Today, Occam's Hatchet posted a diary, "On Gettysburg, Impeachment, and the Left Flank", which begins as follows:
Once upon a time, a group of people on the Far Left side of a great battle took a stand, and it saved this country.
I recommended the diary because I think it's well-written, but in my opinion, Occam's Hatchet could not be more wrong. He falls into the error of mistaking a metaphor for what he hopes it will represent.
The condition progressives face at this time cannot reasonably be conceptualized as a military battle. Generally, people like those kinds of metaphors because we understand them, but OR's diary reflects a profound oversimplification of where we are, what our charge is, what our limitations are, and how we can--and can't--proceed toward our goals.
More on the flipside.
There are many reasons why a battlefield metaphor isn't useful in planning strategy for a national political movement. In politics, there are so many more factors, every political subdivision is its own battlefield with its own battlefield conditions, and far more unforeseen and uncontrollable factors such as world political and economic developments have heavy influence on outcomes. But beyond that, the reason a battlefield metaphor doesn't work well is that battles end. Someone wins, and that's it.
Politics doesn't end. It goes on forever. If you want to accomplish change, you have to truly win the hearts and minds of the people, and keep them won through ongoing strategy, policy development, communications, and organizing. In fact, to accomplish lasting change, you have to not "defeat an enemy", but bring a significant number of its ranks over to your side. You have to create a cultural shift that embraces your values: if you don't, you will have to fight the same fight, over and over again. Good examples of where this has not happened in the US include the ways that judicial decisions have forced change when the culture did not yet embrace that change. Pushback has led to some of the biggest cultural divides in our country, such as on abortion rights. (I'm not saying I disagree with the judiciary's having drawn the conclusions that have driven these divides--I don't--I'm just saying that because the resulting policy shifts came before a genuine shift of the political center to embrace these values, there has been ongoing resistance to their permanence.)
What this comes down to is that great chasm down the middle of Daily Kos: pragmatism v. what I will call "revolutionism". We've seen this argument a lot: on impeachment, on Nader and the Greens, etc. I think most of us know what this debate looks like.
Conflicts over these two strategic perspectives crop up all over the place here. I'd like to discuss a bit why revolutionism, for all its attractiveness, is a counterproductive approach to social and political change.
First, let's define terms.
So...what is pragmatism?
Pragmatism, as I would define it, seeks incremental change in a positive direction by charting a course which consistently pursues outcomes which are achievable and, while somewhat ambitious, are not so wildly so that they are unlikely to be accomplished. After each such outcome is achieved, conditions are reassessed and another step forward is charted. Pragmatism's hallmarks, therefore, are positive change over time, taking smaller, more conservative steps than are pursued by revolutionists.
Revolutionism swings for the stands. It pursues great leaps of positive change in a minimal number of steps--often, a single radical change-- arguing that pragmatism doesn't do enough, or that moral imperatives such as injustice obligate pursuit of fundamental or radical shifts in politics, however unlikely they may be to be achieved. Moral imperative is often argued by revolutionists: we have no choice but to stand for this--anything less would be moral failure.
In examining the relative merits of each of these stands, let me first say: I'm a pragmatist. I'm sure I'll get comments here that say I'm not fairly representing the revolutionist camp, and perhaps that's true. But here's how I understand the differences, and why I believe pragmatism is the only approach to progressive social change that is likely to accomplish its goals.
I begin with a look at history.
Reviewing the sum total of human history, there are only a tiny handful of instances when radical and sudden social change has led to improvement of conditions. More often than not, such revolutionary change has led to reduction of human and civil rights, and often to outright totalitarianism. Changes which have come as a result of a change in the values and beliefs of the people have had staying power. Sudden radical social changes driven by anger, greed, or purist ideology have given us the guillotine of the French Revolution, Oliver Cromwell, the Soviet Union, the Nazis, Communist China, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and a host of tinpot dictators throughout the developing world.
What progressives have accomplished in this country has come through incremental cultural shift. Civil rights activism on the part of African-Americans had been going on for nearly 150 years before the desegregation of the military and Brown v. the Board of Education. Enough Americans knew that racism was wrong by the time those steps had been taken that those who did not were in the minority.
Likewise the women's movement. The failure of the ERA ended up not mattering, because its principles were rapidly taking root in the culture. Likewise environmentalism: advances in law came as a result of growing awareness of the need for it. Likewise labor law.
I'm not saying that EVERYONE agreed. I'm saying that these movements have had long-term effect because they had roots in values that had enough support in the minds of ordinary people that a courageous step could be taken by the nation as a whole.
In each of these cases, it was necessary for those most affected by the issues concerned to organize, protest, and dissent to advance their goals. Some were revolutionists, and made broad and sweeping demands for immediate change. To my knowledge, none of these demands were ever fulfilled. Change in a positive direction came when calmer, more pragmatic voices strategically achieved steady and incremental advances which were so obviously just that their opponents steadily lost the hearts and minds of mainstream citizens.
Pragmatism is about grubby, real-world politics that happen at a human scale, which means that outcomes are never perfect. What pragmatism offers is advance that has staying power. It's not a revolution which will then be overthrown in ten years by a counterrevolution. It's also frustrating, generally only delivers about a tenth of a loaf at a time, and requires patience, hope and an ability to keep an eye on the prize for a long time.
What revolutionism offers, in my opinion, is primarily a satisfactory feeling of moral superiority: I'm not a sell-out. I won't settle for partial justice. This is about morality. But I would argue that a strategy without likelihood for success is as much of a sell-out of values as is just joining the Republican Party and saying the hell with it.
It's nice to imagine that American politics is a blank slate, and we can just erase things like the two-party system if we choose. But it's not: it's a vehicle in motion. We can switch parts out, or add new features as we develop them (install a nice single-payer health care system, for example). It's going to keep moving no matter what we do, and we can't just decide that now it's going to be a helicopter, or a horse.
Revolution begets counterrevolution. That's just the nature of things. We can't force people to embrace a set of values--we can only invite them to do so, and the best way to do it is by bringing them to dip a toe in the water, find out it feels pretty good, and then, when they're ready, take another step. It takes a lot longer, but that's how you get them in the pool, and once they're in, they're swimmers forever.
Through that lens, attempting to impeach the Shrub wouldn't be just an ineffectual waste of time: it wouldn't accomplish anything. Our job is to bring the American people along into a better country. Burning our momentum, political capital and time on some abstract principle that just sounds like another politician's high moral dudgeon doesn't do that.