CT Blue

In a column on Slate (Progressives to Arms), Paul Krugman makes what has become, for him, a familiar argument:

Here’s a thought for progressives: Bush isn’t the problem. And the next president should not try to be the anti-Bush.

No, I haven’t lost my mind. I’m not saying that we should look kindly on the Worst President Ever; we’ll all breathe a sigh of relief when he leaves office 405 days, 2 hours, and 46 minutes from now. (Yes, a friend gave me one of those Bush countdown clocks.) Nor am I suggesting that we should forgive and forget; I very much hope that the next president will open the records and let the full story of the Bush era’s outrages be told.

But Bush will soon be gone. What progressives should be focused on now is taking on the political movement that brought Bush to power. In short, what we need right now isn’t Bush bashing—what we need is partisanship.

Unfortunately, partisanship is a bad word for what Krugman is talking about, though there may not be better one.

Partisanship connotes an attachment to party or faction for it’s own sake. I think that Krugman is preaching aggressive advocacy of a set of principles that are common to liberals or progressives (pick your term). There’s nothing wrong with compromise, but there’s something very wrong with the idea, so endemic among the punditocracy, that compromise is inherently good, and that truth is always to be found midway between the extremes within which they themselves choose to limit our discourse. That sort of thinking is especially corrosive when the allowable extreme in one direction is much farther from the actual “center” than the other “extreme”. The opinion makers have cooperated in a process that has steadily moved the rhetorical mid-point rightward, even while the actual opinions of the electorate have drifted left. They are not wholly to blame for this. The Republican party has been aggressive in promoting the interests of the plutocrats and the Democrats have only timidly pushed back. The empty headed pundits have in many cases followed the path of least resistance.

The Republican party is now in decline, not because its tactics have been unsuccessful, but because its policies have proven so disastrous in practice that even the electorate, pounded as it is with propaganda, has seen through the party for what it is. In fact, a great argument can be made that the Republicans flourished for a while in spite of public disapproval of their policies, because they at least appeared to stand for something, rather than nothing.

So I think Krugman is teaching forceful advocacy of the progressive agenda and the need to recognize that we get what we want by pushing hard for it, and not defaulting for some elusive mid ground that keeps slipping ever rightward. That means our candidates must clearly advocate progressive positions now, so they can claim a mandate if they win, and it means we must be prepared to fight for every inch of ground.