The new round of "Green Lantern" arguments begins

One of the tropes that was particularly prominent during the Obama Administration was something called "the Green Lantern theory of the Presidency". This was a phrase used mainly as mockery of calls by progressives for Obama to more openly confront bad Republican ideas or to highlight real problems and focus attention on them. (For anyone wondering, Green Lantern is a comic-book superhero who has been around since 1940.)

Politics is politics. And the "Green Lantern" trope was part of an entirely normal and necessary part of politics. Partisans have different priorities, and elected officials have to prioritize which issues are more urgent than others and they have to make decisions on how hard to fight over them. In any negotiation, the participants have to "know when to hold 'em" and "know when to fold 'em," to recall Kenny Rogers' famous song.

With the Biden-Harris Administration coming into office in January, the Democratic version of partisan infighting over positions and priorities they want the President to take is now back on stage. Since the "Green Lantern" trope was used by establishment Democrats against progressives during the Obama-Biden Administration and the Republicans didn't pick it up during the Trump-Pence government, it's worth recalling for a moment how it works.

Greg Sargent hauled out the GL trope during the Obama years in Why the Green Lantern Theory of Presidential Power persists Washington Post 04/30/2013.

At today’s press conference, President Obama spent a fair amount of time pushing back on what some of us are calling the “Green Lantern Theory of Presidential Power.” This theory — which seems to hold broad sway over many in the press — holds that presidents should be able to bend Congress to their will, and any failure to do so proves their weakness and perhaps even their irrelevance.

What accounts for the persistence of this theory? The answer, I think, lies in the tendency of reporters and analysts who are trying to remain a neutral, nonpartisan posture to feel comfortable making process judgments, but not ideological ones.

Now, Greg Sargent was primarily focusing on a lazy mainstream press posture of focusing on process rather than policy, which actually is a chronic shortcoming of the corporate press. I would say he was making a solid point in that column:

This isn’t to absolve Obama of all responsibility to move Congress. Surely presidents have the power to set the agenda and get the public to think more about an issue. But as many others have explained at great length — see Jonathan Bernstein and Kevin Drum on this — the president’s influence over Congress is currently quite limited, historically speaking, for a host of reasons.

But progressives also legitimately criticized Obama for falling back on empty invocations of bipartisan cooperation and not using his own position and popularity to rally public pressure not only to put pressure on Republicans over specific legislation but to encourage public awareness of serious problems.

One instance where I think Obama failed in both ways was on the Citizens United decision in January 2010, one year into Obama's eight-year Presidency. Obama's initial rhetorical response was excellent, and very memorable. "This ruling strikes at our democracy itself," he declared. "I can’t think of anything more devastating to the public interest." (Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Obama Turns Up Heat Over Ruling on Campaign Spending New York Times 11/23/2010) In his State of the Union address that month, he said, "With all due deference to separation of powers, last week the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests –- including foreign corporations –- to spend without limit in our elections." (Remarks by the President in State of the Union Address Obama White House Archives 01/27/2020)

But after a failed attempt at a legislative fix that year when Democrats controlled both the House and the Senate, , the issue was essentially put on the standard list of issues using in Democratic Party fundraising appeals but de facto accepted as the way things work and should work. (I discussed several such issues in Was the Obama Presidency a "last chance"? 04/16/2020)

The "Green Lantern" sneer can but used to dismiss such criticisms by conservatives who actually don't want to see the Democrats eliminate our oligarchical system of campaign finance. But it can also be employed by those who indulge the establishment Democratic habit of avoiding staging highly visible losing fights as a way of calling out unpopular Republican positions and laying the political grounds for later winning on that issue. There's nothing radical or exotic or magical-thinking about that concept. It's basic politics. The Republicans do it all the time, and sadly they are often effective in doing so. Yes, such fights involve prioritization and judgment calls like everything else in practical politics.

But in such matters, the Democrats need to practice more "Green Lantern" and less Bert the Turtle (Duck and Cover):

Again, Greg Sargent did have an important point about how mainstream pundits used that criticism in a lazy way:

Perhaps this is how the public will view Obama; perhaps it isn’t. What is clear, however, is the basic imbalance here. While neutral commentators often hold up compromise, abstractly, as the Holy Grail, the process/ideology dichotomy makes it much easier for those commentators to fault the president for failing to work the process effectively enough to secure compromise than to pillory the opposition for being ideologically uncompromising.

