Glenn Greenwald is correct that it is a bit mystifying that there have been as many complaints from the left about Obama’s appointments as there have been. Surely they understood, as I have come to understand, that he is an establishment-accommodating, consensus-oriented politician, so how can anyone be all that surprised or upset? That is how he won, and that is how he has ascended so quickly in politics. More idealistic Democratic politicians, such as Russ Feingold, probably never could have done what Obama has done, which seems to me to be an indictment of our system rather than evidence of the impracticality of Feingold’s refusal to compromise civil liberties or sign off on an unjust war, but the point stands. Then again, I am a bit surprised that there haven’t been more complaints. There are two distinct questions here. It seems to me that there should be fewer bewildered cries of betrayal, because there should have been no illusions about Obama, but there should be far more criticism of Obama’s selections and decisions when progressives find them dissatisfying for well-founded reasons. In other words, there ought to be even more criticism of the probable Brennan selection, but much less gasping in surprise and asking, “How could Obama do that?”

In Greenwald’s post, there is an excerpt from an email from Digby, and I thought this quote was the most telling:

Liberals took cultural signifiers as a sign of solidarity and didn’t ask for anything.

This is what conservatives and progressives both seem to be reduced to in election after election: looking for cues that so-and-so is “one of us” and allowing that to make up for the rather uninspired, conventional policies the pol pursues. The problem with this is that the pols who seem to be most adept at giving these cues are also the ones most likely to take their core constituents for granted. Indeed, they are bound to take those constituents for granted, because they know that the cultural signifiers have bound the constituents to their politicians in such a way that they end up being the least likely to rebel against the pols. The response Digby describes here is much the same as what we have seen with conservatives and Bush and again with the conservative reaction to Palin.

Greenwald makes a fair point that progressives did not hold out for concessions or courting from Obama, but gravitated to him over the course of the primaries and now do not have much reason to expect that much from him. The conservative response to Bush in the 2000 primaries was somewhat similar, in that Bush became the rallying point for conservatives who were lured into thinking that Bush, previously considered a moderate, was now a “real conservative” alternative to McCain. Whatever progressives may have thought of Obama early on, perhaps the possibility of defeating Clinton was so tempting that they had no interest in holding out for more from Obama.

It is this, it seems to me, that is at the heart of what is wrong with most calls for “pragmatism.” At every stage, the “impractical” purist hears that he should not withhold his support from the marginally preferable candidate under any circumstances. He is urged to be realistic, and so he and those like him do not insist that the candidate make strong commitments on policy positions that are deemed by someone to be out of the mainstream. The candidate pays some minimal lip service to the purist’s “values,” and this is supposed to count for something. In the name of pragmatism, the purist decides that he has to support the candidate, because the candidate represents the best chance of advancing his views, but even before the election is held the purist has already given so much away in the name of pragmatism and realism that he and those like him have no leverage at all. Having yielded and given away their support in exchange for nothing more than lip service, the purists are scarcely in a much better position than before. They can take satisfaction in being on the winning side, but for the most part this means that they will bear the burden if the public turns against the candidate after he is elected and otherwise they will scarcely get much of anything. The purists-turned-pragmatists will receive the blame for enabling the administration in whatever it does, but they will receive no credit or acknowledgement that their support was important enough to merit meaningful concessions to their concens. 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.