There is very little here but anger. - Democratic Underground

Occam Bandage

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Mon Mar-30-09 05:45 PM
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There is very little here but anger.

This is not a criticism. It is simply an observation: anger is what is driving the majority of the conversation here. It is not even anger directed at anything in particular: it is diffuse, it is pervasive, and it has been building for quite some time now. Anger is beginning to have a very real effect on the quality of conversation here, to an extent it is not elsewhere. In fact, it is almost as if this site were designed by a cosmic architect to cultivate a slow-boiling anger. I will now list several problems I find contributing to this factor:

Problem the first: a lot of bad shit happened over the last eight years. Bush basically fucked up everything he touched, and fucked 'em up badly. He more or less set the grand tapestry called America on fire. We recognize this, and have been angry about this.

Problem the second: Wall Street more or less fucked over the entire country as well. We recognize this, and are angry about this. We are especially angry about the fact that in order to prevent the nation from collapsing in on itself, we have to save Wall Street from itself. (This story is more or less a repeat from 1933).

Problem the third: Obama doesn't do anger. He never has. Obama is very bad at being a national conduit for emotion. To be sure, he did develop a skill at inducing people to project positive emotions onto him during the campaign, but that wasn't always the case; during the early stages of the primary, he was dry, uninspiring, cerebral and boring. He does not naturally attempt the use of public emotion.

This third problem is one I have long seen in him. Before Iowa, I did not support him for the Presidency, but rather supported Joe Biden; I thought Obama was too "cool" and "cerebral" to stoke the public fires. Thankfully he did much to prove me wrong during the campaign, but I feel he's back to his old ways, so to speak. He thinks, and acts pragmatically; he has little love for impatience or for revanchism. That is generally a good trait for a leader in a time of crisis, but it is an unpopular one. People want their leaders to express the same values and beliefs they do, after all.

And here we have the problem on this site at the moment: people here have a lot of anger, but there's no real way to do anything about it. Obama has made no effort to relieve our anger at Bush through legal punishment for Republican wrongdoings, but instead has governed pragmatically, deciding that every possible cent of political capital should be spent on the current crisis. Obama has made only halting and half-hearted efforts to relieve our anger at Wall Street; he is mostly content to work on his policy plans and occasionally say "yeah, gee, that is pretty bad."

But wait, you, say, your problem isn't with Obama's lack of anger, it's with his plans, I don't like his plans, just look at this Krugman article, et cetera, et cetera. I think you are most likely a bit confused. The greater part of the criticism here actually has very little to do with the substance of the plans Obama has announced. Krugman's complaint, and those of the economists with whom he is allied on this issue, is predominantly on the valuation of the toxic assets covered by the Geithner plan. To make it simple for purposes of conversation, Obama thinks these have some innate value and if he backs them he can save the financial industry at low risk and great reward, while Krugman thinks they have no value beyond what the market currently thinks they have and nobody will buy what he's selling. This is a fair and reasonable argument. I personally have no idea who's right. But yet this is not the argument that DU has against it. DU complains about "handouts," and "giveaways," and "banking buddies" and "criminals" and "Wall Street insiders" and many other things that have absolutely nothing to do with any serious economic analysis of the plan itself, but rather are purely directed at expressing anger at the fact that people on Wall Street did bad things and are not going to have their toys taken away from them. Anger drives just about every discussion here.

You may be thinking that anger at Wall Street and emotional dissatisfaction with Obama's ivory-tower response are hardly endemic to DU, and you are correct. But DU has one extra factor that is slowing turning it into a hellhole: this is Democratic Underground, and this is the Presidential forum. As members of the political base of Barack Obama, we naturally expect him to speak for our feelings on issues, and are angered when he does not. As members of a site that historically forbids non-constructive criticism of Democrats, many of us find such anger-driven criticism to be unhelpful, and that in turn breeds anger. Of course, outright expression of that anger results in a quick mod intervention, which is certainly for the best, but which of course cannot treat the problem.

Frankly, I don't have a fix in mind. I'm just a little bit disheartened. Here we have the first politically aggressive Democratic President since LBJ, and this site is preoccupied almost entirely with angry brick-throwing or with angry brick-throwing at the angry brick-throwers.