Progressive ideas can and will win in the end.  But when they win, progressives might not get the credit for them.

Who would ever have thought that the cultural acceptance of gay marriage would have moved as rapidly as it has?   Just a couple of years ago it seemed the best that could be achieved would be a long interim period of gradual, grudging acceptance of civil unions.  But the progressive case has proved so persuasive that change is occuring very rapidly, to the extent that acceptance of gay marriage is increasingly popular among Republicans, and isn't even identified by them as a "progressive" position.

Arguing for fundamental changes in the organization of society is always going to be an uphill struggle, especially when those changes do not serve the material interests of the most powerful and privileged members of our society.  Progressive innovation incurs the wrath, outrage and resentment of all those who are emotionally invested in the status quo.  And that is always going to be most people.  But you just have to keep making the case.  You can change people's minds, even if you don't convert them to your side.

People are always going to hate on progressives.  But at the same time, they can be gradually persuaded by progressive arguments even as they go on hating progressive people.   I look forward to the coming progressive victory that will consist in successfully convincing a lot of rank-and-file middle class Republicans that the rich need to pay much higher taxes, and that executive salaries need to be curtailed.   But I expect that even when the day comes on which most Americans are finally voting for these things and effectively implementing them politically, they will still be identifying themselves as conservatives and moderates, and will still be railing against evil pinko socialist liberals and progressives.  But they will have come to think of income balance and equality as a common sense and even conservative defense of the American dream, a rock-ribbed conservative and deeply American attitude.

I continue to think that it is the battle for ideas and persuasion that is the most important aspect of political change - maybe because that's the only aspect of generating change I am any good at - and that reason is a powerful battering ram by which even the most obtuse are ultimately overcome.   You might not get their hearts and guts into your "camp", but your arguments can still win out over their stubborn minds and inadequate theories.  So I I think progressives should continue to focus on doing more homework, acquiring better information and making better arguments.

People might ask, "Haven't we been doing that?  Aren't progressive views and arguments already better and smarter?"   Frankly, I think not.   At least not in the mouths of most progressives.  Progressives these days frequently tend to think they are very smart and clever, but they are often actually quite dumb and intellectually incapable.  This is, in my view, the sad result of decades of dumbed-down liberal education, in which a commitment to rationality, logic, powerful quantitative thinking, and deeply layered bodies of information has been replaced by a collection of hip and pseudo-sophisticated cultural "attitudes" and clever poses, shored up by little more than some half-baked and intellectually undisciplined cultural studies and humanities fads, woven together in a loose emotional fabric of gut feelings and self-satisfied snark.

People like this always find their own attitudes very intuitively appealing and comfortable, but are completely dumbfounded and perplexed when faced with an actual argument against their position that comes from outside their incredibly narrow comfort zone.  So they resort immediately to ironical disdain without counterargument, or fatuous relativism.  MS-NBC has made a whole art form out of this juvenile style of rhetoric.  But there is nothing more unattractive and ridiculous than unearned smugness and cluelessly oblivious sarcasm.

Since they acquired their comfortable attitudes in college, the snark-progressives tend to think that they must be intellectually advanced.  But they are not.  A lot of progressives come off as wet-behind-the ears and overconfident college kids who haven't yet realized how ignorant they are, whose heads are stuffed with a lot of shallow though somewhat literate book learning, and who don't know anything at all about how the real world actually works.  In a word, a lot of progressives have become intellectually flabby, callow and shallow, yet vainly self-deluded about their intellectual achievements and capacities.  They now need to face the depressing reality about just how much junk, superficiality and illogic flits about in their minds, and hit the intellectual gym and work themselves into real shape.

I visited some relatives last week and had a series of long arguments and debates with various conservative opponents.  I actually feel like I made headway with them.  Some of my academic knowledge continues to be useful.  But my experience in the business world has been much more helpful in marshaling experience-based facts and arguments that conservatives will sometimes find persuasive.  When they advance some conservative dogma about how society actually works economically, I am now usually able to come up with three or four concrete anecdotes drawn from the workplace that provide evidence that the economic sphere doesn't work that way at all.  And since these pieces of evidence are drawn from real-world lessons that resonate with my opponents' own experiences, they sometimes find them persuasive.

Almost everyone, for example, has had a boss that threw them under the bus, or who made dumb decsions, or who fleeced customers and co-workers to advance their own positions.   Almost everyone has seen waste and inefficiency in practive.  Almost everyone has experienced the negative effects of ruthless hierarchy, paralyzing fear and workplace paranoia on job performance, etc.  Almost everyone in a company has experienced sheer stupidity and gross injustice on the part of owners or upper management.

Lots of people can be convinced that they themselves are hard and productive workers and have been exploited by people above them, and are therefore underpaid.   I have had a certain amount of success in persuading some conservative friends that a 20-to-1 rule, which would cap executive salaries and force management to plow more company income back into employee salaries and benefits, would have a powerful positive impact on productivity, and provide a more efficient and productive distribution of a company's resources.  And once they see that such a measure would be good for their own companies, these conservatives are more open to the idea that it would be good for society as a whole.

But I haven't found it necessary to "frame", spin and soft-sell my arguments.  My experience is that conservatives have more respect for someone who is willing to sock them in the mouth with a straightforward argument that isn't filled with a lot of euphemism and double-talk.

