Obama's Politics and Game Theory

I have been required, time and time again, to explain President Barack Obama's bargaining beliefs. Why does he always seem to get taken to the cleaners by his Republican opponents? I've grown increasingly disinclined to have these arguments. It's like being a Cleveland sports fan. Why keep cheering for a loser? Yet I do, whether it's the Indians or the Browns or the President.

With the help of Jon Elster and Cristina Bicchieri, I think I have a handle on it. Obama is a conscientious bargainer, but a slow learner. To see this more clearly, let's use something I can't use very well: game theory.

Classic two player games are designed to show what rational actors would do given specific known payoff formulations. For example, consider this:

This is a simple two player game. In this game, there is common knowledge that both players are rational. The rules are straightforward. One player moves at a time. Player I can either move down, terminate the game, and walk away with a 1, leaving player II with nothing. Or, he can chose to extend the game, offering player II a chance to either: a) move down, allowing player II to collect 2, leaving player I with nothing; or b) continue the game to the third node, where player I will terminate the game, either walking away with 3, and leaving player II with nothing, or - less plausibly - giving 3 to player II and walking away with nothing himself. Given this scenario, a rational player will take the first payoff available. If player I is rational, he will terminate the game at node 1. If player II gets the chance - because player I waffles or misunderstands the payoffs - he will end the game, walking away with 2.

Barack Obama is not rational, at least not in the simple formulation depicted in this game. He has commendable, but in this political environment naive, faith in bargaining. For Obama, the game looks like this:



Obama has confidence that as political opponents negotiate, the ability to accomplish even greater things - grand bargains - emerges. He's not wrong. A body of theory I often return to - Putnam's work on social capital - informs us that repeated engagement helps build trust and patterns of reciprocity. We get better at working together the more we try. This allows us to risk things that we might not attempt otherwise. We feel less vulnerable, because we have confidence that our opponents/collaborators will not take advantage of a concession. To illustrate what I mean, imagine a school board and a teachers' union making some difficult decisions about how to keep schools open in the face of a budget crisis. The teachers and the administrators have had a history of encounters, bargaining over issues large and small, and across that iterative history of encounters, the two sides have learned that, although they view challenges through different lenses, each side wants to serve the public good, and educate as many kids as possible, as well as possible. With that in mind, the two sides might agree to a bargain that cuts pay for new teachers, preserves pay for more experienced teachers, and creates a process requiring neighborhood school boards to make recommendations about how, and under what criteria, new teachers are given tenure and higher pay. The school board gets the cuts it wants, but surrenders some control over how teachers are assessed and rewarded. The teachers make some concessions regarding entry-level pay, but map out approaches to promotion that allow teachers working in difficult settings - violent, low income neighborhoods filled with struggling families, for example - to be evaluated by context-relevant criteria. It's a socially preferred outcome - schools stay open, teachers stay on the job - that might not be possible if the two sides were negotiating without trust and expectations of reciprocity.

Obama's problem is that he is negotiating with opponents who have no interest in serving the public good. He has been too slow to learn this, perhaps because his faith in the value of iterative negotiations is too strong. He believes in engagement, and the power of long-term rationality. If Republicans and Democrats continue to work together, he believes each party can get some of the things they want and the country will be better off. But he's misjudged his opponents, while they have quickly learned to take advantage of his vulnerabilities. What we get is something like this:

Republicans, knowing they can, because Obama is loathe to defect, continue the game across several iterations, then terminate, winning twice as many concessions as they could have had they defected earlier. Obama is left to hope he gets some political gain because he is the only participant in the game with the nation's interests in mind, or because he is the only adult in the room. But, in the meantime, his poll numbers drop, his followers are dispirited, and we haven't really done anything to help the unemployed, or regulate banks, or solve our most stubborn, long-term problems. I have many friends who believe faith is a wonderful thing. In this case, it's a handicap.

Wages and the Wages of Sin: Evangelicals as the Right's Soldiers

The comparison I mapped out in my last post - linking the collapse of democratic politics in Brazil in 1964 with the current political sentiments of the Republican Party - can be developed a little further.

As industrialization developed and deepened in Brazil in the years prior to 1964, the goods being manufactured in Brazilian factories were higher end consumer goods, destined for elites, or products, in most cases manufactured in Brazil by foreign corporations, intended for global markets. If the goods produced in Brazilian factories were manufactured to be sold to Brazilian consumers, then the state and Brazilian industrialists might have felt compelled to improve workers' pay. With better wages, consumers could buy more goods, increasing demand, creating opportunities for growth, and putting more profits into manufacturers' pockets. Because this wasn't the case, Brazilian technocrats and industrialists had no incentive to grow workers' wages. In fact, to compete in the global market, Brazilian planners and manufacturers wanted to suppress wages, to manage production costs. The result was an increasingly desperate working class which attempted, through unions and politics, to air their grievances and demand a larger share of the nation's wealth. In the end, industrialists, state technocrats, and the military stepped in to overturn democratic institutions and suppress working class aspirations.

This parallels America's present economic realities to an unmistakeable degree. American manufacturers don't produce consumer goods in any meaningful quantity anymore, with perhaps the exception of the automobile industry. The items we do manufacture - medical devices, sophisticated technology for business, precision-manufactured parts for industry - aren't targeted to rank and file consumers. As a result, it is irrelevant to American corporations whether workers make enough to buy toys and shoes and clothes and kiddie pools. What matters is how well business is doing, since the market for our manufactured goods is the business sector. Wages can drop, unemployment can rise, and Wall Street doesn't blink. But when businesses stop buying, Wall Street reacts. Over the years, America's business sector has corrupted the country's political leaders, as lobbyists and campaign contributions have marginalized the interests and the voice of nation's working class. Regulatory oversight has been dismantled, workplace safety has been compromised, the right of workers to unionized has been attacked, wages have stagnated, and the wealthy have grown wealthier, all while politicians, including Democrats, sat by and watched. Our compromised political process, incapable of producing meaningful solutions for an increasingly desperate working class, has lost its legitimacy.

