Tuesday, May 30, 2006
IDEALS v. PRACTICALITY The fight we all lose
Tena, a valued poster on the blogs, came up with a good formula the other day. Political progress is 3/4 vulgar practicality, 1/4 ideals. Exact proportions aren't essential but the range seems about right to be going on with. I don't know if she would endorse all of the following but here goes.
There is nothing idealistic about insisting on ideals that have no chance of becoming reality right now and refusing to compromise on those ideals. People are dying now for lack of practical relief that a Democratic Congress would provide, even a compromised Democratic Congress. There is no good in ignoring death, disease, hunger ignorance and pollution while holding out for something purer in some glorious, remote future. The theoretical ideal might never be achieved and even if it could be, the lives of those who could be saved are here now. They need saving today. To insist on your ideals or principles instead of a compromise that is better than the status quo is to wager on their lives. Their lives aren't ours to bet with.
If you want to put it in stark terms, how many days are you willing to go without food for your political ideals? Are you willing to die when the odds might indicate that your ideals stand little chance of being achieved? If you imagine that you are willing to die then how many of your children are you willing to sacrifice on the same long odds? For a person facing starvation it isn't just a matter of their own life. Children are even more vulnerable than adults in most cases. If the answer is that you aren't willing to see yours die but you are prepared to take a chance on other peoples' children then you have to believe that yours are more worthy of life than people who you are betting on now. For us it's a matter of imagination. They are looking at the skulls of their children showing through their skin.
The all or nothing fixation, the worst kind of this idealism, is a form of self-satisfied preening. It has been with us for as long as one leftist could attain personal status by being the most leftist in the room. It has helped lead us into the disaster we find ourselves in today. And it has produced nothing. Nothing. Rigid, uncompromising and insistent idealism is sterile and useless in the real world. It would be better to call it what it really is, vanity.
The period of most rapid progress in the sixties was full of compromises, some clean, a lot of it pretty grimy but progress was made. The progress seems to have moved some on the left into the kind of competitive arrogance that leads to folly. The folly in this case was pretending that our individual interest groups were in a stronger position than they were. Saying so didn't make it true. We started demanding the premature delivery of the presently unobtainable and our politicians couldn't deliver. We started attacking them for not being able to do the impossible. And doing that is just plain nuts. Working coalitions with the center and among competing parts of the left fell apart. In reality were we were only as strong as the coalition based on compromises of ideals.
We all know that the other path of folly was the Vietnam war. As Martin Luther King pointed out, with spending for the war Democrats stopped being able to deliver incremental progress both for the poor and for the middle class. It might not be an accident that was when the Party began to lose support in the general population. The result was Richard Nixon and the rise of the far right. He had to deal with the old coalition and since he was most interested in playing his demented version of the great game he let it have some of the last of the great reforms it has put into law. But he also began the Supreme Court appointments that would doom many of those.
Amidst it all the rigid idealists presented the Republicans with a very useful tool. Republicans and their media, fixing on the most extreme of the radical idealists, made the rest of us into a cartoon. And the show liberals were gratified and encouraged. Even Phil Donahue who was supposed to be a liberal turned the word into a synonym for "flake". Conservatives have used this cartoon to deflect attention while they were ending the middle class, stealing everything they could for their wealthy patrons. Tricked by the media, the general population has adopted the lie to their own disadvantage, as has been pointed out many times before.
I will confess that I was taken in by idealist fundamentalism for a lot of that time. We were standing for the soundest of principles. To compromise our ideals was to betray them. Eventually, somehow, even as we faced repeated defeat, it would make us stronger to remain intransigent. Some of those hucksters have a mighty good act. But in the end it's producing results that is really idealistic. The impatient left has been waiting for that glorious, instantaneous millennium to dawn for way too many lifetimes. The bodies of those who could have been helped by moderate assistance during that period is a pile too big to tell. Don't bother waiting any longer, it's never going to get here that way. We've never been farther from it in our liftimes. The futile insistence on having it all now is a block to reaching those ideals. If some progress is made, incrementally edging closer to the final goal, the ideal stands a chance. If people who aren't on the left start seeing modest success instead of our present complete failure they might just think we're on to something. Especially if some of that success improves their lives. We might start building a larger coalition instead of seeing it shrinking all the time. The perfect really is the enemy of the good and it's also its own worst enemy.
Tena, a valued poster on the blogs, came up with a good formula the other day. Political progress is 3/4 vulgar practicality, 1/4 ideals. Exact proportions aren't essential but the range seems about right to be going on with. I don't know if she would endorse all of the following but here goes.
