Tribal Loyalty and the Corporatist Agenda: It's Not Just For Republicans Any More

In 2007, Glenn Greenwald wrote
a column about how our political debate was being
constrained by the demonization of figures like Howard Dean, Al
Gore or Ron Paul who were singled out and labeled "weirdos" for
expressing opinions outside of party orthodoxy, even though those
opinions may have broad popular support. Noting that Ron Paul shared
several core principles with progressives on the issues of civil
liberties and his opposition to the Iraq war, Glenn asserted that his
participation in the GOP presidential primary gave him an important
platform for "expanding the scope of issues we consider and the ideas
that are worth hearing."

Glenn's column triggered an ongoing debate, with many "liberals"
demanding that anyone who embraced a pro-life stance (as Paul does)
must thus be excluded from serious consideration on any issue
whatsoever. Glenn noted that Paul's pro-life position was no different
from Harry Reid's.

Ezra
Klein responded:

I find Glenn Greenwald's defense
of Ron Paul's anti-abortion record deeply bizarre. "Look over here, he
likes the Constitution" doesn't exactly respond to concerns that, in a
Ron Paul world, tens of millions of women will be forced to use their
bodies to bear children against their will. I'm less than
pleased that my civil liberties are being abrogated, but I'm not willing
to sell reproductive rights down the river for it.

That's an interesting position. Does the health care bill Ezra has
been fervently pushing "sell reproductive rights down the river?" Some
would argue that it doesn't, but Ezra Klein is not one of them. When the
Stupak amendment passed in the House bill, Ezra
wrote:

The idea that people are going to go out
and purchase separate "abortion plans" is both cruel and laughable. If
this amendment passes, it will mean that virtually all women with
insurance through the exchange who find themselves in the unwanted and
unexpected position of needing to terminate a pregnancy will not have
coverage for the procedure. Abortion coverage will not be
outlawed in this country. It will simply be tiered, reserved for
those rich enough to afford insurance themselves or lucky enough to
receive from their employers.

The abortion language that was ultimately included in the health care
bill came from the Senate, which does in fact force women to purchase
separate "abortion plans" on the exchange, and allows states the ability
to opt out of offering abortion plans on the exchange altogether. Ezra
allows
Michelle Goldberg to make the argument for him that the health care
bill does really good things for women anyway, providing "feminist
cover" to support it even though one would have to objectively say that
it "sells reproductive rights down the river."

And what about those people who still hew to Ezra's 2007 position,
believing that it's not okay to "sell reproductive rights down the
river"? When we pointed out that this is in fact what the bill does,
Ezra dismissed it as "helping activists kill the bill" rather than
"actually informing anyone about what is in the bill." According
to Ezra, "the restriction here is not on the right to choose, but
on whether primary insurance covers abortion." Therefore, since the goal
of the bill is not restricting a woman's right to choose, the fact that
it does so anyway is just a coincidence and therefore not a valid
reason to object to the bill's passage.

Ezra then went on to write (with no small amount of irony) that poor
David Frum had
been purged from AEI for his failure to walk in lockstep with the
GOP on health care, after Frum pointed out that the foundations of the
bill really were conservative. He castigates the party for its
unfettered tribalism in shutting down a truthteller like Frum, who he
applauds for merely pointing out the obvious conservative intellectual
inconsistency. You could give yourself whiplash trying to count all the
reversals wrapped up in that one, starting with Ezra's long-held
insistence that the health care bill represents a
huge progressive victory (though he has been trying
to square the two, as if progressive "goals" hadn't been used as
bait to neutralize liberal opposition and achieve a drastic corporate
agenda).

It's probably unfair to single out Ezra for this rather glaring
inconsistency, since he was just one of many who were quick to excoriate
"purists" on the left who didn't support the bill and then subsequently
leaped to Frum's defense. But if the lesson of the David Frum firing
is that it's really bad for a political movement to stigmatize dissent
and deviation from the party line, what does it say about those
steely-eyed "pragmatists" who castigated pro-choice dissent within their
own party when abortion rights were deemed an acceptable sacrifice?

There is no consistent, coherent moral position being expressed
here. Rather, a woman's right to choose has value primarily when it can
be demagogued to exclude those who don't pass its litmus test of tribal
loyalty. Abortion is a core element of the liberal canon that cannot be
broached at any cost when it comes to shutting down potential
trans-partisan alliances around civil liberties or ending the war that
have nothing whatsoever to do with choice. But when it comes to a law
that actually seriously impacts a woman's right to choose, abortion
rights can be sacrificed for some "greater good," with some feminist
cover quickly assembled to affirm that an appropriate standard has been
met. And anyone who doesn't arrive at that conclusion at the same time
is operating in bad faith and should not be taken seriously.

The abortion issue is emblematic of the way in which appeals to
tribal loyalty were used to stigmatize and delegitimize progressive
opposition to a radically corporatist health care bill. George Bush
couldn't privatize Social Security because of liberal opposition, but
liberal resistance to a health care bill authored by the insurance
companies was effectively neutralized by a call to Democratic party
loyalty. Anyone making a consistent values argument, who didn't
immediately fall in line and support the passage of a neoliberal health
care bill, was "helping the Republicans" - as if Republican opposition
to the bill wasn't the very thing that gave progressives negotiating
power in the first place.

In What's the Matter with Kansas, Thomas Frank poignantly
describes how white working class Americans are tricked by corporate
elites into acting against their self-interest through naked appeals to
irrational tribalism.

Glad that only happens to Republicans.