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A front page article from Sunday at Dailykos, Frederick Douglass: The activist who would not 'grow up', highlighted the greatness of Frederick Douglass as an effective model for activism. However, Douglass was also characterized as someone who had refused to "grow up" to advance his calling to abolish slavery in the process the article was rebutting a commentary made by Fareed Zakaria who "berated liberals for their criticisms of President Barack Obama" by urging them to "grow up". In my opinion, the commentary made by Fareed Zakaria has been used to paint a false equivalency of today's activists by comparing them with the likes of Frederick Douglass which in my opinion undermines the legacy of Frederick Douglass.
In my view, the majority of today's activists on the blogsphere are not anything like Frederick Douglass for a reason I will discuss further below. However, to give the "grow up" liberals remark made by Zakaria's a context, watch the first 4 minute of his Sunday program with partial transcript provided (bold emphasis mine):
Let me offer a simpler explanation. Obama is a centrist and a pragmatist who understands that in a country divided over core issues, you cannot make the best, the enemy of the good. Obama passed a large stimulus package within weeks of taking office. Liberals feel it should have been bigger. But, remember, despite a Democratic House and Senate, it just passed by one vote.
He signed into law an unprecedented expansion of regulations in the financial services industry, though it isn't one that broke up the large banks. He enacted universal health care through a complex program that was modeled after the Republican Mitt Romney's plan in Massachusetts. And he's advocated a balanced approach to deficit reduction that combines tax increases with spending cuts.
Now, maybe he just believes in all these things. Maybe he understands that with a budget deficit that is 10 percent of GDP, the second highest in the industrialized world, and a debt that will rise to almost 100 percent of GDP in a few years, we cannot cavalierly spend another few trillion hoping that it will jump start the economy.
Maybe he believes that while American banks need better regulations, America also needs a vibrant banking system and that, in a globalized economy, constraining American banks alone will only ensure that the world's largest global financial institutions will be British, German, Swiss and Chinese. He might understand that Larry Summers and Tim Geithner are smart people, who, in long careers in public service, got some things wrong, but also many things right.
Perhaps he understands that getting entitlement costs under control is, in fact, a crucial part of stabilizing our long-term fiscal situation and that you do need both tax increases and spending cuts - cuts, by the way, that are smaller than they appear because they all start from the 2010 budget, which was boosted by the stimulus.
Is all this dangerous weakness, incoherence, appeasement? Or is it just common sense?