In Brazil, industrialists joined with the military to overturn democratic institutions. That hasn't been necessary here. Corporations and their lobbyists have managed to render our political institutions irrelevant. Here, the coup was carried out without armed forces.

But the right does have foot soldiers to aid it in its efforts. The evangelical right, as deeply concerned about social chaos and moral decline as the Brazilian military was, has been recruited by the Republican Party to take the battle to the streets. In a nation of increasing diversity, shifting moral precepts, and growing tolerance for non-traditional forms of sexual identity, the Christian right has moved from moral panic to moral panic, accomplishing three things useful to the Republican Party. First, by mobilizing to prevent the legalization of gay marriage and address fears about the declining influence of Christianity in America's civil institutions, Christian activists have increased Republican turnout. Second, they have managed to shift the frame of political discourse, positioning moral issues ahead of economic concerns. Third, by doing so, they have divided middle-class and working-class voters, and persuaded working-class Christians to ignore appeals from their unions and co-workers, voting for morally-crusading Republican candidates, who, once elected, set about the work of suppressing wages and attacking unions. It's a cynical type of politics, divisive and deeply anti-populist.

Our Banana Republic

Years ago, when I was a student of Political Science, I focused on political development, mainly in Latin America. For a time, the literature on the subject was dominated by authors seeking to explain the collapse of democracies in Latin America, and the emergence of authoritarian regimes. One of the classics of the genre was an edited volume, assembled by Alfred Stepan, called Authoritarian Brazil. I've begun to reread it, as an attempt to understand our present politics. If that seems crazy, it shouldn't. Our politics now increasingly resembles the models social scientists once linked with the developing world: vast inequalities in wealth; persistently dysfunctional political processes characterized by the concentration of power in the hands of an economic elite; and a shift toward a politics of "authenticity," where politicians, incapable of crafting genuine solutions to deeply rooted societal ills, opt for a hyper-nationalist rhetoric, aimed at painting their opponents as enemies of the state.

The complete disregard the well-off have for other Americans, and the representation of this attitude in the politics of the Republican Party, resembles the political mood in Brazil prior to 1964, when the military seized power. The accumulation of wealth, rather than the collective needs of the wider society, has become the dominant political concern of Republican politicians. Some might argue this has been true since at least the 1980s, and Reagan's repositioning of the Party and its message. In Brazil, the "anti-populist sectors of the military and the technocracy," decided that "the accumulation process required that the instruments of pressure and defense available to the popular classes be dismantled.1" This meant overturning the electoral process and dismantling labor unions and other vehicles for the expression of middle class and working class aspirations. Those who continued to agitate for political change, demanding a voice for the politically marginalized, where branded enemies of the state, criminals, radicals who prioritized their commitment to left-wing doctrine over the well-being of Brazil.

What I see unfolding every place Republicans acquire power resembles this era. Labor unions are stripped of bargaining rights and the demands of working people interested in preserving their quality of life are portrayed as illegitimate. Working class voters are stripped of voting rights, and obstacles are erected to prevent their participation in elections. And all of this done to preserve the accumulation of wealth by a tiny elite.

Unlike Brazil, this is unfolding within the existing framework of politics. There has been no coup, no one has banned elections. Yet the motivations and the sentiments are remarkably identical. A powerful elite, no longer concerned with the suffering and impoverishment of the wider population, disconnected from the sentiments and common attachments that once joined society together, has attempted to seize political control, in order to guarantee the preservation of their wealth and lifestyle, as they see the machinery that created their wealth collapsing around them.

1. Fernando Henrique Cardoso, "Associated Dependent Development: Theoretical and Practical Implications," from Alfred Stepan, Ed., Authoritarian Brazil (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), pp. 145-146.

Party Like it's 1787

I’ve been teaching a class this summer, and one of the books I used was Jill Lepore’s The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle over American History. One of the infuriating things about the tea party, of course, is their appropriation (and preposterous reinterpretation) of history and our national symbols. Of course, many political movements have seized historical events and patriotic symbols, and used them to legitimize their rhetoric.

But Lepore sees the tea party as something different. They are, in her words, both anti-historical and historical fundamentalists. For them, in Lepore’s words, there is a:

belief that a particular and quite narrowly defined past – ‘the founding’ – is ageless and sacred and to be worshipped; that certain historical texts – ‘the founding documents' – are to be read in the same spirit with which religious fundamentalists read, for example, the Ten Commandments; that the Founding Fathers were divinely inspired; and that political arguments grounded in appeals to the founding documents, as sacred texts, and to the Founding Fathers, as prophets, are therefore incontrovertible.

The rhetoric about the founders finding health reform and permissive immigration unacceptable, the use of colonial-era and early-American flags, the wearing of the tri-corner hat at rallies, the appropriation of the historical reference to the Boston Tea Party, are all efforts to reposition arguments in this eternal past. The aim is to position every progressive ambition – health care for all, gay marriage, schools that work for minorities – as a blasphemous challenge to the founding documents. And because this positioning is designed to end the argument, it is a very undemocratic view.

As Lepore points out, it doesn’t matter what a President who carried 53 percent of the vote and won 365 electoral votes does, if his actions and the legislation he squeezes through a divided Congress can be shown through rhetorical sleight-of-hand to be in conflict with the wishes of the founders, his actions and his legislation are illegitimate.

