This Website is for Idealists

The Democratic Party, and increasingly its progressive wing, have become obsessed with electoral politics. This is mostly fine. We need to be in power. Calling all non-cynics! Come to this site! Complain about GOPosaurs–fine. Talk about Specter’s chances in 2010–fine. But don’t lose sight of the goal of this site–to discuss ideas about the right way we should be living our lives and conducting our political discourse in this country and throughout the world.

The Problem with Being Pragmatic

So what’s my beef with being pragmatic? Well,

I’ve always resisted the urge of explaining away everything through numbers. Now, it’s always good to look at numbers, because science is good. But I’m definitely on the normative side of political and social theory, not formal. There are those among us Leftists that have given way to using poll numbers, demographic trends, social surveys, etc to explain political phenomenon. Let’s face it. Conducting a survey is the number one, default choice of social scientists to prove or disprove hypothesis. This is often an easy way out, and I’ll tell you why.

By focusing on numbers all the time, we lose focus on our ideals. We stop thinking about how to shift the public one way or another, how to drive the narrative of the human condition forward.

Let me stop and say that the the tide is shifting our way, the Leftist way. But what we can’t do is waste the moment, basking in high approval ratings and large majorities in elected bodies. The people of this country want to believe in a better world. Together, we can get there, towards an approximate vision of utopian America that our forefathers envisioned so many years ago. Simply being in power won’t make that happen.

It is much harder, therefore, to explain what a better world might look like, and why we would want to go there. The path to a better world is not one we can muddle-through on, from one election to the next, from one policy to the next. We have to define the path clearly, and set out knowing what the purpose of our journeying down the path is.

Now, I’m complaining about two different categories of pragmatists at the same time. One, we have the pragmatists who think we should hug the center of vague, incoherent public policy issues and arguments. That’s the only way to get elected, they say. Well, that’s fine if your real goal in life is to be elected. But that’s not what the people want. They don’t want elected officials to be elected simply on the merit that they want to be elected.

The other group of pragmatists are those who think that by simply winning elections that public policy will drift towards the right answers and philosophies that have been bouncing around for years.

I am conflicted, and always have been, about whether elected officials should be there to make hard decisions, or to reflect their constituents. Now, you certainly don’t want politicians to dupe those who voted for them and change their positions on issues the day they take office. But you also don’t want an elected official to blindly follow the polls–this is the same folly I just described above.

What we need in elected officials is to know what their worldview is, what their ideals are, what kind of world they’d like to live in if they could create it on their own. This obviously needs to go beyond platitudes. But I think if people can get a good grasp both of that they personally want the world to be like, and what the candidates want the world to be like, then this would be a tenable third way to reconcile the difference between leadership and representation.

The Return of Ideals

With all this said, I think some of this is already being done. Obama, though his actions and policies reek of political pragmatism, has begun to articulate a vision of America and its place in a better world. His great oratory skills have allowed him to do this, and appeal to the idealist in all of us. When he speaks, Obama begs us to imagine a better world; he hungers for a conversation to begin about what exactly we want the world to look like.

There are many Leftists among us that have tried to keep us focused on an ideal vision of America. But often these become too platitudiness, or so philosophically complex that we would rather just settle for the approval ratings to see what’s really happening.

What We Want, Why We Want It, How We Get There.

Those are the questions we need to answer, and I hope that this site can be a place where I’ll try to answer some of these questions. I’ll try to have one post per week that is actually well written. This page counts for week one. But I’m also going to post random thoughts and essays that have been bouncing around in my head, just to keep up my writing skills, and for the sake of keeping you all interested. This should continue through the summer and then I’ll probably take a break until I get acclimated to my spot at Virginia Tech.

Do you want more ?!!!??!