there's just no sense in being halfway radical

Over time I've really come to see Kevin Drum as a symbol for modern American liberalism-- he's increasingly despondent and incredibly stuck. Modern American liberalism is filled with people who have righteous moral convictions that they have made totally irrelevant due to their dogged adherence to a broken system.

Take this post. It's called "How 2008 Radicalized Me," and it describes how the truly unbelievable events of 2008 (rightly, reasonably) caused Drum to become more radical. That's as natural a story as one can get; a small group of fantastically well-compensated people drove the entire worldwide economy to the brink of total collapse through their greed and incompetence. To not be radicalized in the face of such events is intellectual death. Of course, despite these events, and despite their being the inevitable consequence of our current macroeconomic policy, most people have not changed, and neither has that policy

The question is what this has actually meant for Kevin Drum in any substantive sense.

To be clear, I'm not at all a "where's the policy angle?" kind of guy. When people dismiss an argument by sniffing about "policy options," it's just about always a way to shrink the realm of the possible and discredit alternative opinion. But you'd like to get a sense of what radicalism means for Drum in context here. His post doesn't offer much to indicate what kind of radical change he'd pursue.

Maybe more executives should have been fired, maybe the Department of Justice should have tossed more Wall Street traders in jail, and maybe a couple of big money center banks should have been placed in temporary receivership.

In  other words, the things that maybe should have been done in response to one of the greatest crises in the history of capitalism-- a systematic failure that resulted in incredible human suffering for those who were least responsible for it-- are exactly the things that wouldn't have created any lasting or fundamental change. A few of the actors would have been punished, but there would have been no systematic change that could have prevented the next crisis. More, there would be no challenge to the fundamental problem: that great economic resources give these corporations and individuals nearly limitless political clout, which prevents any real change or accountability. Just as the 20008 crisis resulted in essentially no reform or accountability of genuine impact.

Drum continues:

But hoo boy, what a contrast with how the rest of us were treated. Things like principal write-downs, second waves of stimulus, aid to states, and mortgage cramdown all got a bit of idle chatter but were then left to die. For some reason, it would have been unfair to hand out money to profligate homeowners, state and local workers, and the millions who have been unemployed for more than a year.

My endless frustration with this position is the notion that we our failure enact all these "regular person" programs is some preventable error, like it just sort of happened that way. I have no objection to the standard Keynesian case made by Drum and Krugman and Yglesias et al, that we could spend some government cash, loosen up our money, drum up aggregate demand, decrease unemployment, and do some limited good for a lot of people out there. I'd vote for such a thing in a heartbeat. But there's this bizarre failure to understand that these measures are not happening for precisely the same reason that no adequate regulatory power has been exercised over the banks, for the same reason that there's been no accountability for those responsible, for the same reason nothing has meaningfully changed: because moneyed interests control our system. To point out that those with vast financial assets control the Congress, the Fed, and our entire economic policy is at once to invite claims of crankery and conspiracy theorizing, and to state the painfully obvious.

Drum gets to the nut of it:

This is how 2008 radicalized me. It's one thing to know that the rich and powerful basically control things. That's the nature of being rich and powerful, after all. But in 2008 and the years since, they've really rubbed our noses in it. It's frankly hard to think of America as much of a true democracy these days.

So here's my question: what do you want to do about it? How do you rescue true democracy in the face of ever-greater capture of our political process by the rich and powerful? I've followed Drum's blog for years, but before or in the month since this post, he's offered little in the way of suggestions. He's got a lot of small-bore, CAP and WaPo-approved triangulating policy shifts, but nothing that can address complaints of this size. To me, all of this-- not just the financial crisis, but the continuing inability of our society to live up to its basic social contract-- suggests that we need actually radical reform. Moving the deck chairs simply is not sufficient anymore. You cannot overstate how close we all came to total economic collapse, yet in the face of that we have adopted terribly weak reforms.

Here's an idea: nationalize the investment banking industry. Eliminate the profit motive, removing the incentive to find ever-more-risky investment vehicles. Stop them from accruing enormous financial assets during boom times, which gives them the political power to ensure that the government will bail them out in bust times. (If you think that we wouldn't bail out BofA or Citi or any of the big ones should they start to fail tomorrow, or that they aren't busily building the next disastrous bubble, you're very naive.) Keep savings banks local, support cooperative credit unions, go the full "Sweden in 1992" on the big banks, but make it permanent. It's a start.

Of course, if Drum wanted to look in this kind of direction for real reform, he'd have to be willing to do what so many of them are unwilling to do: give up a seat at the table. The gatekeepers of liberal political discourse don't permit this kind of radicalism, and Drum would have to make a very direct trade between articulating reforms that can actually counter the problems he sees and being taken seriously by the liberal intelligentsia. (You'll note that this dynamic doesn't hold in the other direction-- Drum could advocate some radical conservative reform, like the gold standard or something, and perfectly mainstream conservatives and libertarians would stroke their chin and talk about what a bold iconoclast he is.) Drum isn't a "cocktail party at Nick Gillespie's house" kind of a blogger, but professional regard and reputation affect everybody. He is also not one of those common politicos who views politics as a kind of game or sport; he's always struck me as genuinely committed. But to be taken seriously, he can't advocate what it would take to create genuine change. So he's stuck.

In this sense he strikes me as emblematic of American liberals, or progressives, if we must use a term of defeat. Drum has articulated a radical's passion, and is hemmed in by decidedly anti-radical peers. Like many liberals, he can poignantly articulate our moral duty but can present no compelling argument for how to accomplish it.

If I had to guess, I'd say that Kevin Drum will continue to do what they all do-- chase merrily after the center as the conservatives drag it further and further to the right. I can't quite blame him. As someone who has never enjoyed influence, it's too easy for me to tell someone who does to abandon it. But over time, the gulf between the principles and goals which animates him, and the ability of establishment reforms to deliver them, will only grow. For people facing that kind of a divide, I'd say that there's three choices. Grow more despondent. Grow more compromised, and make the work of the nominally liberal the work of complaining about regulation, taxes, and impediments to "free markets." Or let your mind get blown.