Some of you may know that there's been a bit of a dust up lately between Nate Silver of 538 and David Sirota and, somewhat, Open Left's Chris Bowers. I have no interest in revisiting that drama.
But Silver did a post which has been pretty widely circulated, with a fair degree of applause, and I want to address it here. For this post is a most cleverly presented repackaging of an all too familiar attack against the progressive left, and it needs to be discarded.
Silver begins his post with a seemingly academic attempt to define progressivism into two distinct categories - "rational progressivism" and "radical progressivism". He even does a nice chart to organize each and their constituent characteristics into a neat dualism:
Silver goes on to elaborate:
The first type of progressivism has its philosophical underpinnings in 18th Century, Enlightement-era thought. It believes that politics is a battle of ideas. It further believes that through the use of reason and the exchange of ideas, human society will tend to improve itself through scientific and technological innovation. Hence, it believes in progress, and for this reason lays claim to the term "progressive". Because of its belief and optimism in the faculties of human reason, I refer to this philosophy as rational progressivism.
Rational progressivism tends to be trusting, within reason, of status quo political and economic institutions -- generally including the institution of capitalism. It tends to trust these institutions because it believes they are a manifestation of progress made by previous generations. However, unlike conservatism, it also sees these institutions as continuing works in progress, subject to inefficiencies because of distorted or poorly-designed incentives, poorly-informed or misinformed participants, and competition from 'irrational' worldviews like religion. It also recognizes that certain persons who stand to benefit from preserving the status quo, particularly elected officials but also corporations, may seek to block this progress to protect their own interests. The project of rational progressivism, then, is to propagate good ideas and to convert them, through a wide and aggressive array of democratic means, into public policy.
The second type of progressivism is what I call radical progressivism. It represents, indeed, a much more radical and comprehensive critique of the status quo, which it tends to see as intrinsically corrupt. Its philosophical tradition originates in 19th Century thought -- and specifically, owes a great deal to the Marxist critique of capitalism and the Marxist theory of social change. It also finds inspiration in both the radical movement of the 1960s and the labor and social movements of late 19th and early 20th centuries (from which it borrows the label "progressive").
Radical progressivism is more clearly distinguishable from "conventional" liberalism and would generally be associated with the "far left" -- although on a handful of issues such as free trade, it may find common cause with the "radical" right. Radical progressivism embraces the tradition of populism and frequently adopts a discourse of the virtuous commoner organizing against the corrupt elite. It is much more willing to make normative claims than rational progressivism, and tends to view conservatism as immoral and contemporary American liberalism as amoral (at best). Its project is not reform but transformation.
This all sounds very impressive. Except for one problem. It is fiction. It's easy to create labels and classify things in the abstract. But those classifications break down pretty quickly when you apply real history, people and events. For then you have to put meat on the bones and demonstrate specific correlations between your labels and classification structure to real humans.
Silver provides no evidence to support his classification of rational versus radical progressives. There is no evidence any such delineation even exists, except in Silver's mind. But by presenting it in an abstract form, he saves himself the messiness of having to apply his argument to the real world.
This is what we call sophistry. Dress your argument up so that it sounds very serious and thoughtful so as to conceal the fact that you are just making things up. Look, it even has a chart.
As Al Giordano said...
Nate's post reminds me of the saying, "there are two kinds of people in the world: those that think there are two kinds of people in the world, and those that don't."
In his "rational progressivism" vs. "radical progressivism" dialectic, I'm all over the map on both sides of it. I think reformative change can make paths to transformative change. I don't see them in conflict with each other. I think one can be outcome oriented and process oriented, just like one can walk and chew gum at the same time.
I'm clearly with Nate in the empirical tendency and with seeing ideology as malleable (if we learned anything from the 20th century it's that ideology too easily becomes dogma or fundamentalism, turns brittle and then it snaps, too often violently). I'm also with Nate among optimists, but I believe one can be conversational and action-oriented at the same moment.
