[W]hen you label one thing like conservative free-market fundamentalism as "pragmatic" there is the implicit suggestion that the opposite of that ideology -- like, say, progressivism -- is not "a practical point of view."
That's the whole goal, of course. Whether it's the constant perversion of the term "centrism," or the Orwellian use of the word "pragmatism," the objective from the media and political Establishment is to marginalize progressivism in this, a supposed "center-right" nation. And what better way to do that than bill discredited free-market fundamentalism as undebateably practical, and anything else as impractical, pie-in-the-sky idiocy?
There is no question about any of this, of course, nor even any controversy about it I should imagine. Selling these conservative narratives to the benefit of incumbency is precisely the goal of the gatekeepers, and has always been. Despite generations of consistent insistence by majorities of Americans that they wanted environmental protections, universal healthcare, liberalization of drug laws, less militarism, and so on, incumbent interests have broadcast-mediated the fantasy that our secular multiculture identified with blandly Christianist "moral values," has a horror of "socialized medicine" on behalf of their abusive bosses, and that our center-left nation is instead a "center-right" nation for which the definition of "center" skews ever more surreally rightward. And who could forget the flabbergasting facile falsity of Thatcher's correlated declaration of the neoliberal TINA ("There Is No Alternative"), and the crowbar blow to reality it dealt generations who knew and know otherwise? Mass distraction, mass disinformation, mass cynicism, mass disaffection were the predictable consequences of this state of affairs, very much to the short term benefit of the richest and rottenest people in the world.
The thing to remember about this by now well worn narrative is that all these world-historic consequences were hardly a matter of audacious and brilliant rhetoric. That attribution of brilliance and audacity is, fortunately enough, the self-congratulatory fable told by the primary beneficiaries of all these fun and games, and I suppose by the rubes who identify with them without the benefits -- and I say this is "fortunately" so because this explanation is delusive in a way that renders them far less capable of grasping the scale of the shit they're in now.
But the brutal fact remains that the actual efficacy of this sort of Orwellian discourse in the service of incumbency has always depended first of all on the congenial dissemination of authoritative descriptions via broadcast-media formations. That is to say, incumbency needs precisely the pre-emptive filtering and structural incentivization of authoritative descriptions of the possible and the important that have been fatally undermined (for now) by the emergence and ramification of p2p-formations. And this dependency of the modern Right on broadcast-mediation was as true for the European fascists as for the activations, by Nixon and then Reagan, of the dark and sunny sides, respectively, of the anti-democratizing politics of resentment that hand in hand fueled thirty years of catastrophically "successful" movement conservatism in America.
Sirota continues on:
[I]f there was ever a time for a paradigm shift, it is now. We're facing a potential depression that is a direct result of conservative's ideological and decidedly un-pragmatic policies. Our own history during the Great Depression indicates that the pragmatic way to deal with such a massive crisis is through some good old fashioned ideological progressivism.
Obama, I think, knows this, and is doing something of a dance -- one that doesn't seek to challenge or change the Orwellian shenanigans, but to manipulate them for his own -- and likely progressive -- ends. It could be really brilliant.
I agree with Sirota in all this. I must say that I've felt a bit annoyed by all the histrionics about Obama's "betrayals" of progressive principle that have roared across the Netroots since election day. For one thing, Obama always campaigned (not to mention voted in office) as an Actual Centrist, and it seems rather absurd to decry his consistency on this score as betrayal. Far from feeling betrayed, I have personally found Obama to be ideologically right where I expected him to be so far, but also to be efficacious beyond my wildest dreams. I have always expected that it would be the sheer scale of conservative catastrophe together with the energy of the progressive supporters to whom he is beholden that would nudge an Obama Administration in the more progressive directions we demand against the grain of his own tendencies (which is not to deny for all that, that Obama is not the most inspiring and progressive President elected in my lifetime, Carter certainly included). Of course, to do this nudging the Netroots needs to do precisely the sorts of things that are annoying me now, I suppose, pushing Obama from the sensible and popular left, calling him on his accommodations with scoundrels, reminding him of his best campaign promises and so on.
It's just that I do think Obama is engaging in what Sirota calls here a kind of dance on hot coals -- I do indeed think he's sending complex signals to the actually existing diversity of institutional players who crowd the terrain on which he needs to do his work and corralling his political capital to spend it where it makes most sense, and that he is doing all of this in an enormously competent fashion in the service of the left wing of the possible. In this I think he -- and we -- will benefit from an enthusiastic and reasonably united progressive left. I think some of the cynicism and outrage I am hearing across the left instead is too lazily reflexive and too needlessly divisive and too unproductively frustrating of collective energies and so scarcely likely to contribute in the least to the outcomes the desire for which presumably inspire it in the first place.
Sirota has been one of the figures of the progressive left to whom I normally turn for good arguments but who has sometimes seemed to me to be jumping the gun a bit in decrying Obama's failures before he's had a chance to succeed (Glenn Greenwald -- who I think is absolutely brilliant and marvelous is another). That is what made me especially pleased to read this post today from him.
I think we need to give Obama the space he needs to dance in before we start crying out to stop the music.
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