Robert Naiman - Would It Make a Difference to Progressives if Norman Solomon Goes to Congress?
May 23, 2012 A key paradox for progressives of our national political life goes something like this: everybody complains about Congress, but nobody does anything about it.
Of course, it is far from true that nobody is doing anything about Congress. Lots of people are doing something about it. But if you hold the complaints of progressives about Congress in one hand, and the level of progressive activity to change who is in Congress and what they do when they get there in the other, there is a big mismatch. The level of complaint should provoke a much higher level of activity to do something about it.
Every four years it is revealed that at the end of the day, the overwhelming majority of progressive-minded people in the U.S. are pragmatic idealists. They are people who have one eye on the horizon, and the other eye on the next practical step that can help get us closer to the horizon - or stop us from being pushed further away, which amounts to the same thing. The overwhelming majority of progressive-minded people will vote in the fall Presidential election, and they will vote for Obama; not because they think that doing so is the beginning and end of political engagement, but because they think - correctly - that it is the political choice in the context that best serves the interests of pragmatic idealists.
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