Much has been written, both here at dagblog.com and elsewhere, about the rift between the so-called progressive left and their interlocutors in the halls of power.  So much so, that the arguments seem fairly ossified at this point.  I don't know that I can change of that, but I do have something for the offering nonetheless.

I recently read this post on Calitics, a very fine blog about California politics from a progressive point of view.  The post in question highlights two essays that were recently written for the journal Democracy.

The first, written by Michael Tomasky, makes the case for avoiding what he labels "despair" among the progressive left in the face of numerous disappointments in the Obama era (he also coins the term "professional disgruntleists," which I will readily confess to favoring over "professional left").  In his piece, he visits much familiar territory, including acknowledging both successes and failures of the Democratic party in the Obama era, but he does so by way of revisiting the history of the New Deal and other progressive successes in a way that reminds us how bumpy those roads really were.  To top it off, he reminds us that it seems far more probable that the progressive successes of the previous century were anomalous rather than indicative of the overall arc.  For my money, it's probably the best piece that I've read from this perspective, both for making the argument so seriously and thoroughly and for the helpful reminders about how uneven the history of these events actually was.  And, just to be clear, I do not think that Tomasky ever makes the argument that the President or Party should be excluded from criticism, but rather that he is concerned about the ennui that might result.

But a response penned by David Dayden is even better.  Rather than simply contradicting Tomasky's argument, Dayden builds on it by delving again into the history of the New Deal.  He recounts the story of Francis Townsend, who was a furious agitator and advocate for what became Social Security.  Dayden makes Townsend sound like a one-man AFL-CIO cum MoveOn.org, all without the aid of the Internet - or even television (seriously, the guy gathered 20 million signatures for his cause, something that is hard for me to imagine even with today's tools).  On Townsend's reaction to FDR's initial implementation of Social Security, Dayden has this to say:

Townsend went ballistic–some would say crazy. The Depression-era March of Time newsreel series accused Townsend of leading a “lunatic fringe.” Townsend criticized the Roosevelt plan from the day it passed, calling the benefit package completely inadequate and “suitable only for paupers.” He ramped up the Townsend clubs, which, according to political scientist Edwin Amenta, increased tenfold between the end of 1934 and 1936. He used his Townsend Weekly pamphlet to hammer Roosevelt’s Social Security program and its meager benefits. He joined with Gerald L.K. Smith, the head of the Share Our Wealth Society (founded by Huey Long), and the nativist demagogue Father Charles Coughlin to found the National Union for Social Justice, a new political party. The Union’s candidate for president in 1936 grabbed almost one million votes.

In short, Townsend’s reaction mirrored that of the “professional disgruntleists” cited in Tomasky’s piece. Rather than justifying the Social Security Act of 1935 as the product of the art of the possible, he loudly proclaimed Roosevelt a sellout and apostate, and did whatever he could to bring him down, even joining in a coalition with those who mostly shared a vendetta against the President instead of a similar ideology. There’s even evidence that Townsend may have been pushed along by his own vanity and the adulation of his millions of followers rather than seriousness and principle–in his 1943 autobiography, New Horizons, Townsend claimed that FDR only enacted Social Security to “stem the Townsend tide.”

The point of this exercise is for Dayden to try to answer the question of how progressive agitation is actually hurting progressive causes, which seems to be what the other side is saying.  The conventional wisdom is that sober adults all realize limiting factors in our political institutions, so we have to fight for what we can get and take it (cue the old "half a loaf" trope).  But Dayden goes to the history of the very programs that Tomasky discusses and finds that if progressive agitation hurt the cause, you can't really tell how.  If anything, it looks like all of the subsequent agitation for expanding Social Security helped create the space for that to happen.

So agitation and activism matter.  Dissent matters.  Even liberal Presidents need to be endlessly prodded into achieving their status as legends, if they should be so lucky.  That's the way it's been and we have no apparent reason to expect that now is any different.