Brendan Nyhan, who claims to have coined the phrase, made a similar critique For the Columbia Journalism Review, The Green Lantern Theory of Sequestration 02/27/2020. In 2019, he defended the theory from criticism based on Trump use of active demagoguery as President, A Weak President Can Still Be a Dangerous One Medium 02/26/2019. He states the basis of the theory as the "premise that presidential compromise and policy failures are not the result of a lack of will but of the limitations of an office that is constitutionally weak, especially in domestic policy."

But somehow, Republican Presidents are more willing to use the powers of what the "Imperial Presidency" to fight for their own policy positions than the last two Democratic Presidents have been. The heads of governments of most democracies would presumably be surprised to hear that the American Presidency is a "constitutionally weak" one!

Ryan Cooper argues against the "Green Lantern" theory in Liberals need to stop pretending the president has no power The Week 02/11/2020:

Back in the Obama years, Democratic partisans had a contemptuous slogan for leftist critics of the president. People who insisted that the president could and should be doing more were adherents of the "Green Lantern Theory" of the presidency, after the comic book where someone in possession of a particular ring can do anything, limited only by their imagination and will. By this view, the presidency is an inherently weak office and leftists who think putting a more progressive person in the White House will make a big difference by itself are naive and foolish.

He looks at three of Obama's most consequential decisions, the bank bailout with minimal bank reform, the foreclosure crisis, and the initial economic recovery package as examples of where Obama made explicit decisions to go for a more conservative approach when a more activist approach that would have been much more beneficial for working people and the Democratic base voters than the one he chose. Those decisions were not driven by some vaguely-defined Constitutional weakness of the Presidency because those were his policy choices.

Big donors and lobbyists will be making plenty of demands on the Biden-Harris Administration. Labor and progressive groups have to do the same. And let the critics sneer about Green Lantern fantasies. Who cares, so long as the right policies get enacted?

This strikes me as a current example of the "Green Lantern" sneer

I get that people are pissed. So am I! But at Biden? Apparently people think the President-Elect has powers before he’s sworn in. Hearing a lot of suggestions that would either achieve zero or make Biden look weak by demanding things he can’t force Trump to do.

— Tim Fullerton (@TimFullerton) November 20, 2020

Uh, hello? Joe Biden is the President-elect who just won the election with a strong Electoral College margin and a popular vote lead of well over six million! Yes, he has political power! That literally makes him one of the most influential on the planet already. What he says, the priorities he sets, the people he selects to staff his administration, how he approaches Congressional relations - all of that matters. A lot!

Conservatives and corporate lobbyist know this. And there's no reason at all that labor, progressive groups, and grassroots activists should think otherwise, either. Unless they are not serious about their demands.

Here's someone who I believe is still nominally a Republican, John Dean, a longtime critic of the authoritarian trends in the Republican Party not only during the Trump Presidency but also in real time during the Cheney-Bush Administration, making a demand on the, yes, the already extremely powerful Joe Biden:

Trump is openly and actively violating federal criminal laws in his efforts to overturn his defeat. President-elect Biden should put Trump on notice that he will request his attorney general investigate criminal efforts to undo the election. Trump is playing Biden as a weak fool!

— John W. Dean (@JohnWDean) November 21, 2020

Farred Zakaria on legislative fixes for some of the problems of Trumpism

I'm by no means a particular fan of Fareed Zakaria. He too often buys in to superficial cliches of the punditocracy or the Washington foreign policy "Blob," as Stephen Walt calls it.

But when he's right, he's right. At least here, when he's talking about the failure of the Obama-Biden Administration's obsession with Bipartisanship as a value in itself, Fareed: Trump spotlighted great weakness of US democracy 11/21/2020:

He also has a decent point about the need to formalize some of the procedural traditions that have governed Presidents, like those concerning the Presidential transition period and requirements like the President putting his business holdings in a blind trust and tax form disclosures for Presidential candidates.

