Progressives delude themselves

MADISON, Wis.--Panelists here at the recent conference celebrating the 100th anniversary of the founding of Progressive magazine were overwheliming optimistic. They are doomed to overwhelming disillusionment.
These wonderful optimists talk about organizing, solidifying and exhorting. They extol the power of labor. They urge pressure on politicians. They demand speaking truth to power. They talk about the wave of the future.
Their hearts are in the right place but they refuse to face reality.

That reality was exemplified by the Wisconsin State Journal, Madison’s only daily newspaper. It did not print a line about the two-day convention attended by 500 delegates nationwide and celebrities like Robert Redford, Jesse Jackson and Cindy Sheehan.
Reality. Progressives and leftists make up a miniscule part of the population, maybe 100,000 out of 310 million. Their agenda has so few adherents. Progressive magazine has a paltry 55,000 circulation.
Reality. The system will not allow profound changes. Corporations and lobbyists, with their money, rule America. They get what they want. The bulk of the people suck hind tit.
Reality. America does not have a democracy. Four Republican senators from Wyoming and Alaska have power far beyond the number of their constituency of 1 million.
Wyoming, with 500,000 people, has two senators. The District of Columbia, with a population 100,000 greater, has none. California has 36 million people but just two senators.

The Senate with its archiac rules is woefully undemocratic, requiring 60 votes to halt a filibuster. This means it can override the will of the majority on such progressive measures as universal health and card-signing unionism.
One mossback senator, the rebarbative Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, can singlehandedly hold up funding for national parks for one year. And: that same one man amends a credit card reform bill to allow loaded weapons in national parks, a totally unrelated measure.
The antiquated Electoral College has given the presidency four times to the loser in the popular vote.
Reality. Americans are innoculated with capitalistic abundance. They love it. The schools, the media and society inculate the American Way.
Nevertheless, the conference was enlived by panelists like Joan Claybrook and Ron Hayes with stiff doses of radicalism.
Claybrook, Public Citizen head for 25 years, offered 12 sensible reforms for corporations, among them: chartering of corporations, ability to revoke those charters, overturning the egregious Supreme Court ruling in 1886 giving citizen rights to corporations, closing corporate tax loopholes, eliminating tax-free outsourcing, setting up a corporate investigating commission and establishing a corporate criminal court.
Hayes, advocate for worker construction safety, declared: “We must make corporate misdemeanors the felonies they should be when workers are killed on the job.”

Sheehan impressed. She denounced President Obama for his warmongering in office after sounding anti-war notes on the hustings.
One panel noted that the civilized countries of Europe have measures uncivilized America does not: universal health, family allowances, maternity leaves, sick pay, longer vacations and strong unions.
Naomi Klein, author of the leftist bestseller, “The Shock Doctrine,” called the two-party system the fraud it is.
She demanded a much-needed Truth Commission to investigate the abuses of the Bush thugs. She correctly denounced Obama for wanting to bury the past, to look forward instead of cementing the past in America’s “historic memory.” She rightly denounced capitalism but never said socialism is the solution.
A sports panel endorsed the “Beer and Circus” of college sports. The panelists embroidered that view by telling amusing stories. But never once did they point out that sports don’t belong in universities. Never once did they observe that sports has become the opiate of the masses.

The conference had its frustrations: microphone-hogging questioners who delivered five-minute speeches, panel moderators who yaked and yaked when the delegates wanted to hear the panelists, standing ovations, self-adulation, preaching to the choir and cheers for commonplace statements.
And, oy vey, the many panelists who simply could not utter simple sentences without that terrible speech mannerism “you know.”
Nevertheless, Progressive deserves accolades. For 100 years it has fought the power of greedy corporations and predatory banks, exposed the plight of workers, battled for the environment, opposed war and decried empire-building. The magazine has denounced racism, sexism and homophobia.
As the weekly Madison Cap Times put it: “It has cherished our civil liberties and defended them against the Joe McCarthys, the Richard Nixons and the Dick Cheneys who would eliminate them.”
But overall the conference lacked the radicalism of Marx. He wrote in the “Theses on Feuerbach” in 1888: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world…the point…is to change it.”
Marx’s vision of change for justice will never be fulfilled in conservative America.