The rest of you are bean- counters, in a system that doesn’t even work! “What can be done to turn the existing personality- based politics into a true democratic movement?” Is that something you should answer with: “continue in the same way and believe real hard that ‘someone’ is going to do ‘something’ that benefits ‘people’”? Seriously – shut the hell up and think, if at least for a short while. It might hurt at first, and won’t fill your tummy with butterflies and sugerpuff, but you have to bloody do it anyway, now won’t you?

And then for Daniel himself, I would only quibble with the last paragraph: “Having refused in the first place to exact a price for their support, they have made their support worthless and ensured that they will have no influence.”

I don’t think it’s that simple anymore. The progosphere has changed a lot, and witness already the leverage they’ve exerted in Congressional primaries and races. Unlike (or at least much moreso than) previous decades, the dissatisfied now have an easy place to gather for solidarity and action-planning.

It’s certainly clear that if the Democrats don’t make the netroots happy, there will be more heated primaries against incumbents and accelerated turnover of “Democrats who don’t” into “Democrats who will.” Especially when there’s a majority in Congress already, it’s not very risky for the netroots to “pick their battles” like that, and they WILL. (In fact, they will anyway, if even if they’re broadly satisfied – the zealots now are building an effective incremental mechanism for change in the House.)

To add a plank to conradg’s observations, there IS a critical distinction between the zealous bases in regards to identity politics. It’s true that both bases subscribe to “identity affinity” in large numbers. However, the Republican base has tended toward a much more authoritarian regard for their leaders (“if he does/wants it, ‘it’ must be right and good!”), whereas the Democratic base hasn’t reflected such an instinct.

Greenwald and John Dean have both written quite a bit about this, and any honest assessment of the parties’ bases should take them into account.

There is simply no parallel between the leftist “progressive movement” and the modern conservative movement, which succeeded in getting the GOP nomination in 1964 (Goldwater), and then the Presidency in 1980 (Reagan). To compare Obama in 2008 to Bush in 2000 is utterly ignorant of this history. Conservatives had already mainstreamed themselves for decades, largely by utterly marginalizing left-liberals and progressives to a tiny fraction of even the Democratic party. Conservatives, beginning in the 1950′s, went to war against leftist and progressives, and they won hugely. However, in the process they actually began to abandon the very goals they set out to accomplish, primarily the one of shrinking the size of government. Reagan himself abandoned that project, and Bush simply represented the inevitable slide into big government “conservatism”, which is of course a betrayal of the very meaning of conservatism as a political movement.

The point being that leftist progressives have no base, no party, no legitimate leaders in public office, except a few marginal figures like Feingold. They have no power, in other words, unlike conservatives. They have Daily Kos, Mother Jones, the Nation, and a few bloggers. But even those guys are for the most part very realistic supporters of Obama, recognizing that he’s not himself a leftist progressive, and yet that he represents a huge shift in that direction, or at least back to a kind of pragmatic FDR liberalism. Daily Kos prides itself on being pragmatic, directed towards electing Democrats of every stripe, and not being terribly fixated upon ideological purity. It’s not that they don’t care about ideology and a progressive agenda, but they recognize that a movement has to be created, and politicians elected – meaning mainstream Democrats – who are at least sympathetic to their goals.

Now of course there are progressives who disagree, who want a progressive revolution, and want Obama to instigate one. Well, that’s no his job, and most progressives understand that. They understand that plain old mainstream liberalism has to establish some credibility first, after years of being bashed by conservatives to the point where the public is very uncertain of its capacity to lead.

The problem with this debate is that even the terms “progressive” and “liberal” seem undefined. If by “progressive”, one means “Naderite/Green party radicals”, well, such people never supported Obama to begin with. I know some of those people, and they recognized Obama from the beginning as not being interested in their goals. ANd they are a tiny group made even tinier by Obama’s success. If one merely means good-hearted liberals, well, those are Obama’s people still, and the course he’s pursuing is one that makes them happy. If one means Kossites, well, those people are huge supporters of Obama for the very pragmatic reasons you decree.

