Establishment and Progressive

 In the midst of the ongoing fallout from the Graham Platner controversy, I received a mass email from a progressive group aligned with Bernie Sanders. They formally withdrew their endorsement of Platner—but then fiercely underlined that this must not be read as an "opening for the Establishment," and that they would continue to fight for a "progressive" candidate for Maine. 

As so often in these debates, the militant fury of this message seemed so disproportionate to the inciting cause. I have never been able to discover what actual policy difference—if any—separates the "progressives" from the "moderates" in Maine Democratic politics. 

What is the actual objection to Janet Mills, for instance? The only criticism I have seen offered of her is that she is old. (Viz. this cruel, unfunny, and uncreative reference to "dentures" from one of the most mean-spirited "progressive" pundits). 

As far as I can tell, the "progressives" and the "Establishment" in Democratic politics agree on 90% of issues (and both—to Matt Yglesias's point—are already well to the left of the average swing voter). 

Do progressives support universal healthcare more? Are they more in favor of it? Maybe; that's possible. But if we do not yet have universal healthcare in this country, I am not persuaded that the reason for that is the presence of too many "Establishment" Democrats in Congress. I am much more convinced it has to do with the lack of Democrats of any description in Congress. 

And yet, there is this persistent belief on the Left that if we could just elect "fighters," they would make up in wrath for what we currently lack in votes and numbers. Hence the enormous weight being put upon mere stylistic differences in this primary season. The "Establishment" candidates are labeled as such because they use words like "opportunity," whereas you can spot a progressive because they talk about "oligarchy." 

This is understood by the cognoscenti to be a very significant difference, though its salience is lost on me. I can't escape the impression that we are here in the presence of that mysterious "power of words of formulae" in politics, as Gustave Le Bon called it—those "magical phrases" he described, whose concrete meaning is elusive to outsiders but over which people engaged in political controversies are strangely willing to destroy each other. 

As for the belief that more "fighters" in Congress would make possible what has scarcely been possible before by other people elected on the same promises and holding the same convictions, I can only respond with a passage from Edmund Wilson. 

I've been reading Wilson's Apologies to the Iroquois the last few days. It's really a remarkable book for its era. Wilson manages to write with great respect and sympathy for the cause of American Indians, without ever devolving into romanticism or sentimentality, patronizing his subject, or substituting his "wisdom" for Native leaders' own tactical judgments about what the moment demands. 

There is one place in the book, however, when he is discussing the political struggle on a Canadian reservation, when he allows himself to offer a humble word of advice and caution to the nationalist militants among the Native tribes:

"[O]ne recognizes here, nevertheless, the ever-recurrent illusion, characteristic of revolutions and not unknown in our two-party system, that a brand-new set of rulers, though selected from one's own community, will be able to make a clean slate of the past and to behave like a new order of human beings." 

It seems that, in our currently knives-out primary season in the Democratic party, we are in the presence of this same illusion. People just can't seem to rid themselves of the belief that if all is not as it should be, it must be because we have been given over to the children of darkness, and if only we could elect the children of light this time, all would be well. 

Much of Wilson's political writing in the '50s and '60s was devoted to combatting this dangerous misconception. The true struggle in life and politics, he wrote, was not between the forces of good and the forces of evil. It was not between an insidious, captive "Establishment" and a "progressive" base that could work miracles if only it would be unshackled by its traitorous elders. 

The true struggle is due rather to the forces of inertia and the fact that real politics may involve hard trade-offs between incompatible values and ideals (as Isaiah Berlin was constantly pointing out). 

As Wilson wrote in another book from this time—his Cold War and the Income Tax—"who today is the reformer's adversary? [...] Not 'capitalism,' not 'communism.' Simply human limitations so general as sometimes to seem insurmountable, an impulse to internecine destruction which one comes more and more to feel irrepressible."

This attitude—Wilson's postwar skepticism toward dualistic thinking (one senses he would agree, as I do, with Walter Kaufmann's plea to "think in color" instead of black and white, and to embrace pluralism over Manicheanism); and his dubious and critical stance toward the power of revolutions suddenly and completely to effect fundamental changes in human nature—is one we need more of today.