Democrats Want to Fall in Love, Republicans Want to Fall in Line

I would have thought it goes without saying that for somebody of the Left like me (in the radical democracy, social democracy, democratic socialism neck of the ideological woods) there can only be a tactical alliance with any actually electable President. Education, agitation, organization yields political change, and while politics is not reducible to partisan politics, neither does it make much sense to disdain so preeminent an agency for political change as plays out through partisan politics.

I have said many times that Obama is the most progressive President we have had since FDR, and this is almost always taken as some sort of uncritical Obama-mania on my part rather than as a fairly straightforward indictment of the limits of the Presidency since WW2 for a person of the Left. While that indictment is perfectly true, it seems to me just as obvious that for a person of the Left, Obama is such an incomparably better candidate than any Republican will be and any Republican so devastatingly bad, that not to support Obama (either actively by voting for somebody worse or passively by not voting and thereby conceding the election to those who vote for somebody worse) is simply stupid or, in this day and age, simply reveals you to be evil. That's how bad Republicans are now: a generation or two of mostly scoundrels and ignoramuses and smug bigots crystallizing in the present in an unambiguous authoritarian identity movement.

I believe that it is a political commonplace to say of Democrats that they want to fall in love with their President, while Republicans like all anxious authoritarians are looking to fall in line. Neither attitude is commendable, and neither attitude conduces to reasonable political thinking.

So, just what is a consistent, and therefore probably what will pass in this day and age for radical, person of the Left to do? How to reconcile one's ideals with one's practice? Now, anarchism as a practical or ideological orientation on the right (the market fundamentalists and anti-government conservatives) carries water for plutocracy, and on the left amounts mostly to a form of performance art (not without its beauty and usefulness -- but the Left already won the Culture Wars so the usefulness is limited). Meanwhile, third parties function as spoilers for the foreseeable future -- since the institutional reforms that would render them otherwise (like implementing publicly financing campaigns, instant runoff voting, and reorganizing the way committee assignments are made in the House and Senate) are either as or more fundamental than the institutional reforms that can be made within the current system that would yield the policy outcomes the desire for which make third parties seem attractive in the first place. Few are willing to make the sacrifices demanded of literal revolutionary politics (which requires more than big talk, online or over coffee), and in any case too many forms of revolutionary insurrection have yielded in my view unintended consequences as vile as the ones that provoked them.

For a person of the Left -- and as such almost certainly a person to the Left of the politics of most candidates of the Democratic Party -- that leaves as the only sensible attitude and practical arena remaining always to work to support the election of More, and Better, Democrats across all layers of government, while continuing to engage in education, agitation, and organization in other modes of criticism, dialogue, activism, cultural intervention, and social support as a supplement to partisan politics pushing Democrats and the country and the planet more generally to the Left from the Left, but always in ways that disempower progressive partisan politics as little as possible.

This is no time to fall in love or pine to fall in love with elected officials, nor is this a time to limit one's struggle to the bounds of electoral politics. At a time when our institutions are so dysfunctional it makes as little sense to fall in line as it does to disdain altogether the struggle to regain control and reform those institutions back into functionality. So much paralyzing demoralization and pointless recrimination interfering with the heartbreaking heartening work of progressive change simply arises from the failure to recognize that one has to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time. Elect More -- and Better -- Democrats. Engage in partisan politics -- and in social, cultural, political struggle beyond the immediate horizon of elections and reform legislation.

It is not either /or. It is not one to the detriment of the other. It is both/and. It is both, to the extent that they enable one another.