The Libyan intervention of 2011 and the ongoing results

Andreas Baumer in Business Insider Deutschland provides a good recap of the US-British-French NATO intervention in Libya in 2011, which failed to win a UN Security Council endorsement due to vetos by Russia and China, Wankelmütiger Riese: Die Libyen-Krise offenbart das ganze Dilemma Deutschlands 08.04.2019:

Was danach passierte, ist schnell erzählt. Die Nato griff tatsächlich in den libyschen Bürgerkrieg ein und zwar weitaus entschiedener, als Russland und China das wollten. Statt nur eine Flugverbotszone einzurichten, bombardierten Nato-Flieger Gaddafis Truppen. Auch mit Nato-Hilfe stürzten die Rebellen den Diktator und töteten ihn grausam.

Der Wiederaufbau des Landes ging danach gründlich schief, auch weil USA und Europa zunehmend das Interesse am Land verloren. Eine stabile nationale Regierung hat Libyen seitdem nie wieder bekommen. Im Osten des Landes ist General [Chalifa] Haftar der starke Mann. Im Westen hatte bislang die international anerkannte Regierung um Sarradsch das Sagen. Zwischendrin kämpfen lokale Milizen um Macht und Pfründe. Libyen ist das Sorgenkind in Nordafrika.

My translation:

What happened after that [the Security Council vote] is quickly told. NATO actually intervened in the Libyan civil war, and far more decisively than Russia and China wanted. Instead of just establishing a oo-fly  zone, NATO planes bombed Gaddafi's forces. And with NATO help, the rebels overthrew the dictator and cruelly killed him.

The reconstruction of the country went fundamentally wrong afterwards, partly because the United States and Europe increasingly lost interest in the country. Since then, Libya has never regained since then. In the east of the country, General [Chalifa] Haftar is the strongman. In the West, the internationally recognized government around Sarradsch has been in charge up until now. In between, local Militias are fighting for power and sinecures. Libya is the problem child in North Africa.

It's worth recalling how Obama's Secretary of State celebrating the seeming victory in Libya at the time, Clinton on Qaddafi: We came, we saw, he died CBS News 10/20/2011:

Not the most distinguished moment of the Obama Administration.

The authoritarian trend during the Cheney-Bush Administration

The main thing that concerns me about the liberal enthusiasm over NeverTrumper conservatives criticizing Trump is that it tends to obscure the extent that the whole Republican Party has been pushing an authoritarian style of politics for a long time. It's been a habit of liberals for decades to point to conservatives from 10 or 20 years before and use their words or positions as criticisms of conservatives in the present moment. It's a standard political ploy for conservatives to do the same with liberals of earlier decades. It's noarmally more stock polemics than real analysis.

There's a market for authoritarian ideas and has been for a long time. The "Studies in Prejudice "directed by Max Horkheimer highlighted that trend in The Authoritarian Personality (1950). That set of studies built on the Studies on Authority and the Family (1936) from the Frankfurt School Horkheimer directed.

Historian Richard Hofstadter - who still seems to be the only expert on authoritarian movements in America that many TV pundits have heard of - wrote in his famous essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" (Harper's, Nov 1964):

This glimpse across a long span of time emboldens me to make the conjecture - it is no more than that - that a mentality disposed to see the world in this way may be a persistent psychic phenomenon, more or less constantly affecting a modest minority of the population. But certain religious traditions, certain social structures and national inheritances, certain historical catastrophes or frustrations may be conducive to the release of such psychic energies, and to situations in which they can more readily be built into mass movements or political parties.

Joe Conason did a book published in 2007 titled It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush. Here an excerpt from the review I did of it (Contradiciones (Original) 02/24/2007), with minor spelling corrections:

Conason skillfully describes how the toxic combination of lazy and compliant reporters, the extreme governmental secrecy that is a hallmark of Cheney's style of rule, corporate media dominance, and actual government-sponsored propaganda have combined to cripple the functioning of an independent press that is a critical element of democracy. He calls atttention to a trend in the Republican Party toward advocating overt censorship, still alarmed as they are about the amount of genuine journalism still being practiced in the US. He calls special attention to an article by Gabriel Schoenfeld, Has the New York Times Violated the Espionage Act? Commentary March 2006, which lays out much of the ideological justification for this next level of authoritarian media regulation.

