The Scanner tries to explain Why the “new progressive movement” is fucked
So why do I say that the new progressive movement is fucked? Because they have no ideology. They lack any semblance of a creed. Now, naturally, the progressives would vigorously dispute this. Of course we have a creed! We believe in universal healthcare, combating global warming, protecting the right to abortion… [etc., ad infinitum] But that’s not a creed, it’s a list of policies.
…
The minute these new progressives try to put their creed into words, it melts into a flavorless mush of insensible campaign rhetoric, …
My reading of the U.S. ‘left’ is very different.
These ‘liberals’, the Scanner uses the Center for American Progress as an example, ain’t ‘liberals’ at all. Their creed is the same the right has.
The health care plans the Democratic candidates offer now are to the right of Nixon’s plans. What is liberal with that?
Foreign policy? Matt Stoller at OpenLeft says We Should Stay the $#$&* Out of Pakistan but writes:
While we have a checkered history in terms of our involvement in the
affairs of other countries since World War II, the last seven years
have been nothing short of horrendous. We ought to stop the meddling
in other countries business until we fix our national security and
diplomatic apparatus.
Reread Stoller’s last sentence "… until we fix our national security and diplomatic apparatus."
What fix would that be? And why would a fix of the national security apparatus justify international meddling. What security interests would be served by that? What is liberal in that?
This is laughingly insincere.
Juan Cole, in a piece about the Bhutto killing, yesterday wrote this:
Pakistan is also a key transit route for any energy pipelines built
between Iran or Central Asia and India, and so central to the energy
security of the United States.
Why is Iranian gas for India "central"(!) to U.S. energy security? What lunacy is this? Liberal creed?
The ‘liberals’ have basicly the same creed the right has. They can’t say
so openly. Instead they market the few policy points in which they differ a tiny
bit from the right.
But the Scanner thinks the deeper reason for the lack of liberal creed is this:
[I]f liberals
tried honestly to formulate
their principles in abstract terms, they would quickly discover how
poorly they echo the American vernacular. Many swing-voting Americans
would simply recoil from them. After all, Americans are, in the famous
phrase, programmatically liberal but ideologically conservative.
This is wrong in all three points.
One can define ‘freedom’ as economic liberty to run whatever business one likes, as is usually done today in the U.S. policy argumentations. Or one can define freedom as ‘freedom from want’, a far more liberal term that includes universal healthcare and other progressive policies. ‘Freedom from want’ certaily also echos the American vernacular. Packaged correctly, one can be progressive AND ideologically conservative.
Swing-voters can never be the benchmark for any policy or creed. To cater to them is weak and insincere. If one does so, one is immediately and rightfully distrusted as lacking a backbone – this especially by the swing voters. Triangulation and serving swing voters is what dragged ‘liberals’ to the right. It is the central illness of the ass party.
If you want to broaden your voter base, why not look where most of the potential votes really are? These are with the people who today do not vote. Those are mostly the poor, the disenfranchised, the people who have no reason to vote because the ‘liberals’ are not really different from the ‘conservatives’.
The lack of creed of the ‘liberals’ in U.S. policy isn’t the problem. The problem is the lack of real liberals.
The "new progressive movement" isn’t fucked. It doesn’t exist.