By tender design or unpardonable oversight, Politico's 8/23 piece, "Dems urge Obama to take a stand," marooned a discussion of what seems increasingly central to the left's discontent.
If you missed reading the article and absorbing its main point, not to worry, for unquestionably you've absorbed it in some familiar form elsewhere: "By declining to speak clearly and often about his larger philosophy -- and insisting that his actions are guided not by ideology but a results-oriented 'pragmatism' -- [Obama] has bred confusion and disappointment among his allies, and left his agenda and motives vulnerable to distortion by his enemies."
That Obama's enemies will distort every facet of his presidency is of course to be expected; it's what they do. What intrigues, however, and what prompted Politico's coverage, is the battle taking between the "professional left" -- progressive bloggers and "cable guys," as one interviewee put it -- and the president, which, as you can see above, is a battle defined as one of "confusion and disappointment" for the former.
Maybe so, although "confusion" is a monumentally ambiguous word. Confusion over, precisely, what? That Obama's Democratic majority is in fact a relatively conservative Congress, thereby circumscribing the president's once-larger and more conventionally progressive policy ambitions? Whatever.
The word with which I wish to take issue, though, is "disappointment." Quite the contrary: The vocal and high-profile left, I have finally become convinced, is positively -- paradoxically -- elated that Obama has "disappointed," since the accusation plays not only into the left's conspiratorial mindset of betrayal by powerful forces ("See? We told you this would happen"), but opens enormous vistas from which to launch its moral superiority, perhaps the single most insufferable quality of polemical progressives.
The exhortation most commonly heard by the vocal left is that Obama should "fight." Fight, fight, fight. The left wishes to fight and so Obama should fight. Fighting is preferred to and elevated above policy wonkishness, above the practical politics of Congressional coalitions, above actual progress. Indeed, progress appears to be the least of the left's concerns; it just wants to fight and to bloody its enemies and to even the score, etc. etc.
This factional and dare I say ideological development is as dispiriting as it is noteworthy, since it reminds me of ... anyone care to take a guess? Bingo -- the modern right, those ill-tempered pseudoconservatives, whose political jollies come chiefly in fighting, fighting, fighting.
If the left permanently adopts the right's anger-as-political-platform and aversion to compromise-politics, well, it's not exactly hysterical to speculate about the similarly permanent degeneration of our traditional two-party system, which, for all its blemishes, has served us rather well. Which is to say, the nation needs one side to stay cool, until the other burns itself out and reforms.