There is nothing idealistic about insisting on ideals that have no chance of becoming reality right now and refusing to compromise on those ideals. People are dying now for lack of practical relief that a Democratic Congress would provide, even a compromised Democratic Congress. There is no good in ignoring death, disease, hunger ignorance and pollution while holding out for something purer in some glorious, remote future. The theoretical ideal might never be achieved and even if it could be, the lives of those who could be saved are here now. They need saving today. To insist on your ideals or principles instead of a compromise that is better than the status quo is to wager on their lives. Their lives aren't ours to bet with.
If you want to put it in stark terms, how many days are you willing to go without food for your political ideals? Are you willing to die when the odds might indicate that your ideals stand little chance of being achieved? If you imagine that you are willing to die then how many of your children are you willing to sacrifice on the same long odds? For a person facing starvation it isn't just a matter of their own life. Children are even more vulnerable than adults in most cases. If the answer is that you aren't willing to see yours die but you are prepared to take a chance on other peoples' children then you have to believe that yours are more worthy of life than people who you are betting on now. For us it's a matter of imagination. They are looking at the skulls of their children showing through their skin.
The all or nothing fixation, the worst kind of this idealism, is a form of self-satisfied preening. It has been with us for as long as one leftist could attain personal status by being the most leftist in the room. It has helped lead us into the disaster we find ourselves in today. And it has produced nothing. Nothing. Rigid, uncompromising and insistent idealism is sterile and useless in the real world. It would be better to call it what it really is, vanity.
The period of most rapid progress in the sixties was full of compromises, some clean, a lot of it pretty grimy but progress was made. The progress seems to have moved some on the left into the kind of competitive arrogance that leads to folly. The folly in this case was pretending that our individual interest groups were in a stronger position than they were. Saying so didn't make it true. We started demanding the premature delivery of the presently unobtainable and our politicians couldn't deliver. We started attacking them for not being able to do the impossible. And doing that is just plain nuts. Working coalitions with the center and among competing parts of the left fell apart. In reality were we were only as strong as the coalition based on compromises of ideals.
We all know that the other path of folly was the Vietnam war. As Martin Luther King pointed out, with spending for the war Democrats stopped being able to deliver incremental progress both for the poor and for the middle class. It might not be an accident that was when the Party began to lose support in the general population. The result was Richard Nixon and the rise of the far right. He had to deal with the old coalition and since he was most interested in playing his demented version of the great game he let it have some of the last of the great reforms it has put into law. But he also began the Supreme Court appointments that would doom many of those.
Amidst it all the rigid idealists presented the Republicans with a very useful tool. Republicans and their media, fixing on the most extreme of the radical idealists, made the rest of us into a cartoon. And the show liberals were gratified and encouraged. Even Phil Donahue who was supposed to be a liberal turned the word into a synonym for "flake". Conservatives have used this cartoon to deflect attention while they were ending the middle class, stealing everything they could for their wealthy patrons. Tricked by the media, the general population has adopted the lie to their own disadvantage, as has been pointed out many times before.
I will confess that I was taken in by idealist fundamentalism for a lot of that time. We were standing for the soundest of principles. To compromise our ideals was to betray them. Eventually, somehow, even as we faced repeated defeat, it would make us stronger to remain intransigent. Some of those hucksters have a mighty good act. But in the end it's producing results that is really idealistic. The impatient left has been waiting for that glorious, instantaneous millennium to dawn for way too many lifetimes. The bodies of those who could have been helped by moderate assistance during that period is a pile too big to tell. Don't bother waiting any longer, it's never going to get here that way. We've never been farther from it in our liftimes. The futile insistence on having it all now is a block to reaching those ideals. If some progress is made, incrementally edging closer to the final goal, the ideal stands a chance. If people who aren't on the left start seeing modest success instead of our present complete failure they might just think we're on to something. Especially if some of that success improves their lives. We might start building a larger coalition instead of seeing it shrinking all the time. The perfect really is the enemy of the good and it's also its own worst enemy.
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It might not be an accident that was when the Party began to lose support in the general population.
I agree Vietnam was key, but I am not sure if the reason was purely guns taking away money from butter.
Let us not underestimate the interaction between the Vietnam era draft and class. The draft drove apart the New Deal coalition between the Working and Middle Classes as the latter had the "luxury of protest" while the former did not (which ties in with the begining of your post, don't it?): a middle class person might not have had the luxury of supporting the war from the sidelines the way a rich person could, but a middle class kid could have avoided the draft, first via draft deferments through college and then via dodging the draft and protesting the war -- which protests "cost" so much as to preclude participation by the working class. And to make matters worse, the situation was racially divisive as (much needed) programs were put in place to help deserving minority children stay in college (and out of the draft for just a wee bit) but no similar programs were made available for working class whites.