Lepore points to one of the major uproars of Barack Obama's first year in office. It is largely forgotten now, because there was nothing to be upset about, even those responsible for the uproar seem aware of that now. In August of 2009, the Department of Education announced that Obama was going to speak to American school children in their classrooms by way of a television broadcast. The right and prominent Republican politicians reacted with outrage, calling it - before it ever happened and before they knew what the president intended to say - an effort at "indoctrination," designed to "spread President Obama's socialist ideology."

What were they really afraid of?

For as long as nation-states have existed, the state has used education to create cultural homogeneity, to teach a shared language, to offer patriotic education, and to sentimentalize our attachment to the nation-state. This is the foundation supporting the entire architecture of the nation.

The tea-party and much of the far-right believe that too many American schools have been captured by "liberals", and are being used to teach, as Glenn Beck views it, a "learn-to-hate-America lunacy."

However, because most school systems across the country are controlled by local school boards, who shape the curricula used in schools, red state children have been safe from this lunacy, secure behind carefully defended curricular fortresses. What Obama's national broadcast was designed to do, the tea party argued, was bypass these locally-guarded curricular battlements, that assured that love of America and the English language were still taught in schools. The reason this mattered so much is because we reproduce ourselves by learning our culture and history. Our children do this in schools. For them to mislearn that history, or have it shaped by liberals who ridicule our traditions, threatens our foundations.

Through the spring and summer of 2009, the Texas Board of Education met to map out history and social science standards for the state's schools. The overwhelmingly conservative board were convinced that liberals had "contaminated" the teaching of history. What the Texas Board produced was this:

'(A)n emphasis on the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, including Phyllis Schlafly, the Contract with America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority, and the National Rifle Association.' Thomas Aquinas was added to a list of thinkers who inspired the American Revolution; Thomas Jefferson (who once wrote about a 'wall of separation between Church & State’) was removed. The United States, called, in the old curriculum, a 'democratic society,' was now to be referred to as a 'constitutional republic.' Biblical law was to be studied as an intellectual influence on the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution. Kids in Texas, who used to study Locke, Hobbes and Montesquieu as thinkers whose ideas informed the nation's founding, would now dispense with Hobbes, in favor of Moses.

The interesting thing to notice about all of this, which Lepore doesn't unpack but leaves us to do, is that these sentiments - resistance to a national curriculum, the sense that the Constitution is a sacred document we cannot interpret, this fear of Hobbes - all reflect an anti-nationalist stance. Tea partiers, while attired in the symbols of our national history, and claiming to speak in our national interest, really despise the machinery and architecture of the nation.

The fact that local boards want to roll back national educational standards, and insert their own, means they oppose exactly the type of educational project that has always guaranteed the preservation of a national culture. Ernest Gellner, the grandfather of scholarly thinking about nations, argued that the modern age was different from all earlier ages. In our age, the state’s monopoly over education is "more important, more central than is the monopoly of legitimate violence.” Centralized education creates “the political sociology of the modern world.” With the passing of local village life, as we become an atomized part of an anonymous mass, interchangeable, mobile, living in a vast community, among millions of others we will never directly meet, education becomes the tool to shape our cultural union, fusing us together, sentimentalizing our attachment. Once we shared mutual obligations with those we lived side by side with, our familiarity with one another created our attachment. Now, we exist in a vast social landscape, the boundaries of which extend far beyond our vision. Yet, through a shared educational experience, we learn a common narrative, and are taught that we are joined together in a great social project, one nation navigating the events of history.

Tea partiers and the far right reject the view that the nation is a living entity existing across historical time, preferring to embrace essentialist interpretations that freeze our national development at a point more than 200 years in the past. For everyone else, nations are phenomena of living history. Nations are founded, external enemies attack and are defeated, insurgencies rise up to challenge the nation-state's authority – the Confederacy is a perfect example – great catastrophes are survived, and along the way narratives and social and governmental institutions are rewritten and redesigned, perhaps, as in our case, to become more inclusive. All of this unfolds across historical time.

For Lepore, the veneration of the Constitution and its authors, at least as narrowly imagined by the tea party, is at the heart of the contemporary right’s belief system. And this, in its aggressively anti-historical character, is at odds with the way nations – including our nation – have always been imagined. If nationalism is composed of narratives, and those narratives are a product of, as Ernest Renan said, memory and forgetting, what the tea party seems to believe is that there is nothing worth remembering since 1787, when the Constitution was ratified.

The banning of Thomas Hobbes from the Texas curriculum is especially interesting. Hobbes was the source of the idea that we create states, and surrender much of our autonomy to them, because we want those things that only states can guarantee - principally our security from others who might harm us. It is through the intervention of the state that our lives are preserved, our vulnerabilities lessened. States make it possible for us to live together and engage in commerce, and make progress possible. This is central to the idea of the nation-state. We surrender our autonomy to the state, and the nation-state is entrusted with protecting our community from harm, and preserving it into the future and, in the meantime, we engage in industry and accomplish great things. But the far right believes the state is evil; they celebrate individual freedom, rejecting both the authority of the state and the idea of collective life. But the collective life of the broad horizontal community of the nation, preserved by the state, is the very idea behind nationalism. It has always been central to our own idea of who we are.