Finally, I see no conflict between incremental change and radical change. Here's an example: an incremental lessening of state repression can make it possible for more people to step forward and make bigger change. The first is often necessary for the second.
Where do those tendencies put me in Nate's terminology? I haven't the foggiest, nor do I care much about labels.
I would only add that I've never met a single person who would remotely fit into either of Mr. Silver's two columns. But that's not really the point. The bottom line is Silver is merely using his fancily formatted classification scheme to make an old, tired ad hominem attack.
Main Entry: rad·i·cal
\ˈra-di-kəl\
Function: adjective
A: marked by a considerable departure from the usual or traditional : extreme b: tending or disposed to make extreme changes in existing views, habits, conditions, or institutions c: of, relating to, or constituting a political group associated with views, practices, and policies of extreme change d: advocating extreme measures to retain or restore a political state of affairs
We've seen a lot of this lately. Cast yourself as the serious, pragmatic, rational one while casting your opponent as radical, un-serious, irrational. But how does one seriously define the term radical in an era when we have seen the pillars of convention crumble all around us?
Silver says he "trusts" the status quo (which is itself a confession of irrationality - trust is like faith, it is the realm of believers. The rational person verifies) But is not the status quo itself radical when it leads to the severe alteration of an entire planet's weather system? When the global economic system has completely collapsed? What exactly are we calling "radical" these days?
The entire political establishment, minus a few exceptions, rushed wholeheartedly into invading and occupying a country that wasn't a threat to anyone so that we could secure a few more drops of a form of energy that is threatening the survival of the entire human race. That is "radical".
We are living through a radical time. Our entire world is on the brink of collapse on multiple fronts. To anyone who is honest and been paying attention it should by strikingly clear by now - the progressives, on average, have always been the rational ones.
What disturbs the self ascribed "pragmatists" is that we on the so called "radical" left don't trust the establishment. And we certainly don't trust technocratic elites. (How's their record going so far?)
And we don't "adopt a discourse of the virtuous commoner organizing against the corrupt elite". We recognize, quite rationally, that the elite is corrupt, and has been organizing against us commoner for a long time.
We do seek transformation because we rationally understand that nothing less will save us. Instead of preoccupying ourselves with antiquated economic theories, we look at the very empirical evidence of the mass suffering that has resulted from the ideological faith in these theories.
And what really gets under the skin of people like Nate Silver is we actually care passionately about the condition of the world.
I went through Silvers comments and diaries going back to his first postings. In not one post does he ever express outrage over the plight of the poor, the environment, the corruption in Washington, or anything. It's all horse race all the time for Mr. Silver. What human being could have gone through just the last eight years of George Bush's presidency and not been compelled, upon one's second cup of coffee, to at least express some disdain for the state of affairs? But not Mr. Silver. If it doesn't have to do with polling stats or the game, he isn't too interested.
I, on the other hand, as I know many here are, am in a constant state of outrage. I manage it with a strong sense of humor and a lot of time off with friends and family. But I cannot open a newspaper, turn on the television, and certainly not look at a blog without feeling a sense of disgust rise up from my gut.
The injustices in this world are almost unbearable to me. Especially since I've always had a vision of how much better it could be to juxtapose the realities of daily life against. And I've noticed that the ones always portraying themselves as the "pragmatists" are also the ones seemingly least affected by those injustices. They never write passionately about the environment, social inequality, corruption of our leaders, the poor, or any other issue that inflames so many of us.
And they never, ever write an unkind word about the establishment. On the contrary, they are often the ones defending it - though that has gotten increasingly difficult lately.
No, their pragmatism informs them that the way to get ahead is to integrate with the establishment. Some may actually even believe that this is the way to change things. But history is not their friend. In fact, it has always been the "radicals", pushing from the outside, who have brought about real change. This was true of the American Revolution and it was true of the New Deal (look for my upcoming diary called 'How "Radical Leftists" Made the New Deal').
But to the self ascribed pragmatists, we are "dangerous". To that I say, yes, we are.