A lot the "conservativism" of the "silent majority" was based on their resentment of bearing the burdon of Vietnam -- a war presided over by the domestically liberal LBJ -- while middle class liberals had the luxury of protest. Those protestors may have been protesting on behalf of the working classes, but, as the continued resonance of the myth of the protestor spitting on the returning soldier shows, the working classes felt that liberals who could engage in protest were somehow betraying them by not getting into the real trenches with them.
It is this legacy from the Vietnam war that continues to inform public perceptions of "liberals" and harm the Democratic cause to this day. Alas, until we can confront the issue of class in this country -- something provocking the wrath of the white-shoe MSM, et al. who benefit from our covert class system, against any politician who even begins to do so -- we cannot rid ourselves of this spectre.
I agree Vietnam was key, but I am not sure if the reason was purely guns taking away money from butter.
Let us not underestimate the interaction between the Vietnam era draft and class. The draft drove apart the New Deal coalition between the Working and Middle Classes as the latter had the "luxury of protest" while the former did not (which ties in with the begining of your post, don't it?): a middle class person might not have had the luxury of supporting the war from the sidelines the way a rich person could, but a middle class kid could have avoided the draft, first via draft deferments through college and then via dodging the draft and protesting the war -- which protests "cost" so much as to preclude participation by the working class. And to make matters worse, the situation was racially divisive as (much needed) programs were put in place to help deserving minority children stay in college (and out of the draft for just a wee bit) but no similar programs were made available for working class whites.
A lot the "conservativism" of the "silent majority" was based on their resentment of bearing the burdon of Vietnam -- a war presided over by the domestically liberal LBJ -- while middle class liberals had the luxury of protest. Those protestors may have been protesting on behalf of the working classes, but, as the continued resonance of the myth of the protestor spitting on the returning soldier shows, the working classes felt that liberals who could engage in protest were somehow betraying them by not getting into the real trenches with them.
It is this legacy from the Vietnam war that continues to inform public perceptions of "liberals" and harm the Democratic cause to this day. Alas, until we can confront the issue of class in this country -- something provocking the wrath of the white-shoe MSM, et al. who benefit from our covert class system, against any politician who even begins to do so -- we cannot rid ourselves of this spectre.
No, it wasn't just the money taken from domestic programs but that was a good part of what stopped The Great Society from being put into effect. And it was a good part of what caused the inflation, pitiful by later standards, that helped do Johnson in. If he hadn't gotten involved with the war I think he would be remembered as one of the top handful of presidents.
I don't know if I agree about Democrats being held responsible today. A lot people even ten years younger than I am couldn't tell you who Johnson was.
It was pretty complicated and a lot of what I remember about it is colored by my experience but I believe the point about the left losing sight of its position in the political life of the country is valid.
I'm hot and cold on "protest" outside a few well managed and focused instances it is probably counter productive. I haven't thought it through but I'll bet that Bayard Rustin was responsible for a lot of the most effective protests and that few others were able to pull it off.
I don't know if I agree about Democrats being held responsible today. A lot people even ten years younger than I am couldn't tell you who Johnson was.
It was pretty complicated and a lot of what I remember about it is colored by my experience but I believe the point about the left losing sight of its position in the political life of the country is valid.
I'm hot and cold on "protest" outside a few well managed and focused instances it is probably counter productive. I haven't thought it through but I'll bet that Bayard Rustin was responsible for a lot of the most effective protests and that few others were able to pull it off.
I don't know if I agree about Democrats being held responsible today. A lot people even ten years younger than I am couldn't tell you who Johnson was. - olvlzl
True -- people in this country have remarkably short historical memories -- and the results are exactly what Santayana could have predicted.
But this country does like it's memes. And one of those memes is that liberals are effete elitists who are out of touch with Joe and Jane Sixpack. And that meme, while likely being as old as urbane professional-class liberalism, really achieved prominance due to the luxury of protest indulged in by the middle classes which was not available to the working class.
And by "luxury of protest", I don't just mean actual protesting -- I mean the general ability of the kids of the upper middle class to say "I hate the Vietnam war and am not going to fight in it", act on that sentament and, largely, get away with it (albeit at some risk of imprisonment, etc.). A working class kid couldn't avoid the draft in the same way as a middle class kid who couldn't avoid the draft in the same way as a rich kid (a middle class kid still took risks in avoiding the draft or at least had to work hard to stay otherwise occupied with studies and/or family -- a rich kid like GWB could land a cushy spot in an ANG unit and even then skip out on it to do other things).
If we "middle class" urbane liberals could undo that meme which really got its strength from the very real class divisions exposed by the Vietnam war, it would help our cause immensely. That and going against the sort of government abuses recently pointed out by Ted Rall in his op-ed column: we liberals are the party of government action, but so long as people identify government action with, e.g., speed traps, they are not going to support our support of, admittedly very different kinds of government action. In order to be electorally successful as the party of government doing good things, the Democrats need to take the lead in being the party of good government -- until we can do that, it will not help our cause even when the Republicans are the party of bad government: 'cause they are anyway the party of government not being able to do good things in terms of their ideology -- so they are making their own case. Anyway ... this is a digression I am sure I've blogged in detail about in the past anyhow ...
