Progressive divides and all that

I don't feel nearly as agitated on this subject as I did several days ago, but Nate Silver had a good post up on the two types of progressives: the rational and radical. What's the difference? Perhaps a good illustration was in the Democratic primary process: Obama the rational and Edwards the radical. That's John not Chet. Obama's rhetoric is pretty progressive, but he couches it in bipartisan terms. Edwards - I followed his campaign back in Iowa, and his rhetoric was Fight Fight Fight. Fight what? Corporate power in particular. The Republicans. Iraq. (Hillary's a stranger case - she sort of ended up with fighting rhetoric, but I'd put her in the rational progressive camp. She can be pretty anti-progressive too. But let's ignore her for now and...) So Iowa provided a pretty clear-cut test of whose rhetoric was more appealing. Seems people weren't hungering for the fighting rhetoric. Now, the Edwards supporters will tell you that Edwards didn't get nearly as much media attention as Obama and Clinton. That's probably true on a nationwide level, although he got more attention than say Dodd Biden Richardson. I don't really buy that argument in Iowa though, because Edwards, like the other contenders, spent quite a lot of time in Iowa. Iowans could have seen him no problem. A lot did. Many liked him! But more liked Obama.

Anyway, we sure found out quite a bit about John Edwards as time went on. That was pretty crazy. Found out quite a bit about Obama too - cool under fire, that's for sure. But I'm ignoring my chosen topic to recount old battles. Now Obama's president and there are new battles to be fought!

The real reason I chose this topic is because I'm a bit unsure of what camp I fall into. By temperament, by instinct, I'm in the Rational camp. But, yanno, I hear all these outrageous stories about the stupidity of the economy. And I grow convinced that Obama needs to listen more to folks who were right, and less to folks like Summers and Geithner. More Roubini, more Krugman. I doubt you can call them radical progressives, but the radical progressives praise them. Rational progressives tend to favor incremental change. That's usually fine, but these are unusual times, and we need big changes. Can Obama deliver?

The stimulus was a good start, I think. I'm happy that it passed. The bailouts of the banking and auto industries - I think we need to be very careful with those. There's a pretty clearcut difference here: radical progressives oppose the bailouts, rational progressives support them. I support them too - whatever preserves jobs - but I don't want the money to go to those executives who got us in the mess. The people whining about how $500,000 isn't nearly a large enough salary. wtf wtf wtf, I was under the impression that was a really great salary. So I get angry when I hear about things like that, and I get radical.

Radical progressives do have the strange tendency of pissing me off though. They tend to be ideologues, and I'm uncomfortable with ideologues. Dick Cheney's an ideologue, and look how awful he was. Why? No retreat, no surrender. Ideologues never retreat, they never surrender, and that's just silly sometimes. Again, I turn to Frank Church and am reminded that compromise is not a dirty word. You just have to be very careful in your compromise and make sure that you wind up with as good a deal as you can. Politics is the art of the possible.

And as for Church, he started off as a pretty moderate Democrat, but his record grew increasingly liberal. He staunchly supported McGovern in 1972 for instance, and McGovern was about as popular as AIDS in Idaho. My point is that I think Church became more radical as time went on. And that's not popular in a state that became more reactionary as time went on.

So yeah, summary: Radicals, rationals, I'm a rational progressive, but the deeds of rational progressives piss me off and the rhetoric of radical progressives pisses me off. As for the deeds of radical progressives - who knows, there aren't many in power. Bernie Sanders, Russ Feingold maybe. The rhetoric of rational progressives pleases me, but this entry doesn't. I was too incoherent. Also not in the mood for writing a blog entry: music theory was long today, I did a lot of work (but not nearly enough) for the Horace seminar today, and I also performed in an octet.

Coming up on Saturday: A tribute to Foghorn "Fritz Hollings" Leghorn.