There are a whole bunch of arguments about the economic organization of society that progressives of 40, 50 and 60 years ago could repeat in their sleep.  But that was all swept away during the more recent Third Way heyday of cultural liberalism combined with Reaganite and Thatcherite economic neoliberalism.  I'm pretty convinced that that era is now rapidly ending.  But we are still dealing with the intellectual wreckage and progressive decadence it wrought.  Sometimes I feel like we progressives are collectively like the Eloi of H.G. Wells's The Time Machine.  It's astonishing how dumbed-down progressive thinking became in the 80s, 90s and early 00's.  But I am hopeful, because I am starting to see it all come back to us.   Progressive intellectuals have been on a long and indolent vacation, but are starting to remember a lot of the stuff they used to know before they let their minds go soft, and are recovering their appreciation for the long, brutal battles that progressive forbears fought and won once before.

This is a conservative country. Neo liberalism triumphed because it felt right to most of us. And Welfare shrank because it didn't.

Now the Kochs, Murdochs  and Masters of the Universe are spending lavishly to keep it a conservative country. Not to protect their assets - as if they had  to care- but because they passionately believe that's right.

It's not corporate money that packs are churches on weekends, or criminalizes pot or abortion. It's the way we think, here.

Attacks on the rich - in general - don't win elections. They simply sound hysterical or envious. May not even be fair. Are the Rich less charitable or tolerant or whatever than the rest of us? I'm not so sure.

Obama's 2004 convention speech is almost certainly the way to go. Assume (it may even be true) our political opponents are decent people who want at least some of the same things as us. 

Accept that for our sins we live in a conservative country so exploit the conservative values that happen to work for us. Fortunately, Joe Lunchpail doesn't  just think the Lord helps those who help themselves, he thinks the country should too.

There's no majority for the idea of equality. But there is for the idea of equal opportunity - and therefore for good schools, No majority for bailing out General Motors which was supposed to make a profit on its own, but one for supporting e hospitals which weren't.

Whatever our Ellis Island past, there's no majority for citizenship for illegal immigrants, but might be for undoing Globilization. To quote Keynes, "the thing about tariffs is..they do the trick". .

 Possibly even there is a majority for the counterveiling power of a union. Makes it seem like a fair fight. So Governor Walker may have over reached. The Wisconsin protestors may be getting some unlikely assistance from Libya. It's hard to enthuse about the crowd in the square in Benghazi and then criticize the one in Madison.  

You know we all want to change the world. But we can't. We have to play the hand we've been dealt here.

I've been itching to get this thread all weekend. Thanks to all participating. This intelligent and, as acanuck, wrote "meaty" discussion pretty much matches my ideal for the kind of debate I hoped for when launching dagblog. So while the rest of the world watches pretty actors and actresses simper, I at last have a moment to join in.

That said, there's so much meat, it's hard to know where to join. Let me add a twist to the arguments of Dreamer and Dan by applying in what I know about right wing politics.

Dreamer writes:

The former DLC's theory of power was that if you can come up with ideas that attract strong bipartisan support from policymakers you can get them adopted.

There is a reason that the GOP does not take this approach. It's nicely illustrated by a NYT quote from a Tea Party organizer today:

The mood here is that we're a little disappointed in the Republicans in the House in not living up to their pledge...We realize we have to keep the pressure on these guys all the time. If you leave them alone they revert back to their own ways.

This notion of pressuring the Republican Party is fundamental to right-wing politics. In the 1970s, Paul Weyrich launched the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority, and the Free Congress Foundation with the express intention of reforming the GOP. Political organizations like the Club for Growth now carry that baton by funding primary challenges against every Republican congressperson who deviates from doctrine. Rush Limbaugh has been hectoring the Republicans for being too weak and too moderate for twenty years now.

The pressure from right represents a stick that complements the carrot that American Dreamer describes. The right wing organizations help support heavy-lift Republican initiatives, and they also prevent Republican legislators from compromising. A number of the few Republicans compromisers in the 111th Congress lost to primary challengers in 2010. The Tea Parties have already prepared lists of Republican targets in 2012.

Just as the right wing expresses disappointment with Republicans, so does the left express  disappointment with Democrats. But there is a key difference. Rarely have I heard anyone on the left talk about putting pressure on the Democrats. They'll rage about betrayal, vow to stay home on election day, or contemplate third parties. On occasion, the left has run primary challengers against the most conservative Democrats.

But the notion of pressuring the Democratic Party is not part of the progressive worldview. There is little active machinery in place for those who would want to. The leftist media personalities have little clout, and progressive organizations, such as the unions, are too tied into to the Democratic Party and too fearful of electoral loss to risk challenging moderate Democrats.

Thus, weak left wing institutions not only don't assist Democrats with the heavy lifting, they're also powerless to prevent from Democrats from going the bipartisan route. On the right, it's the opposite.

The phenomenon that DanK describes also plays into this dynamic. He's correct that the left wing will never get the credit if the center embraces their ideas, but the same goes for the right wing. The Tea Parties have very high negatives in the polls. The left despises them, and even moderate Republicans disdain them.

But because the right wing is so visible, someone like Boehner, who is extremely conservative, gets a reputation for pragmatism. He becomes the good cop relative to the Tea Parties' bad cop. When Boehner takes a hard line, the media represents his position as forced upon him by uncompromising Tea Parties. And the Republicans' extreme budget cuts don't seem that extreme relative to what the far right has pressed for.

The moderate Democratic leaders have no bad cop. When they take an uncompromising position, they get the blame. And Fox News gets away with insisting that Obama and Pelosi are left wing nuts because there are no powerful left wing nuts to contrast them to.

To sum up with a facile metaphor, political change is like a scale with heavy stones on either side. Even when there is equal weight on both sides, if the stones are not evenly distributed, the scale will tip. These days, there is a lot of weight on the right tip of the scale and not so much on the left tip. The Democrats can clearly win elections, but they have to win by much larger margins to tip the scale to the left. Thus, there are very few opportunities for progressive reform, and many threats of conservative reform, leaving Democrats to scramble just to maintain the status quo.