The Tepid Art of the Possible
Politics is the "art of the possible" they say, and the situations where the saying is thus said can be informative. It is usually rolled out, or is lurking unsaid but implied in the background, during those conversations where some friend who shares your political values is nonetheless trying to convince you to give up some ostensibly unreasonable demand. Unreasonable, it is clear, not because it is undesirable, but because in the present political situation it is unattainable. It is a point of view that stops political progress in its tracks, and one toward which I have developed a certain contempt.
Let's admit it: if black citizens in the late fifties and sixties had listened to their white friends in the political establishment, or even some of the voices of reason in the NAACP, none of the disorders so feared would, indeed, have occurred, but neither would the Voting Rights Act or Affirmative Action legislation have been passed. The civil rights movement, the last progressive movement to enjoy any significant success, flowed from A Dream, enunciated so eloquently in Dr. King's famous speech, not from the crass political calculus of those who undoubtedly believed themselves brilliant political tacticians and realists. The early Vietnam War protestors were working in a country where almost everyone was opposed to their seemingly unpatriotic demands, and through their courage and willingness to be unreasonable by the standards of realpolitik, they lay the foundations of a movement that would finally deliver us from the shameful carnage of that imperialist endeavor.
So being reasonable is not all that it is cracked up to be. When William Jennings Bryant gave a charismatic voice to the Progressive era and took himself against the banks, bosses, and trusts, he was labeled a demagogue because he just would not be reasonable in the face of the social Darwinism of his day. It took a real demagogue, Teddy Roosevelt, this one carrying a big stick, to enact meaningful anti-trust legislation which, until our recent speculative orgies of neo-liberalism and globalism, had been acknowledge as a bedrock protection for a humane capitalism. Without Bryant, though, it is arguable that the movement to control the trusts would never have gained enough momentum to matter.
At a time when we are supposed to believe that corporate and fiscal globalization is driven by ineluctable laws of nature instead of the lust for power and profit of the economic establishment, these reflections on political expediency are worthwhile. Tuesday, November 7, 2006, I will go to vote for a candidate, Patricia Madrid, for the House of Representatives, who I do not like and who inspires no confidence in me. I will do it because she is a democrat, and a democratic majority in the House would elevate Nancy Pelosi to the Speakership, and Pelosi does inspire some confidence, even if she has made dumb mistakes. It is a mere tactic, but one whose result, a democratic congress, could apply some brakes to the out-of-control Bush administration.
Yet if things sometimes reach a point where stopping an anti-democratic and war-mongering juggernaut is the best that can be hoped for, once the downward rush is contained there is still a need to undo damage done and then, borne on the wings of dreams --- of equality, economic justice, the brotherhood of humankind --to struggle for a world which is indeed possible if not too many of us give in to the expedient present.
Let's admit it: if black citizens in the late fifties and sixties had listened to their white friends in the political establishment, or even some of the voices of reason in the NAACP, none of the disorders so feared would, indeed, have occurred, but neither would the Voting Rights Act or Affirmative Action legislation have been passed. The civil rights movement, the last progressive movement to enjoy any significant success, flowed from A Dream, enunciated so eloquently in Dr. King's famous speech, not from the crass political calculus of those who undoubtedly believed themselves brilliant political tacticians and realists. The early Vietnam War protestors were working in a country where almost everyone was opposed to their seemingly unpatriotic demands, and through their courage and willingness to be unreasonable by the standards of realpolitik, they lay the foundations of a movement that would finally deliver us from the shameful carnage of that imperialist endeavor.
So being reasonable is not all that it is cracked up to be. When William Jennings Bryant gave a charismatic voice to the Progressive era and took himself against the banks, bosses, and trusts, he was labeled a demagogue because he just would not be reasonable in the face of the social Darwinism of his day. It took a real demagogue, Teddy Roosevelt, this one carrying a big stick, to enact meaningful anti-trust legislation which, until our recent speculative orgies of neo-liberalism and globalism, had been acknowledge as a bedrock protection for a humane capitalism. Without Bryant, though, it is arguable that the movement to control the trusts would never have gained enough momentum to matter.
At a time when we are supposed to believe that corporate and fiscal globalization is driven by ineluctable laws of nature instead of the lust for power and profit of the economic establishment, these reflections on political expediency are worthwhile. Tuesday, November 7, 2006, I will go to vote for a candidate, Patricia Madrid, for the House of Representatives, who I do not like and who inspires no confidence in me. I will do it because she is a democrat, and a democratic majority in the House would elevate Nancy Pelosi to the Speakership, and Pelosi does inspire some confidence, even if she has made dumb mistakes. It is a mere tactic, but one whose result, a democratic congress, could apply some brakes to the out-of-control Bush administration.
Yet if things sometimes reach a point where stopping an anti-democratic and war-mongering juggernaut is the best that can be hoped for, once the downward rush is contained there is still a need to undo damage done and then, borne on the wings of dreams --- of equality, economic justice, the brotherhood of humankind --to struggle for a world which is indeed possible if not too many of us give in to the expedient present.
posted by Lawrence Austin at 1:02 PM
2 Comments:
The pundits say, this election night, that the democrats who won were all to the middle, and recruited by democrats to run BECAUSE they were in the middle. America is a conservative nation, they patter, these pundits. This is not the America we began with: conservative. We were free spirits, we spawned Whitman -- Walt, not the candymaker. We have lost that. Getting Americans on the right track seems to me a lost cause; and a cause that can only be won by disaster. And: so many thanks for using the word ineluctable.
to anonymous:
I fear you may be right that only disaster --likely economic, I think -- will get the U.S. back on track, although I hope we are both wrong. I'm not convinced, though, that America was conservative at the beginning, at least not by the standards of its own time. Religiously, the most important founding fathers were Deists or Unitarians rather than conservative and orthodox trinitarian Christians. The conservative Patrick Henry fought for an established church in Virginia, and he lost. Jefferson's observation that "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. It is it's natural manure" is hardly a conservative position even now. And a constitutional document that allowed the people to modify it peacefully, avoiding where possibly Jefferson's blood of patriots, was, if not a radical idea, at least a radical practice. I'd say that, rather than conservative, America was radically forward thinking in political terms and fundamentally practical. The freedoms enshrined in our constitution and Bill of Rights are still a standard of liberty for free societies, even if we seem hell-bent on giving them up to some spurious security, spurious because allowing an imperial presidency with police powers only Stalin could love is not going to protect us from madmen intent on harming us.
Yeah, ineluctable is a good word. Another one, which these days I have more and more occasion to use, is "exacrable". Try it, you'll like it!
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