To that end, I have found much of the way that this discussion has played out to be pretty dumb - and I'm hesitant to use that word, because I don't mean to call the smart and passionate people who care enough to make these issues a part of their daily lives "dumb."  I don't mean it that way.  Sometimes brilliant people make foolish arguments.  And we can all get sucked into familiar patterns of debate.  And that can make us look dumb (or maybe even make us dumber if we swim in it long enough).

But what has all of the frustration is these discussions really been about?  Do the White House and its supporters really want to chill the speech of the "professional disgruntleists"?  Are editorials on FDL or Salon really the reason that the Democrats are facing a tough midterm?

My answer to both questions is an unequivocal "no."  But what's strange is that I'm pretty sure we all knew that.

For me, here is where the rubber meets the road: Agitation and dissent are a vital part of the process.  So Robert Gibbs accidentally exposed his sensitive side.  So what?  It's his job to toe the party line and take flack.  And it's a job that most people can handle for a year or two, tops.  I sure as hell don't want his job.  None of this means that anyone is going to stop writing, organizing and agitating.  And it shouldn't.  Political activisim and agitation play a vital role in pushing things forward.  These actions create space for our political leadership to act and then push them into that space if necessary, which it usually is.

And we all know (or should know) that our political system is dysfunctional in some very serious ways.  To the extent that I'm disappointed in Obama's leadership, it's been that he has the skills to be a powerful public advocate for whatever he wants.  I think many of us look at him as someone who could have been using his position to help us create space on many issues of importance.

But there's also the matter of values, which Robert Cruickshank of Calitics illuminates thusly:

Ongoing progressive organizing is motivated by a refusal to accept that our values cannot find expression in our politics and our laws.

This is why, and I've made some half-hearted attempts at making this argument in the past, it seems so bizarre to me for the Democratic establishment to be demonizing the political left as a matter of political persuasion.  Basically, you have a group of people out there saying that they don't find their values reflected in the politics of the Party.  The Party's response, if they hope to persuade, cannot be, "Your values are wrong and/or unimportant."  That is persuasive to no one.  It's insanely obtuse to try to persuade people to your side by berating their values.  (If there is one thing that I have learned as an atheist in religious debates, it is this - it does not matter how insane you think someone's values are, you cannot persuade them by blatantly devaluing what they value.)

(Also, if people are saying, "Though I had initially supported you because I thought you shared my values, I now feel that you share them no more than the Other Guy," you may want to come up with a more persuasive argument than, "Yeah, well just wait until the other guy gets ahold of you!"  That should happen in a Monty Python sketch, not in the campaigning of the Democratic party.)

But what I didn't want to do here was simply rehash old arguments or simply offer my take on them.  And I hope I've done more than that at least by at referencing what I found to be a valuable discussion, properly steeped in the relevant and messy history.  To conclude, I'd like to bring things back to the concrete now by discussing the present and future of healthcare reform.

This is probably the best issue for the highlighting the arguments I've examined here.  For one, we've seen that it closely mirrors the way that important social programs like Social Security and Medicare actually got implemented - fits and starts and lots of rancor all around.  It is far from perfect.

Indeed, as Tomasky notes in his piece, supporters of the HCR bill as it stands today should not spend too long congratulating themselves on the accomplishment because it has some serious problems that we will commence fighting about shortly (what he actually says is, "progressives who don’t worry about [the mandated coverage] aren’t being honest with themselves about the possible problems that could arise from the bill").

Through the lens of history, what we see we have with HCR (and with the era of Obama) is a potential beginning, but not a solution.  The exchanges don't even get implemented until 2014.  The fight will be on in January to start peeling reform back, Democratic majority or not.  The "professional disgruntleists" (and the amateurs!) will be an integral part of pushing this bill forward, of reshaping it into something more substantive over the coming decades.  It was true then and it's true now.

To that end, I leave you with one more piece from Democracy that tries to peer into the future of this battle.

Happy Monday, Daggers.  See you in the fray.