Freddie is nothing if not determined. Temperamentally, I am sympathetic to Freddie’s “no surrender” approach, and when it comes to foreign policy debates I am certainly not sympathetic to those hawkish neoliberals (not Kaus, I would add) who taught post-Vietnam liberals to be ashamed of their healthy skepticism about military adventurism and the security state and who urged military interventions all around the world. I have written a fair amount about why it is important to end the Democrats’ “defensive crouch” on foreign policy in some way that is not merely contributing to a bidding war on hawkishness, so I see the logic of calling for “no more capitulation” to the opposition. I can understand why a progressive on domestic policy would find neoliberals who are focused on welfare reform and attacking unions to be insufferable. That still really doesn’t make Kaus something other than a liberal.

Freddie cites the following passage as typical of Kaus’ writing and indicative of his contempt (Freddie’s word) for liberalism:

Welfare is a liberal sore spot that, if Republicans play it right, could become a bleeding open wound for the administration. Voters probably thought they’d settled the dole-vs.-work issue back in 1996. Obama will be fulfilling the crude GOP stereotype of his party if he even waffles on reopening it.

And there’s something fallacious (i.e. circular) about a liberal Dem citing MSM coverage as if the New York Times was an infallible oracle of the people, as opposed to an infallible oracle of liberal Dems. This is what you see when you look up “cocooning” in the dictionary! …

The first paragraph makes an obvious, almost banal political observation: welfare as an issue was and is a liability for Democrats in electoral politics. I am guessing one reason why the Republican attempt during the campaign to portray Obama’s pledge to provide tax subsidies to offset payroll taxes as nothing but welfare failed to shift sufficiently large numbers of voters into McCain’s column is that people did not find the accusation credible. It didn’t seem credible, because it wasn’t true. It is telling that the stimulus alternative now favored by many observers on the right is one that offers direct payroll tax relief, which would have the same result of returning taxpayers some of their own money. This was a goal that just six months their presidential candidate derided as socialism and misrepresented as “sending checks to people who don’t pay taxes.” But let’s set that aside for now.

In the actual stimulus bill, however, there really are large increases in welfare spending, and this makes up a large portion of the bill’s total costs. There are two arguments a progressive who wants to defend these increases can make against Kaus’ warning: 1) the public is more receptive to increases in welfare spending than they were during the boom in the ’90s (unlikely); 2) the increases in welfare spending do not really undo the ’96 reform, but operate within its constraints (possible). It could also be that the GOP will not have the credibility on this issue that it once had after the spending spree of the last eight years and especially after creating a new entitlement program with trillions in unfunded liabilities, so it is less likely to hurt the Democrats than it might have done in the past.

That is not what Freddie is saying. He is saying that Kaus obviously has contempt for liberalism because he thinks welfare reform was a) successful and b) popular, and assumes that it is politically risky to revisit the question. The first two claims Kaus is making here are basically accurate, and the assumption is a reasonable one to make. If Kaus wished liberals ill, but believed that a return to welfarism was politically dangerous, wouldn’t he keep quiet about this instead of bringing it to their attention? If he thinks that Democrats are playing into their opponents’ hands, why would he recommend a different couse of action if he wanted them to fail politically? Then again, if he were the enemy of liberalism Freddie believes him to be, wouldn’t he be rejoicing in the Democrats’ folly on the stimulus rather than warning them that they have made a mistake? In the end, Kaus may be wrong in assessing the public mood and the public’s level of knowledge about what the stimulus contains, but both of these are temporary and can change to the detriment of the administration and the Democratic majority. The comparison between the stimulus bill and the war in Iraq has been overdone, but there may be shred of truth in it. The war seemed like an obvious, undeniable politically winning issue and an overwhelmingly popular initiative, but turned into political disaster for its supporters as the public saw the results and learned more about how it had come about. The same thing could happen with the stimulus bill, and one part of the problem many voters may end up having with the bill could be the welfare portions of the bill as they learn more about it. Even if that turns out not to be the case because the recession has changed the politics of welfare or for some other reason, it is not a ridiculous thing for a liberal to take into consideration.

The second point about media bias is more vexed, as most progressives find the idea that establishment media outlets are biased in their favor to be absurd. However, what Kaus really seems to be saying here is that liberals should guard against falling into the trap of cocooning themselves and reinforcing their assumptions by relying on sources that confirm what they already believe. This is usually taken as evidence of reasonableness and a desire to enngage in self-criticism when Ross says something similar about conservatives and conservative media, but is a clear case of perfidy and contempt when Kaus says it. I can imagine that Kaus might have contempt for certain liberal individuals or groups who fail to heed what he thinks are important warnings, but that is something very different from having contempt for liberalism as such.

Update: Kaus addresses how the bill relates to ’96 welfare reform and lays out the reasons why the new legislation does not fully “unravel” it, but then goes on to make the political case why liberals should be particularly concerned about this aspect of the bill:

Preserving Clinton’s biggest domestic achievement isn’t something you should want “even” if you’re a liberal who believes in affirmative government. It’s something you should want especially if you’re a liberal who believes in affirmative government.

This is something that I, as a small-government conservative, appreciate only too well. The welfare state will never be pushed back or abolished so long as it can be made to “work efficiently,” or at least as long as reforms can be made that make the public believe that it is working that way.