Progressives work within the official political apparatus to achieve incremental changes for their goals. In elections, this almost always leads to support for Democratic Party candidates, though there have been occasional Republicans who are somewhat progressive. Progressive Republicans are at least a threatened species, and may be extinct soon.
Radicals work outside of and frequently in opposition to the official political apparatus. They are looking for wholesale change, often creating new institutions, to further their goals.
Radicals tend to favor direct action; progressives, political action. Progressives believe they are being "practical." Radicals think they are "getting to the root of things." Both lines of argument have some limited merit.
The point is that both lines of argument have their limits, just as the earth has limits on its ability to absorb pollution, the economy has limits to growth, and empires have limited lifespans even if they sometimes last for centuries.
Progressives and radicals have, to a large extent, common goals: health care for all; elimination of hunger/poverty/homelessness; education for all; and so on. It's an academic commonplace and an artificial distinction to say that they differ on the means to achieve those common goals.
Its an artificial distinction because, apart from a very few very committed ideologues, real people are neither progressive nor radical. Ordinary people are more inclined to approve of what works than they are to worry about whether it's progressive or radical. They support some progressive initiatives and some radical initiatives. They are indifferent to or opposed to many of each. They (we) are entirely right to have this approach.
We all can think of initiatives from various progressives and radicals that didn't work and that were never going to work, because they were just impractical no matter how ideologically pure. We will not all have the same list, but if we have been paying attention, we all have a few examples in mind. I think of the dumber PETA campaigns, myself. You may have a different favorite flop.
We might make the argument that there were times when the progressive approach worked very well in America. Yet, when we look closely at any of those times - Depression, New Deal, Civil Rights, Anti - (Vietnam) War, Women's Liberation and so on - what we see is a combination of progressive and radical actions. There were radical and progressive groups. There was a sustained mass movement struggling against economic failure, social injustice and war. The broadest-based and most successful political groups undertook some radical and some progressive actions at the same time.
Regardless of past victories and past failures, the times they are a-changin' - again. The supposedly free-market global economy that promised prosperity has spectacularly failed to deliver. The economic crisis that became so acute it stopped the 2008 Presidential campaign for a while may well become even more acute in this 2012 Presidential campaign.
None of the issues of mortgage fraud by banks, declining real wages, unemployment, foreclosures and all the other symptoms of the declining American empire have been fixed. The institutions at fault have been propped up with trillions of government dollars. That's a debt to the wealthy we ordinary citizens are expected to pay for with a severe drop in our security and standard of living.
With no mass movement insisting on stimulating the economy from the bottom up and not from the top down, the purely progressive approach of supporting the two-party system is obviously a failure. It's not hard to find articles outlining 100 important ways the Obama regime has been just like the Bush regime, and often worse. Individual rights protected by the Constitution and centuries of legal practice appear to have been obliterated at the stroke of a pen, when Obama signed the law allowing indefinite detention of American citizens, for just one instance.
The inalienable rights mentioned in the Declaration of Independence are not rights that apply only to American citizens. There was, at the time the Declaration was written, no United States of America of which one could be a citizen. Those rights, of which life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness were specifically mentioned, are not rights not of citizens of this or that country but of every human being. Obama is the latest in a long line rulers trying to sign them away, but they are inalienable, whether he likes it or not.
It's time for a mass movement to assert those rights. Occupy Wall Street is a good start, but it is just the beginning. If the movement is to be successful, Occupy groups will be just part of a movement, not the whole. No one group will be the whole. No one person or organization has the whole truth or the sole authority to say what is next.
The economic, political and social failures of today were not caused by taxes that were too low, or too high, or applied to the wrong people and institutions. They were not caused by gay marriage or the lack of it. they were not caused by access to abortion or the the lack of it. They are not caused by too much or too little stimulation of the economy. Yet this sort of tax policy and social policy and abstract economic policy is all that is offered by the political parties that hold power in Washington and Lansing and locally.
The failure of our society is caused by an economic, political and social system that is successful only when the economy is growing. We are in a situation when growth is not happening - or at least, the 99% have not seen economic growth for years and none is on the horizon.
I think that continued conventional growth is just not possible, because the resources of food, water and energy to support that growth simply do not exist. Other people may have other explanations. We could look at overpopulation, at concentration of capital, at a political system captured by obsolete, bankrupt institutions that are using that political control as life support for them instead of us. All these things contribute. There is no one right answer.
It's an interesting discussion. The main thing is to realize we are trying to understand why growth is not happening, in spite of the best efforts of Democratic and Republican politicians and their teams of economic experts. Official statistics for GDP, unemployment and inflation are all fudged to make the situation look better than it is. The situation is not good, and it can turn suddenly worse with any shock such as a Greek default, war with Iran or a Fukushima-type meltdown in the United States.
What the government should be doing is looking out for the general welfare, not the welfare of bankrupt companies, no matter how large. It's not doing what it should; not even close. We need help. they give us austerity. That's why we need a mass movement with radical and progressive moves all at once; not just some thousands of Occupiers in Michigan, but hundreds of thousands. If something so inconsequential as football can fill Michigan Stadium, we should be able to overflow it. We will never win if we are not at least this ambitious.
Of course, since we are the 99%, reaching this number of people should be easy. People who are very dissatisfied with business as usual are all around us. We don't even need to stir them up. Repeated economic & political failures are already doing that. We only need to reach out and organize them. Let's get on with it.
Art Myatt
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