So Adolf L. Reed nails it in the November issue of the Progressive. In "Sitting This One Out," Reed shares his views on the dismal state of the Democratic primary field and the present dilemmas faced by many thinking progressives. But we've all heard this story before. What Reed adds to the usual fare is an analysis of what
progressives are doing wrong, and why it's foolish for us to expect democratic politics to reflect our values right now. It's a great read.
http://www.progressive.org/mag_reed1107OK, HERE WE ARE AGAIN, a year out from a Presidential election, and we’re all supposed to be figuring out which of the Democrats has the best chance to win—determined mainly by the standard of raising the most money—and subordinating all our substantive political concerns to the objective of getting him or her elected. This time, I’m not going to acquiesce in the fiction that the Presidential charade has any credibility whatsoever. I’m not paying any attention to the horse race coverage—that mass-mediated positioning in the battle for superficial product differentiation.
The Democratic candidates who are anointed “serious” are like a car with a faulty front-end alignment: Their default setting pulls to the right. They are unshakably locked into a strategy that impels them to give priority to placating those who aren’t inclined to vote for them and then palliate those who are with bromides and doublespeak. When we complain, they smugly say, “Well, you have no choice but to vote for me because the other guy’s worse.” The party has essentially been nominating the same ticket with the same approach since Dukakis.
-snip-
A friend of mine characterizes this as the “we’ll come back for you” politics, the claim that they can’t champion anything you want because they have to conciliate your enemies right now to get elected, but that, once they win, they’ll be able to attend to the progressive agenda they have to reject now in order to win. This worked out so well with the Clinton Presidency, didn’t it? Remember his argument that he had to sign the hideous 1996 welfare reform bill to be able to come back and “fix” it later? Or NAFTA? Or two repressive and racist crime bills that flooded the prisons? Or the privatizing of Sallie Mae, which set the stage for the student debt crisis? Or ending the federal government’s commitment to direct provision of housing for the poor?
Yep, true all dat. But why won't they listen? Why aren't the progressive movement, the base, the activists and the passionate left a defining force in our Party? Reed postulates that the lesson "progressives have forgotten or failed to learn," is that we need to
organize on the ground before we expect politicians, even of the highest caliber, to respond to our pressure. We must present them with a
real movement to represent. This is, in Reeds words,
"why the endless cycle of unofficial hearings and tribunals and rallies and demonstrations and Internet petitions never has any effect on anything."Zing. He follows:
As an illustration, consider the recent contretemps between John Conyers and the pro-impeachment, anti-war activists who attacked him as a sellout for failing to push impeachment over Nancy Pelosi’s and the House Democratic leadership’s opposition. His critics accused him of betraying the spirit of Martin Luther King. But that charge only exposes their unrealistic expectations. Conyers isn’t a movement leader. He’s a Democratic official who wants to get reelected. He’s enmeshed in the same web of personal ties, partisan loyalties and obligations, and diverse interest-group commitments as other pols. It was the impeachment activists’ naive error, and I suspect one resting on a partly racial, wrongheaded shorthand, to have expected him to lead an insurgency. If the pro-impeachment forces had been able to organize a popular movement with militant local to national expressions on a wide scale, Conyers would have had the leverage necessary to press the movement’s case to Pelosi and Democratic leadership, or at least he and the others would have felt real pressure to act more boldly on this issue. Instead, an understandable sense of urgency led them to take a politically self-indulgent, doomed shortcut. The result is much wasted effort, unnecessary enmity, and another demoralizing defeat.
Politically self-indulgent, doomed shortcut. Yep, we gotta stop taking the shortcuts.
Much more here to think about:
http://www.progressive.org/mag_reed1107edit: to correct link