BTW, I think I am warmer on "protests" in general, but I agree with you on your Rustin hypothesis, FWIW.
True -- people in this country have remarkably short historical memories -- and the results are exactly what Santayana could have predicted.
But this country does like it's memes. And one of those memes is that liberals are effete elitists who are out of touch with Joe and Jane Sixpack. And that meme, while likely being as old as urbane professional-class liberalism, really achieved prominance due to the luxury of protest indulged in by the middle classes which was not available to the working class.
And by "luxury of protest", I don't just mean actual protesting -- I mean the general ability of the kids of the upper middle class to say "I hate the Vietnam war and am not going to fight in it", act on that sentament and, largely, get away with it (albeit at some risk of imprisonment, etc.). A working class kid couldn't avoid the draft in the same way as a middle class kid who couldn't avoid the draft in the same way as a rich kid (a middle class kid still took risks in avoiding the draft or at least had to work hard to stay otherwise occupied with studies and/or family -- a rich kid like GWB could land a cushy spot in an ANG unit and even then skip out on it to do other things).
If we "middle class" urbane liberals could undo that meme which really got its strength from the very real class divisions exposed by the Vietnam war, it would help our cause immensely. That and going against the sort of government abuses recently pointed out by Ted Rall in his op-ed column: we liberals are the party of government action, but so long as people identify government action with, e.g., speed traps, they are not going to support our support of, admittedly very different kinds of government action. In order to be electorally successful as the party of government doing good things, the Democrats need to take the lead in being the party of good government -- until we can do that, it will not help our cause even when the Republicans are the party of bad government: 'cause they are anyway the party of government not being able to do good things in terms of their ideology -- so they are making their own case. Anyway ... this is a digression I am sure I've blogged in detail about in the past anyhow ...
BTW, I think I am warmer on "protests" in general, but I agree with you on your Rustin hypothesis, FWIW.
No, it wasn't just the money taken from domestic programs but that was a good part of what stopped The Great Society from being put into effect. And it was a good part of what caused the inflation, pitiful by later standards, that helped do Johnson in. If he hadn't gotten involved with the war I think he would be remembered as one of the top handful of presidents.
[...]
It was pretty complicated and a lot of what I remember about it is colored by my experience but I believe the point about the left losing sight of its position in the political life of the country is valid. - olvlzl
I wasn't alive then to have any coloration from experience in my analysis or understanding of the events (which is probably not a good thing for the accuracy of my analysis), but I agree with you here, e.g., on what hindered the Great Society, how Johnson would be remembered and the left in general.
But I suspect that even if the Great Society was a run-away success in spite of 'Nam and hence Johnson were remembered as one of the best Presidents, even by conservatives some of whom, e.g., "praise" and fondly remember, a la Reagan, Roosevelt as they try to dismantle his work, if the situation with the draft for 'Nam were the same as it was in fact, the "liberals are out of touch" meme would still be crippling us and even earlier Nixon would still have ridden the wave of "the silent majority", etc. In this country, succes at doing something doesn't guarantee political success. Indeed, as we learned with the Iraq war, sometimes being wrong is politically more expedient than being right!
On a slightly different note: perhaps the very strength of memes in our society relates to our collective historical amnesia at a conscious level? If we actually consciously remembered history we would not be so succeptible to slightly off memes?
[...]
It was pretty complicated and a lot of what I remember about it is colored by my experience but I believe the point about the left losing sight of its position in the political life of the country is valid. - olvlzl
I wasn't alive then to have any coloration from experience in my analysis or understanding of the events (which is probably not a good thing for the accuracy of my analysis), but I agree with you here, e.g., on what hindered the Great Society, how Johnson would be remembered and the left in general.
But I suspect that even if the Great Society was a run-away success in spite of 'Nam and hence Johnson were remembered as one of the best Presidents, even by conservatives some of whom, e.g., "praise" and fondly remember, a la Reagan, Roosevelt as they try to dismantle his work, if the situation with the draft for 'Nam were the same as it was in fact, the "liberals are out of touch" meme would still be crippling us and even earlier Nixon would still have ridden the wave of "the silent majority", etc. In this country, succes at doing something doesn't guarantee political success. Indeed, as we learned with the Iraq war, sometimes being wrong is politically more expedient than being right!
On a slightly different note: perhaps the very strength of memes in our society relates to our collective historical amnesia at a conscious level? If we actually consciously remembered history we would not be so succeptible to slightly off memes?
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