Conason creates a useful framework in which to view the authoritarian tilt of the Republican Party under the Cheney-Bush administration, from ideological organizations like the Federalist Society (which promotes corporatist legal doctrine) to the effect of having an atmosphere of permanent war. The latter is essential for Dick Cheney's program of authoritarian rule, because only with such a climate of fear and threat can the Cheney policies of preventive war, torture, massive spying and an Executive not bound by any laws completely supplant the legal and Constitutional practices of the old Republic.

The Cold War provided such a framework, too. And in his concluding chapter, Conason fills in the dots leading from the Nixon administration's police-state measures known collectively as "Watergate" and the Reagan administration's secret war program which is best known through the Iran-Contra scandal to the Cheney methods of authoritarian governance which permeate the current administration.

Understanding the roots of the current situation in the darkest side of the Nixon administration is important because, as he writes, "[m]ost Americans, even those who lived through the Nixon era, have forgotten the context - let alone the details - of the Watergate scandal." He also observes, "The parallels are striking, but the difference is that Bush, Cheney, and Rove, and the forces they represent, are far more developed and powerful than the Nixon gang ever was." (my emphasis)

Though he doesn't mention it in the book, this illustrates the need for something like a Truth Commission process after Cheney and Bush are out of power. Not only do we need prosecution of crimes committed - and there have been many - but we also need a process by which the abuses of this administration can be publicly aired and understood. We need to make it far harder for people like Cheney and Rumsfeld, who learned their governing principles and style from the worst aspects of the Nixon administration, to come to power 10, 20, 30 years down the line determined to succeed where Cheney, Rummy, Karl Rove and the rest will hopefully have failed. The criminal and antidemocratic practices of the Cheney-Bush Administration need to be thoroughly discredited.

That perspective is the basis of my main criticism of the Obama Administration, which is they did not thoroughly investigate those crimes. I'm not talking about the "Lock Her Up!" type of criminalizing political opponents. Whether through the Justice Department, a Special Prosecutor, or some sort of Truth Commission, a real professional investigation should have taken place and appropriate prosecutions under the law should have been carried out as a result.

Conason mentions the Gabriel Schoenfeld article that, as I put it then, "lays out much of the ideological justification for this next level of authoritarian media regulation." The main target in his article was James Risen, then a reporter for the New York Times and now with The Intercept. The article made the case that Risen should be prosecuted for revelations in his book State of Siege and in the New York Times. As his Intercept bio explains:

Risen was himself a target of the U.S. government’s crackdown on journalists and whistleblowers. He waged a seven-year battle, risking jail, after the Bush administration and later the Obama administration sought to force him to testify and reveal his confidential sources in a leak investigation. Risen never gave in, and the government finally backed down. (my emphasis)

Risen described his legal ordeal early this year in The Biggest Secret The Intercept 01/03/2018:

My case was part of a broader crackdown on reporters and whistleblowers that had begun during the presidency of George W. Bush and continued far more aggressively under the Obama administration, which had already prosecuted more leak cases than all previous administrations combined. Obama officials seemed determined to use criminal leak investigations to limit reporting on national security. But the crackdown on leaks only applied to low-level dissenters; top officials caught up in leak investigations, like former CIA Director David Petraeus, were still treated with kid gloves. (my emphasis)

In other words, the Obama Administration's policy was not just to "look forward as opposed to looking backwards" on those crimes. In the kind of legal actions against the press and whistleblowers that Conason rightly warned about during the Cheney-Bush Administration, it was the Obama Administration that applied that next level of authoritarian media regulation. (See also: James Risen, All the News Unfit to Print Intercepted 01/03/2018; Pete Vernon, James Risen’s press freedom battles with Bush, Obama, and The New York Times Columbia Journalism Review 01/03/2018)

But, of course, the drivers of the authoritarian trend in US politics for decades have been the Republican Party, Christian Right fundamentalists, far right groups, woman-hating "men's rights activists," militarists, hate radio, and assorted racists, white supremacists, "Patriot" Militia types, and conspiracy theorists.

On the other hand, Obama proved dramatically that look-forward-not-backwards policies by Democratic Admimistrations will not reverse the authoritarian trends.