Partha Chatterjee, who wrote the influential Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, makes the point that the nation is a modern concept. It requires belief in the modern idea of progress – that history is linear, and cumulative, and that a nation’s history is a record of its great accomplishments and successes and victories, as it marches forward through time. It also requires belief in modern rationality. We come together as a people, and attach our fate to the nation-state as our protector and champion, because we, evaluating our choices rationally, believe it will protect our interests and preserve our accomplishments. We sign up voluntarily. We attached our loyalties to the state, and surrender a bit of our autonomy, because we believe we gain something.

The tea party’s beliefs, then, are regressive, failing to trust in the linear and progressive character of history, and rejecting the idea that we join together as a nation for rational advantages.

Tea partiers are often portrayed as racists, but what does any of this have to do with race? For me, the implication is clear: if blacks were not citizens at the origin of the nation, and we freeze our history at that point, then the historical process that unfolded over the past two hundred and more years, bringing full citizenship to African Americans, is left outside our narrative. It never happened. It isn’t relevant.

Lepore makes an interesting observation, that draws our attention to the ultimate result of this type of historical fundamentalism:

In 1857 , in Dred Scott v. Sandford, the Supreme Court, enslaved to the tyranny of the past, ruled that the framers had considered blacks ‘as beings of inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they have no rights which the white man was bound to respect.’ That’s what Illinois senator Stephen Douglas and his Republican challenger, Abraham Lincoln, debated, the next year. ‘I believe that this government was made on the white basis,’ Douglas said. ‘It was made by white men for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever.’

For the tea party then, whether they are comfortable saying it as directly as Douglas did, America was a white nation at its origin. And because what matters is that moment of origin – our history stops there – we are still a white nation.

Richard Epstein and Derek Jeter

Richard Epstein is a professor at the University of Chicago Law School. I have known him for some time, but not well. My wife has a long relationship with Epstein and his family. One of the wonderful things about living in Hyde Park is the people you get to know. It's a neighborhood where the people you know from work, and the playground, and synagogue overlap, and you come to like people who you never imagined you would.

Epstein recently wrote an essay for Stanford's Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank where he holds an appointment. The essay attempts to build a connection between a recent piece in the New York Times documenting and explaining Derek Jeter's decline and what Epstein views as the Obama-assisted decline of America. As a resident of New York for 5 years during the prime of his career, I came to love Jeter. America could do a lot worse than aspire to be Derek Jeter. He plays the game with heart, he makes other players around him better, and he never sacrifices team objectives for individual statistical goals. He also dates super models and movie stars. I'd rather be Jeter than Adam Dunn. A slugger who no longer slugs and is batting .170 for the White Sox right now, consistently stranding runners and killing rallies.

But, let me get to my point. For a smart man, Epstein's view is myopic. When Epstein picks out the things that "nations that are in their prime" do, his choices are consistent with his ideological view. "They run a strong military...worry about the maintenance of a simple tax system with low rates...they praise their inventors, authors, and innovators."

But historically, "successful" nations have also invested in education, have leveled income and status inequalities, and have been careful to build international stability, rather than bully other societies into reluctant acquiescence. Think about post-war Germany and Japan. Or America, during our long climb to world dominance. And by the way, who doesn't praise inventors, authors and innovators? Even the left likes inventors, authors and innovators.

Epstein steers the analogy to Jeter to suggest Obama, like an aging athlete, is doing a lot of little adjustments that won’t slow our decline: “We are told that we must constantly have stimulus programs to "jump start" the economy so that it can return to its productive ways. But what we get are "cash for clunkers," short-term subsidies to new home buyers, extended unemployment benefits, and an endless set of home loan forgiveness and loan extension programs.”

The reason, though, that we get these less-than-enough programs is because Republicans and corporate-owned Democrats won’t let us adopt system-transforming reforms. We pump money into the system – and rescue Wall Street, by the way, which Epstein doesn’t mention – to save it, not reform it. But the system is corrupt and immoral and damaged. We hobble along like an aged athlete not because of the things Obama has done, but because our economy and system of regulation and schools haven’t kept up with the new, younger players on the field and the new dynamics of the game.

The thing that bothers me the most about his essay is his false and mistaken statements on American foreign policy under Obama:

Here is not the place to defend at length the decision of the United States to intervene militarily in Iraq and Afghanistan. My own sense is that the risk of destabilization coming from these two countries required some military action, not only for humanitarian reasons, but also to prevent them from operating as bases for spreading mayhem ever closer to Europe and the United States. But what really matters is how that intervention takes place. A strong and confident nation declares that the tasks it begins are the tasks that it will end successfully. It is willing to commit major resources to these ventures today without caveats and hesitation….But this is precisely the course that President Barack Obama has chosen to pursue in Afghanistan. His pre-appointed deadline for withdrawing troops offers our enemies the luxury of choosing their optimal strategy….Unfortunately, the Obama administration dismisses our military involvement in Afghanistan as a misadventure.

