Is it official? Is progressive commentary, across the board, now entirely detached from political reality? Has the vocal left knowingly resigned itself to the mere role of professional scold, since the Democratic targets of its enlightened disgust have no room to maneuver away from that which is so fiercely condemned by the lights of insufferable virtue?
I ask -- though I suspect we all know the answer -- having just now read Frank Rich's rather pedestrian but stupendously unattainable thesis: that "even if the Democrats sharpen their attack [on the GOP], they are doomed to fall short if they don’t address the cancer in the American heart -- joblessness. This requires stunning emergency action right now, August recess be damned."
I, like so many Times' readers, have come to expect more from Mr. Rich. But it seems the left's strategic exhaustion and convenient ellipsis of A to Z (that is, omitting steps B to Y) have caught up even to this most literate of progressive observers, leaving him mired in the all too familiar muck of boldly advocating an assault on joblessness, though absent an actual battle plan.
Just why is the Democratic leadership absent another plan to tackle unemployment? The answer entails not the complexities of golf or French cooking or even quantum physics. The answer, quite simply, is that President Obama and the Democratic leadership don't have the votes. Mr. Rich, they're not addressing the cancer of joblessness for the same reason they acquiesced to metastasizing status-quo forces on the public option. They don't have the votes. They ... don't ... have ... the ... votes.
For progressive commentators, this apparent challenge of elementary Congressional math has for some time reduced progressivism itself to the intensely marginal status of dispensable theory, of philosophical autoeroticism, of blithering irrelevance. Of what possible benefit -- to anyone -- is the passionate advocacy of government job-creation or a public option or any other progressive goal if there's no arithmetical path to its accomplishment? If, on the other hand, there is indeed some conceivable path, then for heaven's sake permit us the concept; lay it out, step by step, how the Democratic leadership is to arrive at the mountaintop of Z from its miserably beleaguered A.
For modern progressivism to regain its proper, pertinent and serious place in the national debate, it must first return to its roots: It must travel back to the towering realism, the legislative awareness, the burrowing pragmatism of its founder, FDR, who seldom if ever pondered any subject, foreign or domestic, with philosophical abandon. I'm not insensitive to progressives' unease with hanging up their cherished utopian gloves, and I know FDR's is a hard act -- and tough advice -- to follow. But if progressives fail to re-alight on Earth, if they persist in volubly demanding solutions for which there are no known formulas, they'll only alienate the realistically disposed and continue their marginalization into absolute political obscurity.