Downblog Freddie kicks up some dust around Mickey Kaus’s liberalism that does a good job of highlighting my points around political labels and productive partisanship. Now, please don’t mistake my brevity for glibness, but to the question of whether Mickey Kaus is a liberal or not my answer is a patented: who cares?
I can’t see questioning Kaus’ liberal bona fides as anything other than barking up the wrong tree.
Does Kaus have worthwhile ideas? Does he contribute to political discourse in meaningful ways? Is he someone who is actually interested in an overall project of improvement? If the answer to those questions is “no”, then out on his ear as Freddie may please. If the answer is “yes”, then Kaus can be a liberal, a conservative, or a macadamia nut for all I care, he’s on my team even if I disagree with him 99% of the time.
As per pride in ideology? Don’t believe the hype: dissent is the surest barometer of strength.
Will Truman 
Patrick Cahalan 
Cornelius 
wardsmith 
Tod Kelly 
Tom Van Dyke 
Murali 
James Hanley 
Borat: “I do a picture, only small, of the Tishnik Masacre. Where many Uzbeks…crushed!”
Kindly Gray Hippie: “How did you feel when you drew this?”
Borat: “Very proud!”.
KGH: “I’m just listening with sadness…a little sadness for your people…?”
Borat: “Yes…no, it is not sad. It is us who do the kill!”
When in doubt,
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The answers are, quite obviously:
1. None as far as I can tell.
2. Absolutely not.
3. If so, he’s doing a really really lousy job of it.
So, indeed, out with him.
Which is to say that whatever you call him or he calls himself, he’s still a shallow, obnoxious jerk, whose blog is very close in tone to AM talk radio.
You may not care, but a lot of people do. Like it or not, politics is seen as a zero-sum team sport by a lot of people (including much of the Washington press corps) and if Kaus is seen as a liberal that gives him even more weight when he undermines or attacks his “team”. And if liberals are seen as weaker, that has real-world consequences. Ideally, Susan Collins should be afraid of Obama, and people like Kaus make it marginally less likely that she will be, by making the left’s team look weaker relative to the right.
“if Kaus is seen as a liberal that gives him even more weight when he undermines or attacks his “team”. ” I think this gets at something important here, and which connects up to the deep anger & contempt that liberals typically have for guys like Lieberman as well. There’s a sense in which these people are not just not helping the liberal causes they nominally care about, but they are _parasitic_ on them. Their whole schtick is being someone who gets to operate under the flag of “liberal”, but whose entire niche in the media is to play the “even the liberal X agrees that liberals suck” card. That they are so frequently intellectually dishonest as they do so just reveals the cynical nature of that niche.
I tend to look to history for guidance. So does history have anything to say on this issue of labels or “stinking badges?” Sorry to say Scott, looking back , labels seem to a necessary part of political questions. I’m not going to give examples of this since it will be obvious to most with some reflection.
For me most words are labels, these are “sweet potatoes fries” those are “gum drops.” Verbs label actions. You get the idea.
We do need those “stinking badges.”
Dan,
I’m not sure why Sen. Collins should be afraid of Obama. Obama needed 60 Senate Votes because it was a deficit spending bill (not a filibuster issue). The Legislative Branch is a separate and equal branch. It shouldn’t be afraid of another branch or anyone within it. Collins and Nelson were in a position where they got to have (undoubtedly) far too much weight but that’s the rules of the Senate and by extension the Constitutional provision of the separation powers.
I also imagine that Ben Nelson, Susan Collins, and/or Olympia Snowe would have much of a clue who Mickey Kaus was or care much about what he thinks.
More to do with the basic cluelessness of those three and this fantasy notion that bipartisanship is just splitting the difference between two parties. The liberal leadership is weak enough as is, they don’t need Mickey Kaus to make it much weaker. They do a fine job of that on their own.
At the end of the day, if you want the President’s party to have more power you have to elect more Senators and House Members.
Scott, I like the term “downblog.”
Regarding your post, I think the most convincing argument in Freddie’s favor is that Kaus doesn’t at any point frame his arguments from a liberal vantage (as opposed to Larison, who regardless of his “undermining” of movement conservatives always frames his logic in a decidedly conservative way). Kaus makes no attempt to do so, and so it is odd that he considers himself a liberal.
That said, in the end, I’d rather talk about what’s wrong with the substance of his arguments rather than the labels…
Leaving aside this weird notion that a supermajority requirement in an already unrepresentative chamber is a good idea (don’t get me started)…what I meant by “should be afraid of” might be better put as “would be afraid of in a more perfect world”. It has nothing to do with the separation of powers, and everything to do with winning elections. Ideally (from my perspective as someone well to the left of Olympia Snowe) she would be worried that opposing Obama would cause her to lose the next election and thus be willing to move the bill more to the left.
As to whether or not Olympia Snowe actually knows who Kaus is, maybe she does and maybe she doesn’t. But the point is that Kaus helps create a larger atmosphere which diminishes political pressure that comes from the left. And I believe that median Senators are, to a greater or lesser extent, affected by that atmosphere. Which is why Mickey Kaus is, to me, actively unhelpful.
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