That last sentence is absurdly false. From the start, as a candidate and throughout his Presidency, Obama has believed that the war in Afghanistan was worth fighting, and in fact he escalated the conflict, sending in more troops than George Bush had in place. Even Obama's announced reductions will result in more boots on the ground than Bush had when he left office. I was living in New York in 2001 when we first invaded Afghanistan. I said then that our invasion of Afghanistan would only result in destabilizing Pakistan. I think I was right about that. I think that’s what we see now. And Obama sees that as well: one of the reasons he wants to maintain our presence in Afghanistan is to keep an eye on an increasingly more dangerous Pakistan. What Obama believes – and he is right about this – is that the Bush administration walked away from Afghanistan, pursuing a misguided, unnecessary war in Iraq. Epstein is wrong that “destabilization” in Iraq required U.S. military action. That was the fiction the Bush administration promoted, through phony intelligence and a cynical manipulation of the public’s fear and ignorance. In fact, it was Bush, not Obama, who failed to commit to U.S. action in Afghanistan (to use Epstein’s words) “without caveats and hesitation.” Donald Rumsfeld thought he could fight a war in Afghanistan without committing sufficient troops to hold major regions of the country or block Osama Bin Laden’s escape into Pakistan. Then he reduced our forces in Afghanistan to begin a war in Iraq, again without sufficient forces to hold major cities, or preserve law and order. The Bush administration’s war strategies in Afghanistan and Iraq were hesitant and full of caveats and equivocation. That's a primary reason we have been at war in Afghanistan for ten years. If Epstein is going to be angry at anyone for hesitancy and failure of resolve in Afghanistan it should be Bush and Rumsfeld. Not Barack Obama. As Obama pulls out of Afghanistan, Epstein accuses him of "running scared." In reality, he is making pragmatic choices that preserve operational latitude, are guided by circumstances on the ground, and reflect the mess he was handed by the Bush administration. Fighting a perpetual war in Afghanistan, draining our military strength in the process, and spending resources better spent at home to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure, reinvigorate our schools, and put people back to work is a surer path to national decline than anything Epstein points to.

Downsizing Dylan (and the Democrats)

Bob Dylan has experienced more phases in his career than most recording artists - engineering some of them deliberately. Perhaps most famously, he disappeared from view in 1966, putting the breaks on the methamphetamine-paced 4 year period that saw him release 7 albums between 1962 and 1966. During that time he had become, alongside the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, one of the most important figures in rock music. But even more than those acts, at least in the years preceding the release of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Dylan mattered. He was the "voice of a generation" and a "protest singer" during a time of protest and generational change.

By 1966 he was sick of all of this, tired of the hullabaloo, the fame and the obsessed fans, and the exaggerated expectations, which positioned him alongside the freedom marchers as an agent of social change. As early as 1964, while recording Another Side of Bob Dylan, Dylan opened up to Nat Hentoff in an interview, expressing his exhaustion with the role that had been thrust on him - the role of spokesman - and his weariness with the consequence, trapping him in writing what he called "finger-pointing" songs. Years later, in his memoir, Chronicles Volume One, Dylan wrote of this period, revealing how burdened he was being a "Prophet, Messiah, Savior," and how eager he was to leave these titles behind.

As Dylan amplified his music, and transformed his lyrics from observational and crusading to surreal and personal, many of his followers grew angry. Ugly invective follow Dylan through 1965 and 1966, culminating in the famous Royal Albert Hall concert - which was really performed in Manchester - where Dylan fans howled as he and the Band ripped through a set of his songs in full rock and roll fashion.

Dylan's burden became transparent: he was a false prophet, a messiah who had turned his back on the work of redeeming the world. And his followers were angry. By moving beyond his origins in protest music and swapping the authenticity of folk music for the perceived commercial phoniness of rock and roll, Dylan was branded a Judas. British folk musician Ewan MacColl said of him: "Dylan is to me the perfect symbol of the anti-artist in our society. He's against everything - the last resort of someone who really doesn't want to change the world." Dylan went from being viewed as a champion of social change, to being vilified as a nihilist and pariah, an agent of the status quo. He was hemmed in: incapable of living up to the standards imposed on him, hated for his supposed missteps, his creative freedom inhibited by the expectations of others, yet pushed to produce new recordings and tour (and tour and tour and tour) by his management and record label.

On July 29, 1966 Dylan had a motorcycle accident. Some believe he spent the weeks of late summer 1966 recovering from a drug addiction or merely exhaustion, rather than injuries, and the motorcycle crash was a convenient cover story. In comments over the years, Dylan has talked about the accident as an opportunity for him to get off the merry-go-round - not deliberately manufactured but fortuitous . Recently married, and relishing his role as a father, and weary after years of touring, always pursued by exhaustingly fanatical (and increasingly angry) followers, he wanted to reframe his role. And he began doing this by gathering the members of the Band, who had accompanied him over the past several years, and playing a range of music in the basement of a house in West Saugerties, New York.

Contemporary marketing consultants might call his effort to redefine his role a rebranding.

It started out simply, with Dylan and the Band immersing themselves in traditional music, playing some covers, and writing new music shaped by their visit to the America recalled in those inherited songs. From that, they started recording, with simple equipment, over a hundred songs. Some old, some borrowed, some new. This was a new approach for Dylan, who had recorded his prior albums with efficiency, spending several days, seldom more, recording an entire album. Which, in turn, would be released a few weeks later.

The new compositions from the Tapes were copyrighted, transferred to an acetate, and offered to other artists. The Byrds and Manfred Mann and Peter, Paul and Mary recorded some of the songs. At the time, there seemed to be no intention to release the original recordings - although a selection would be in 1975. Yet, clearly inspired by this detour into Appalachia and the dusty corners of America, these recordings shaped the two albums Dylan released after reappearing from hiding, John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline.

In the end, Dylan chose to reject the roles he had engineered for himself (rock star, poet, surrealist) and the titles imposed on him (activist, prophet, ambassador), and put forward something that was simpler and easier to defend. Frustrated that he couldn't follow his increasingly sophisticated song-writing instincts wherever they might lead, Dylan wanted to renegotiate his informal contract with the world that managed and consumed his music. Dylan was attempting to find a way past the noise and commotion that surrounded him. And, as he convalesced from his injuries and recovered from the dementia of his sudden stardom, he mapped out steps to shrink his role in the public consciousness and, as importantly,I think, reshape his own expectations about who he was and where we was headed. He wanted to be indistinguishable from other recording artists, who routinely stumble and fail and disappoint. He wanted his conversation to be with other musicians, not the public. He wanted to respond to what other artists were doing, filter it through his own gifts, without a need to reply to the demands placed on him by his fans.