The problem with your argument, Daniel, is that I think you are projecting your own problems with the GOP onto the Democratic side of the street. I know you support the Constitution Pary and its ideological purism, and you see the progressives in a similar light. Well, they aren’t, except for the Naderite/Green wing, which I guess really is similar to your own Constitutionalist wing of the right. But just as the GOP can completely ignore the support of the Constitutionalists, so can the Democrats completely ignore the support of the Naderite/Green people. But the term “progressive” on the left these days is a very loose one, not confined to socialist purists or the anti-corporate conspiracy folks. And the vast majority of those who seem themselves as sympathetic to progressivism in this looser sense are very happy with Obama’s pragmatic approach.

I also disagree that it takes zealots to move the political center. It takes pragmatists to do that. Zealots only move the center when they become pragmatists, as the conservative movement did in the 1970s and 80s.

1) Past actions are often prelude to future actions, but in this case, we are talking Obama’s policies being implemented by experienced Washington hands. Only time will tell how that works out; and

2) It takes purists – zealots, really – to move the political center. To the extent that purists remain dissatisfied they may yet be serving their, and possibly our, ends.

Jake

You shouldn’t, Mithras, but only because he has none.
Maybe you should try to read Greenwald (or the post above) before you ascribe a “sense of betrayal” to him. The case is, in fact, the opposite.

Finally, Greenwald’s (and others) “liberal purity” comes from many different places (and may be a subject for discussion), but to assume that it arises out of some juvenile impetus to remain a contrarian is sloppily reductive and, frankly, offensive.

That’s poorly thought-out sarcasm. The reason “purists” should be complaining, or at least feel a sense of unease, is that the appointees do have a record, and Obama presumably took that record into account when he chose them. So far he’s chosen centrists, and this probably means something. Obama himself has a record, both as a senator and as a candidate and he’s already said and done things which should make lefties feel uneasy on certain issues–he backtracked on FISA, he panders to AIPAC, he wants more troops in Afghanistan, and for all the mileage he’s received for opposing the Iraq War, apparently it doesn’t matter that his VP and Secretary of State didn’t have the good judgment to oppose it as he did. .

Gee, maybe it’s because none of the appointees have done anything disagreeable yet seeing as how they have yet to be appointed and confirmed. Also; I don’t know if you’ve heard, but Barack Obama hasn’t been inaugurated yet, either, so he has yet to make any poor policy decisions as President.

In this respect, most people are not really purists, but there are plenty of people who claim that they are advancing toward the same goals that the purists want incrementally by way of pragmatic compromises. On the whole, these people are kidding themselves, and those goals recede farther into the distance in part because of these pragmatic compromises. Principles are not for sale, but their votes certainly are, and they are cheaply purchased.

I am referring to purists a bit ironically, which I didn’t make very clear, and I probably should have chosen a different word all together. This is what more radical critics on left and right are often dismissively called when they refuse to compromise core principles for the sake of “getting things done.” The Bush administration got a lot of things done–they managed to do many terrible, unjustifiable things, and those who resisted them were for a long time treated as the fringe and the administration and its lackeys were at “the center.”

The problem with the pragmatists is not just that they make what I think are unacceptable compromises, but that they end up endorsing the establishment understanding of what counts as reasonable, responsible and serious discourse and who belongs as part of the political “center” and who doesn’t. This is an understanding geared toward the preservation of the unchallengeable bipartisan consensus in foreign affairs and national security in particular and the unrepresentative political system as a whole.

To be clear, Greenwald is not making any claim that he and the left have been betrayed. He is arguing precisely the opposite against others on the left who have been more inclined to say this. One of the advantages of coming at these questions as a strong progressive or conservative is that you expect little or nothing from the political class.

In any event, for a real purist, why would the question of price enter into it? Principles are not for sale. If you reply that you can’t get everything you want, that’s a pragmatic argument, isn’t it?

Greenwald, like many liberal bloggers, finds himself in an uncomfortable position. For the past 8 years, his job has been made simple by the egregious nature of the Bush administration. It’s easy to be a purist when you can’t get anything you want. Now that liberals have a President who wants economic policies that reverse the upward redistribution of wealth, a balanced foreign policy with withdrawal from Iraq, the Freedom of Choice Act, the Employee Free Choice Act, the end of torture of prisoners, the closure of Gitmo and secret prisons, and forward-thinking environmental policies, the purist must still insist he feels betrayed. I believe him, I just don’t see why I should share his sense of betrayal.