Matt Stoller has a phenomenal piece on what it means to be a part of the progressive movement in America today. Seriously. Go read it.
Stoller makes the point that the goal of the progressive movement has to be not just a short-term victory in stopping Bush or ending the war in Iraq, but completely rearranging the fundamental assumptions of the American system. In other words, destroying the "authoritarian national security state."
The roots of this state are traceable directly to an authoritarian South, a one-party unique region in America that has held the balance of power since the 1930s and that was and is dedicated above all to a race-based hierarchical society. Through shaping even progressive legislation, like the Wagner Act, Dixiecrats ensured that broad-based class movements failed.
Now, some of you may have figured out that I'm a Southern liberal. Whenever people ask me how that happened, I tell them the same thing Molly Ivins always used to say about how Southern liberals are made: "Once you realize they're lying to you about race, you start thinking that maybe they're lying to you about everything. Guess what - they are."
The point is, I'm not entirely sure that Stoller's use of the present tense in describing Southern motivations is true anymore. Certainly there are people who think that, but their numbers are shrinking with every passing year, and every time they overstep the bounds of good sense and humanity, they lose more supporters. I agree with so much of Stoller's thinking that I hate to pick this nit, but it really drives me crazy when people who've never lived in the South (and no, Miami is not the South) think they know how Southerners think. Okay, I got it out of my system. Moving on.
And where were the liberals? Well, the liberals were going along with it, helping to cooperate with the Southern autocrats to destroy what they perceived as the existential communist threat (and eliminate their Henry Wallace-ite rivals within the Democratic party). The people that Peter Beinart fetishized destroyed the left from 1946-1948, and so the Cold War took the path it did, and television became the king's telescope into every American home. We adopted the constitution of television, which was sketched out in the 1930s but not adopted until they got rid of the first set of dirty fucking hippies, the radical organizers of the 1930s who kept bothering everyone about class and race and social justice and ending the draft and the like.
Now, MyDD as a site is well to the left of me - and that's cool. They tend to mock the idea of the "existential communist threat," but that's because they tend to support a strong centralized state, and I'm a little more suspicious (despite one user's persistent characterization of this site as "statist"). In this case, though, they're dead on. Eliminating Henry Wallace and his allies did make the Democratic party more antagonistic to leftists sympathetic to communism and the Soviet Union. You can argue over whether that's a good thing or a bad thing - but the ideas advocated by those leftists were vital, and the Party's active efforts to ignore them were a major lost opportunity.
Now, the far left didn't entirely go away, but it did largely refuse to participate in a de-industrializing mainstream civic culture. It went off and invented Hip-Hop, the internet, skate-boarding, and punk music, all of which have become as global as the American military presence. A protest industry developed, made up of those who decided that participation in the system was immoral, because participation in the system was immoral. This is the John Stauber-types, those who can't stomach voting for more money for the military to continue a war that represents everything they hate, those who have seen 'compromise' many times before and think they know where it leads.
There are some facts in this paragraph that I can't confirm or deny, but I believe it. These are the members of the Progressive Caucus who voted against the supplemental, and these are the Malcolm X's of the world. And it's easy to become skittish of compromise, because it's so often led to liberals compromising one principle to get another fulfilled, then compromising the other to get principle #3 fulfilled, and so on until there's nothing left. And I don't deny that there needs to be bedrock principles that we say "this much compromise. No more."
But every compromise has to be considered on its own merits. Too many people in this movement want to believe that THEIR issue is the only one that is a bedrock principle. I don't know what metric we can use to determine which ones actually are, but we need to figure out some process and reach a decision. And those who refuse to compromise on anything can sit on their thumbs and spin.
And then there is the new progressive movement, those who are willing to engage in the system, freshly stripped of our illusions but not our perhaps unwarranted confidence that the American political system can respond to public pressure through the electoral process. These people - Wes Clark, Chris Bowers, Donna Edwards, a million for Barack - are not uniformly young or old, but they represent a new non strip mall-based American direction that has yet to take hold.
And now, we have to make that next step. So have a little faith. Trust our standard-bearers and move forward with confidence and hope.
Chazak, chazak, v'zocheir chazeik - Be strong, be strong, and let us strengthen one another.