In Chronicles Volume One, Dylan wrote of this period: "I'd have to send out deviating signals, crank up the wrecking train, create some different impressions.... My outer image would have to be something a bit more confusing." And more pointedly: "I had assumed that when critics dismissed my work, the same thing would happen to me, that the public would forget about me." Once forgotten, he could regroup, and emerge in a role that suited him better, that better fit his new view of what he wanted from the world and his career.

Dylan's repositioning continued even after he returned to the airwaves and began producing new albums. John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline were seemingly deliberately out of step with everything going on around him. As American youth embraced flower power and dropped acid, Dylan went country. He began the work of reclaiming his career four months after Self Portrait, a perplexing, critically dismissed album, full of easy-listening arrangements and layers of over-dubs, when he released the appropriately titled New Morning, a recording cautiously hailed at the time as a return to form. But baffling choices followed over the years that followed. It was as if he was on the run: changing labels, releasing a greatest hits album that offered few hits, acting in Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid. Over and over again, defying what was expected of him. It wasn't until Blood on the Tracks, nearly a decade after his motorcycle accident, that Dylan produced something that seemed to capture all of his gifts.

Maybe one way to view this period is as a strategic intervention, designed by Dylan to end the parade and disperse his followers. The time I want to focus on began in the basement in upstate New York and ended with Nashville Skyline. Dylan surrendered his role as his generation's troubadour, opting instead to become, at least for a time, a musical archaeologist, unearthing American musical traditions with the Band and, when he returned to the recording studio, embracing country music, a conservative sound, rooted not in America's cities, where change was unfolding rapidly, but the rural backroads. Yet it was in America's hollows and dells where, for generations, one's fame as a musician was shaped by your skill and technique, and your ability to take a traditional tune, and transform it, to make it new by infusing it with something only you could conjure up. Here, within this musical landscape, Dylan would seek to reposition himself as singer and musician.

Like Dylan in 1966, the Democratic Party - and Barack Obama in particular - can choose to reject a definition imposed on it (and him) by others. The party can refashion its identity, not by asserting new claims or donning new disguises, but by boiling down what it does to the simplest terms. The party can reclaim its title as the country's liberal party. It's a simple claim, easy to defend (although there will still be those who think liberal policies are wrong for America) and, like Dylan's redefinition of himself as a singer and a songwriter, it rescales the party's (and Obama's) public image among liberal Democrats and progressive activists.

I'm a proud Democrat, but I am comfortable saying the Democratic Party has seldom been heroic, even if some of its signature legislative achievements have been sweepingly transformative. The party's accomplishments - bringing immigrants into the political process, defending the right of African Americans to vote, improving work conditions for laborers - were often the products of cagey political choices, securing votes so politicians getting rich from public office could remain in office. It has been the party of corruption and compromise, machine politics and patronage. The Democratic Party has always been less a leading man, more a colorful character actor. Now and then, like Ernest Borgnine in Marty, the party brought home the big prize, delivering a social safety net to keep Americans from falling into destitution as they age, guaranteeing civil rights, fighting a war on poverty.

But that's about right. Political parties and the politicians who guide them aren't great causes or prophets. Our prophets - Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Jane Addams, and Martin Luther King and others like them, who took on our society's inequalities and division - weren't politicians. Dylan was a musician and an entertainer. He knew that, but he need to remind us of it. Obama is a politician and he knows that. We need to be reminded.

On the Republican side, of course, especially in the dark realm of the Tea Party, Obama and the Democratic Party has been cast as the midwife to America's failure, another out-sized claim that doesn't match the reality. The flip side for Dylan, too, of course, was that the forces of reaction and conservativism, also powerful in the 1960's, yet fearful of changes they saw on the horizon, demonized him alongside the youth culture they despised.

Dylan, knowing he was neither the messiah nor the cause of American decline, slipped into hiding and rewrote his role. And, as we saw with the Stones on Exile on Main Street, he managed to do it in a way that repositioned himself as an inheritor of a long history of traditional forms of musical experience - blue grass, country, Appalachian fiddle music, back porch blues, and more.

The Democratic Party needs to do something similar. Dip into the traditions of American liberal political thought and draw inspiration from the great advancements these traditions made possible: emancipation, the eight hour workday, occupational health and safety regulation, social welfare for the poor, Social Security for the aged, regulations that made our food safe and our environment livable, political and legal guarantees that secured the vote for Blacks and Latinos and women, and the right to abortion. The party needs to reject the labels imposed by progressives and Republicans. It is a political party, not the last best hope of the nation, nor the devil's ambassador, facilitating America's decline.

I won't waste time exploring the Republicans' role in this. They are cynical manipulators, refashioning the Democratic Party and the nation's first African American president into props in their haunted house, using the party and Obama to scare Americans who feel the floor dropping out from under them.

As far as progressives go, they have a fundamentally mistaken impression about the country we live in, however much I share their hopes. We aren't a Disneyland of racial and ethnic harmony, a haven for gays and lesbians, a magical land of equality. These are all goals we have yet to achieve, and the Democratic Party is one vehicle for doing that, if it can be repurposed and given a new road map. But it is not the last line of defense - Gandalf on the bridge facing the Balrog while we, the timid hobbits, scramble away from the forces of darkness. In fact, much like Frodo, the simpler people have often carried the greatest responsibility for inching us step by step toward becoming a more inclusive, more equal society. Unions, not the Democratic Party, campaigned for years to improve work conditions and improve benefits for workers. Rosa Parks and freedom marchers put civil rights on the nation's front pages before LBJ managed to work his legislative magic to make it the law of the land. Elevating the Democratic Party beyond what is reasonable is misguided and historically unjustified.

