have earned the hatred of entrenched greed. -Message to Congress, (!!!) 1936

Out of this modern civilization economic royalists carved new dynasties... The royalists of the new economic order have conceded that political freedom was the business of the Government, but they have maintained that economic slavery was nobody's business. -Acceptance speech at renomination, 1936

I should like to have it said of my first Administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these forces met their Master. - October 31, 1936 [just days before the election!]

The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little. - Second inaugural, 1937.

Really, the whole of FDR's first two terms was as revolutionary as anything America has ever seen. Of course, that took a back seat to the war - even by 1940 FDR had basically started to rearm the US in preparation for the inevitable. But for eight glorious years, an unabashed revolutionary held the White House, and made no bones about using the power of his democratic office to wage a moral campaign against the rich. And, lest we forget, they more than responded in kind.

America has never seen as unflinching a critic of its own house as FDR in the White House. Had RFK been elected in 1968, it's possible he might have done something similar. Of course, we know how that turned out.