David Sirota

The American Prospect has released its review of Hostile Takeover. They assigned Matt Yglesias - a writer with whom I have disagreed with vehemently in the past. I am grateful that they reviewed the book, and am gratified by Yglesias’s praise for it. He calls me “the kind of pundit you’d like to have on your side in a knife fight and wouldn’t want to cross in a dark alley” (quite a scary metaphor) who has “pioneered a bracing, take-no-prisoners prose style.” He says the book shows I “stand for the interests of ordinary people, and anyone who disagrees about anything is not merely wrong, but a ‘hack’ or a ‘liar,’ a bought-and-paid-for agent of Corporate America.” Fair enough, I guess. The review, however, is quite bizarre. I say that not because of its criticism - the magazine seems to have embraced a bit more of a neoliberal attitude with its new D.C.-based writers, so frankly, I expected some criticism. But what makes it bizarre is that much of the criticism is so dishonestly divorced from what the book actually, repeatedly says.

For instance, Yglesias says “there’s simply very little evidence to support Sirota’s colorfully expressed view that ‘with the wild-eyed lunacy of a crack addict, many Democrats are so singularly focused on raking in corporate campaign cash and reinforcing the status quo that they are unable to see that their genuflecting — not their spin, not their language, not their television ads — is really the core of their problem.’” This, on the very same day that Bloomberg reports that Democrats are raising record amounts of cash from Wall Street, to the point where they are actually challenging the GOP for supremacy in that area. This, in the very same month we see a group of high-profile Wall Street Democrats publicly berate Democrats who are leading the way in pushing populist economic policies. This, in the very same year that polls consistently show the public believes Democrats are as corrupt as Republicans.

Or, how about Yglesias’s comment that only “small minorities of Democrats favored the 2005 bankruptcy reform bill”? Last I checked, almost half of the Democratic caucus in the Senate and more than a third of the Democratic caucus in the House voted for the 2005 bankruptcy bill. That’s not a “small minority” - and to call it one is, frankly, to try to dishonestly mislead readers.

Then there is the dishonest regurgitation of Big Business’s talking points when Yglesias claims there is supposedly a contradiction in Hostile Takeover’s advocacy for a single-payer health care system, and criticism of companies like Wal-Mart for providing so few benefits to employees that states are having to pick up a bigger and bigger Medicaid tab. This is, almost word-for-word, out of the mouth of a Wal-Mart lobbyist trying to defend the company against criticism of its disgusting behavior. The fact is, a single-payer system would be, in part, contingent on companies like Wal-Mart having to pay into the system. Advocating for such a system does not contradict criticism of Wal-Mart simply forcing its employees into Medicaid and welfare without having to pay into the system at all. In fact, they are quite consistent.

Then there is the final flood of dishonesty, where Yglesias claims “clear majorities of Democrats already support almost all of Sirota’s proposals,” that “Sirota’s policy agenda isn’t notably different from the one on which John Kerry waged his presidential campaign,” and that “Kerry’s loss wasn’t due primarily to any inadequacy of his ideas on the topics Sirota addresses.” While it is definitely true that clear majorities of Democratic voters (and voters in general) outside the beltway support all of my proposals (and Hostile Takeover goes out of its way to cite polling data to prove this) - you have to have a severe case of Potomac Fever or Partisan War Syndrome to think that the same is the case among Democratic officials and operatives in the nation’s capital. This is the one that really makes me wonder whether he read the book.

As just one example, the book seriously and repeatedly challenges the Democratic Party’s long-held Clintonian orthodoxy on “free” trade - orthodoxy that high-profile Democratic lawmakers essentially admit governs their behavior; orthodoxy that John Kerry refused to frontally challenge, much less talk about, and which, as evidenced by the recent “Hamilton Project,” still commands the attention and support of very powerful Democrats in Washington, D.C. The argument that this refusal by Kerry - and the national Democratic Party as a whole - to frontally challenge corporate-written policies like NAFTA, China PNTR and “free” trade orthodoxy had nothing to do with, for instance, losing free-trade-ravaged blue-collar states like Ohio is tenuous, to say the least. Check out exit polls that showed how important that issue was to Ohio voters.

More broadly, the idea that the economic populist platform is not effective is also unsupportable, as I tried to meticulously detail in an earlier article for Yglesias’s own magazine. In fact, one might ask how Yglesias could even claim my book merely parrots already-held Democratic positions, considering it was just the other day that the New York Daily News said exactly the opposite: namely, that Hostile Takeover seriously and controversially challenges Democratic orthodoxies.

Let me be clear - I accept criticism of my work, and I expect there will be some. As I told folks in Austin this weekend, if you aren’t pissing people off, you aren’t trying to create real change. And Hostile Takeover is going to piss some people off - it is controversial, it names names, and it will make enemies. I knew that going in. Additionally, I am thrilled the Prospect reviewed the book, and am very excited that the magazine is co-sponsoring the D.C. launch of the book. But what I don’t think anyone should accept is dishonesty about what the book actually says - dishonesty that is, at times, so egregious as to seem deliberate. Progressives deserve a debate that respects the facts - not one that ignores them. That’s what my book ultimately seeks to achieve. It is not a book about the Democratic Party - it is a book about the political system as a whole. It is not a book for pundits, journalists, political operatives, lobbyists, politicians and others who inhabit Washington’s money-drenched swamp - but for ordinary citizens who want their government back.

Sirotablog

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The American Prospect’s Bizarre Review of Hostile Takeover