The party needs to be deliberate in playing a role in this redefinition of its role. Dylan had enough confidence in his songwriting and performing skills to know he could make it in a world where he was measured by these criteria alone. The Democrats need a similar, realistically-sized sense of confidence about its policy instincts. My impression is that Dylan, unsteady on his feet perhaps when he first withdrew from public view in 1966, regained confidence in his songwriting and performing skills by jamming with the Band, and releasing some of the resulting recordings to a small circle within the music business. The reaction to the recordings was encouraging, but surely, too, was the feeling of exploration, mastery, excitement, and renewed confidence that the sessions provided. In the end, Dylan resumed his role as a songwriter and performer. And, I think importantly, he rediscovered that he was a collaborator in the making of his music. Those early years of the decade surely placed Dylan on a pedestal, and, it seems clear, altered his own understanding of his role. Most of his best music from the period was a product of borrowing and collaboration, taking musical ideas from the treasure chest of American folk music, being paired with sympathetic and experienced producers, finding Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper and the Band to work with. His successes were not his own alone, but, I suspect, he forget that as his myth grew. Only when he wanted to escape the weight of his fans' out-sized expectations, and he hid away in Woodstock and jammed with the Band, did he get a chance to recall this.

The Democratic Party leadership (and the Obama White House in particular) needs to similarly recall that the party didn't accomplish their landmark achievements alone: activists and unions and sympathetic courts all played indispensable roles. And getting out of Washington, as Dylan fled New York, and reconnecting with past collaborators - activists and unions and organizers - is necessary for the party to move forward. The product of this would be a renewed agenda, positioned not as the final line of defense, but as a set of policy proposals that would make life in America more fair, for the greatest portion of the nation's population, while laying a foundation for accelerated progress into the 21st century.

Finding the Democrats' Villa Nellcote

In the picture above Keith Richards and Mick Jagger are working on a song, their producer Jimmy Miller is sprawled on the floor, some partially eaten melons sit nearby, a bong and a liquor bottle sit on an acoustic partition. Is this what leadership looks like? Is this a glimpse into the moment of inspiration and renewal? Not exactly, but to pick up the thread I began (and immediately dropped) in my last posting, the Stones were on to something when they recorded Exile on Main Street in a villa in Villefranche-sur-Mer. And, through my lens, their situation, and their approach to the recording process, resembles the circumstances that surrounded the recording of three other great rock and roll albums - Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes, Bruce Springsteen's Darkness on the Edge of Town, and the Clash's London Calling.

In each case, something happened that interrupted the artists' normal creative process. Instead of simply churning out the next album expected by their fans and their eager record labels, they paused, immersed themselves in torrents of music - gospel, blues, rockabilly, soul, Preservation Hall-style jazz, carnival music, and country - and jammed, for extended periods, in rehearsals and with the tape rolling. Many songs were written in the studio, inspired by this tour through the musical legacy that makes up the foundations of rock and roll. In each case, the band worked as a unit - not always harmoniously - yet as if they were moving with a shared instinct, like they were a single organism. Years of work together had fashioned quick reflexes, band members anticipated chord changes, shifts in tempo, moods.

For me, this suggests a process for refashioning the political message, machinery, and mission of the Democratic Party. I'll try to unpack this over the next several posts. In a Cliff's Notes version: The Democratic Party has to realize that they can't think of the next election - in 2012 - as just another election. They have been led from the path they had been following. The 2010 elections suggested something that smart Democrats knew, but party leaders were stubbornly ignoring. The party is corrupt and lost and wandering through a landscape they no longer comprehend. The Democratic Party leadership should dig into the vast legacy of their party's sweeping interventions into American life - FDR's New Deal, the decisions handed down by liberal courts filled with Democratic appointments, LBJ's signature poverty and civil rights legislation - as well as the work of civil rights leaders and social activists that inspired and shaped this transformative effort. Then, with a preliminary blue-print in hand, the party should assemble as much of its rank and file as can be assembled, reach out to bloggers and commentators from what Robert Gibbs dismissively called "the professional Left," bring in union leaders and representatives from the vast network of agencies and organizations that take care of our poor, and create something new. The process is what matters, and this is what the Stones did right in the summer of 1971.

I'm not recommending party leaders indulge in vast quantities of heroin. Or shag each others' spouses. You're getting too caught up in the details. The Stones lived where they worked. They recorded everyday from 8 at night until the early morning. With all the tension between band members, and legal problems, and the allure of new love - Mick had just married Bianca - not everyone showed up everyday. But those who did, shook off the effect of the drugs and the wine, and worked through the songs. Long hours spent jamming, working on material that was being written as it was being recorded. Six hours spent playing one segment of Tumbling Dice, with the tape rolling. So many songs went on and on (only to fade out when they are sequenced on the album). Band members played instruments they don't normally play - Keith playing bass and producer Jimmy Miller playing drums.

But the result is alive, in ways no Rolling Stone album would ever be again. The music has sinew and purpose and character and swagger. To worry about the drugs and the marital infidelities and car crashes and arrests and everything else that accompanied the making of the album that summer is to miss the point. Rather - despite the drugs and the marital infidelities and car crashes and arrests and everything else the Stones had to push past, their creative process that summer produced a recording that was remarkable: shaped by gospel and rhythm and blues and gritty roadhouse rock and roll, authentic and persuasive.

