One of modern progressivism's enduring failures is its belief in the motivating power of national polls. For instance, just look at the polls on unemployment, progs say; We the People -- and isn't it peculiar how the right deploys the same self-majoritarian term? -- care less about climbing deficits than we do plunging jobs. So naturally the pols should listen and advocate (wisely, in my opinion) stimulus, for the time being, over fiscal restraint.
But of course they advocate no such thing. Why? It's seems, according to another of progressivism's enduring errors, that politicians simply enjoy practicing betrayal. They too can read polls, they know what "the people" want, what they demand, yet those pols are unspeakably corrupt, bought off by "corporatist" villains. Such is progressivism's explanatory worldview.
There are, however, a couple of flies in this argumentational ointment.
First, some of its leading lights don't know how to read a poll. This point was driven violently home the other day when I discovered in Firedoglake that a whopping 80 percent of the public supports government spending on jobs. Yeah! We the People speak! Well, actually, 38 percent of the people spoke along those lines, for in reality: When asked if they support spending on jobs, only 48 percent of respondents said yes; when then asked if they still would support spending if it meant an uptick in the deficit, 80 percent of the 48 percent said yes (hence the final 38 percent, and the vastly misinterpreted 80).
How could Firedoglake commit such a sloppy and amateurish mistake? Simple. It wanted to believe in The People.
As for those insensate pols? Here's the Times' Paul Krugman this morning, compressing their insufferable hypocrisy:
[W]e see Congress sitting on its hands, with Republicans and conservative Democrats refusing to spend anything to create jobs...; fighting deficits, they insist, must take priority over everything else -- everything else, that is, except tax cuts for the rich, which must be extended, no matter how much red ink they create.
Yet hypocrisy isn't the same as insensitivity to the people's will, which, when analyzed through polling in the assorted politicians' districts or states, commonly reveals an anti-stimulus attitude. That attitude may be in profound economic error, nevertheless it is sainted public opinion. In short, let us indulge in the brutality of relentless objectivity by asking ourselves: Why, in a representative democracy, should a Nebraska congressman give a damn about what the good progressive people of San Francisco think?
Because, I hear you cry, It's the right thing to do. Which, as policy, it is. But wait. I thought that chief among progressive doctrine was an unerring allegiance to what "We the People" demand. Not true, it seems, when representative democracy conflicts with desired policy goals.
The point of all this you've probably gathered. While progressive goals may indeed be desirable, "movement" progressivism suffers from debilitating, organic contradictions which are blisteringly clear to the attentive swing-voting middle -- that is, where most of the votes are.
My suggestion? For starters, that movement progressives stop the celebratory cheerleading; that they stop claiming a majority will they so vividly lack. The true majority may not comprehend the fundamentals of post-Keynesian economics, but they do have an uncanny penchant for recognizing -- and more important, honoring -- self-honesty, the practice of which could someday actually put progressivism in the majority.