The Democratic Party needs to recreate this. Retreat to its own Villa Nellcote, and dip deeply into the past, rehearse its message, fight things out, all with the tape rolling. Author the party's new mission while the conversation is going on. Make it something spontaneous and alive. Work for long hours, to grab hold of the thread of the thing that has always called to you. For the Stones it was rock and roll. For the Democratic Party it should be social justice, restoring a role for the marginalized, educating kids, keeping the promise the nation made in its founding documents and the 14th Amendment. In the end, refashion everything in a way that is conscious of the present. If you have to, carry the result back to be polished by experienced tweakers. The Stones did, overdubbing a few tracks in a studio in L.A. But don't spoil the authenticity of it, don't dispel the magic. And whatever you do, don't erase the lines that trace what you have created back to its origins. That's what makes it real and meaningful and relevant. Exile on Main Street wasn't just the latest Stones LP, in stores, as always, about a year after the last, ready to satisfy the appetites of the band's fans. It was the latest chapter in a long history, part of a conversation that included Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters, Clyde McPhatter and Memphis Slim, Bo Diddley and Hank Williams, and an endless list of innovators and authentic voices. It was bigger than the commercial impulse that pushed recording artists to put out albums each year. And that's what the Democrats need. They need to shake off the dull repetition of competing every two years, sleep-walking through the process with a satchel full of old battle hymns. They need to go back to the wellspring of their inspiration, drink deeply, and return with something authentic and simultaneously timeless and contemporary.

While you're thinking about this, go listen to Sweet Virginia, and marvel at it. After starting out as a little country ditty, there's a point, after everyone has climbed on board, including Bobby Keys, playing an improbably swaggering sax, when Jagger sings: "You've gotta scrape that shit right off your shoes." That's what the Democrats need to do. Then, learn to thrill the audience. Not with cheap gimmicks, but with the real thing. After you're done listening to Sweet Virginia, skip ahead to Shine a Light. The gospel-style backup vocals, Mick Taylor's liquid guitar, Billy Preston's persistent keyboards. Doesn't that song make you want to cheer and cry at the same time? It's thrilling. The Democrats need that too.

Lessons for Escaping our Cul-de-sac from Dylan, the Clash, the Stones, and Springsteen. Really.

This blog started out as a grab-bag, I thought I would talk about music, politics, my (supposedly) amusing thoughts about life as a dad, wry comedic reports from the day-to-day. It would be like my friend Andrea's blog. I couldn't do it though. I didn't have the gifts to make it work, and I started the blog when Barack Obama was trying to win the Democratic nomination from Hillary Clinton, so the blog became a platform for me to rant about and report on politics. I sometimes slip into old habits, and write about the Kinks or the Chi-Lites or Joel R.L. Phelps or X, always trying to tie them to politics in some way. This post is something flabbier and less focused than even those efforts at mixing music and commentary.

I've been thinking about how America can back out of the cul-de-sac in which it has been trapped. The conversation around the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords shows how lost and divided we are. After the shooting, as everyone knows, we began a conversation about vitriol in our political discourse, we timidly asked some questions about gun control and the care we provide to the mentally ill. But the conversation will lead nowhere, the questions about automatic weapons and high capacity magazines will remain unanswered, and we'll continue to ignore the needs of the mentally ill. This is inevitable. We've seen it time and time again. And, most of all, we'll continue to argue about the future of the country from entirely different corners of the universe. I've talked about this elsewhere; part of the problem is an irreconcilably different vision about who we are as a nation, and what the fundamental requirements are for membership. Bob Dylan, once wrote about America, in his memoir, Chronicles: "You wonder how people so united by geography and religious ideals could become such bitter enemies. After awhile you become aware of nothing but a culture of feeling, of black days, of schism, of evil for evil." He was writing about the years preceding the Civil War, but it could be today. We are still divided by that schism.

Politics as usual cannot be a path out of this. Our political process is corrupted by money and irresponsibility and demagoguery, devoted to preserving wealth, dividing us, to serve the commercial and corporate interests and the wealthy, who view our splintering as a gift. Occasionally more hopeful politics percolate up, showering mercy on those left destitute by the Great Depression, redeeming the promise made to those freed from bondage one-hundred years after emancipation, fighting a war on poverty, promising health care to those previously denied coverage. But there is nothing sustained, and the forces of darkness or merely apathy and drift are restored to their place, and we roll back. Our politics are sisyphean.

Where does redemption come from? Or is it renewal we need? Innovation? Whichever, there are many places we can look for some directions, some examples or guidance. My inspiration was a realization that Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes, the Rolling Stones' Exile on Main Street, Bruce Springsteen's Darkness on the Edge of Town, and the Clash's London Calling all had similar origins. Something occurred - a motorcycle crash, tax exile, a break with management and resulting legal action - to disrupt the normal creative process. The response was prolonged immersion in their recording studios, writing and revisions and group collaboration that drew on themes new to the artists, blending longstanding obsessions with new interests, reaching into the deep bubbling stew of musical expression, drawing on bluegrass, and gospel, and rhythm and blues, rockabilly, jazz, dub in the case of the Clash. What was put down on tape was a product of prolonged jamming, rehearsals, multiple versions of songs, some fast, some slow, some gentle, others savage. But the bands were in each case already so accomplished at what they did, that they found the groove in each song, even across its multiple embodiments.

There's something here. And, like I have said before, it requires collaboration. These performing artists jumped off the merry-go-round. They stopped, for at least a time, worrying about the annual obligation to deliver a new album into the hands of their fans and their record label. They went back to what inspired them, and spent time there, with musicians they trusted. This is a model for collaboration for Democrats. Over the next couple of posts, I'll try to unpack why.