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What the fuck is a progressive?

The pallid young Democrats flocking to the term these days would be no more reconizeable (or acceptable) to the Debsian progressives of American history than would George W. Bush's Republican Party be to Lincoln. These are not radicals, these Democrats and YearklyKossians and FireDogLakers and KillJoeLiebermaniacs. These are the mainstream supporters of a mainstream corporate party who believe that their flinching support for a woman's right to have her fetus extracted, their tepid and unconvincing belief that foreign intervention generally rocks, except when done "incompetently" or based on lies less palatable than those of, say, William Jefferson Clinton, and their conviction that if we would just pay the poor fuckers who sling burgers at Wendy's ten bucks an hour, the rising tide would lift all ships, etc. etc. and so forth and so on.

These are not, in other words, youths (nor adults) radicalized by the war and turning on their own complicit party. In '68 they were calling Democrats war criminals and getting their heads stoved in in the streets. Nary a whiff of tear gas in Hartford, however, as the ahem-Progressives make homophobic hay of the bisous-bisous between G-Dub and J-Leeb. "We will replace this warmongering Orthodox Jewish moralist with this millionaire businessman who, by calling disaster disaster, deserves our vote." My word, it's the new Bastille Day, isn't it?

Here's the most basic problem with such ahem-progressives: their critical faculties don't extend beyond the disaster immediately in front of their faces. They refuse, in other words, to think, preferring only to react. So, while the systematic torture has proven to be a systemic problem (progressives, please note the correct usages of the terms systematic and systemic) in Iraq, the idea that the United States as a global-military enterprise is itself systemically corrupt is, to these progressives, "conspiracy theory," or some other such cutesy-cute dismissal. The atrocities committed as part-and-parcel of the so-called War on Terror were not dreamed up by Don Rumsfeld during a gassy bout of insomnia on 9-12-2001. They were part-and-parcel of our Latin American policy for decades. They were part-and-parcel of our Southeast-Asia policy before that. They were part-and-parcel of our policy in the Phillipines. They are endemic to the war on drugs. They are endemic to our very own penal system, in which guard-on-prisoner and interprisoner rape, humiliation, and violence are tacitly acknowledged parts of official punishment. Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney and Condi Rice aren't causitive, but rather symptomatic. They, like the brutal methods employed in their particular crusades, are the symptoms of empire.

All this is very unfashionable talk among ahem-progressives, who are interested in winning elections for the Democratic party. A very young thing named Ezra Klein, in a post otherwise remarkable for its tone of unearned moral condescension, makes the stupendously ignorant statement:

When I quizzed [George Soros] on the actual amounts he was donating and how committed he was to constructing a progressive infrastructure, he rapidly backed away from the claim, protesting that he possessed no interest in significantly seeding the new left. That's why I find all the hubbub about Soros' money so darkly humorous -- he'll never give enough to truly matter.

Now, I'm no fan of billionaires who bum around the CFR with the rest of the Illuminati, but is one Ezra Klein really claiming that the man who gave all those millions to Solidarity and Chapter 77, the man who created the Open Society Institute . . . that this man "will never give enough to truly matter"? Because he doesn't explicitly endorse the goal of, what, voting for Ned Lamont? Because he didn't go to YearlyKos? Are you fucking kidding me you little twerp? While young Ezra Klein plays political strategist with all the alacrity of a perpetual senior-class vice-president . . . Well, twerp said it all. Says it all.

Ahem-Progressives seek institutional power for their own brand. That is all. There's nothing progressive about it. The progress they dream of is reascension to the bridge of the ship of state. There, they shall make small course corrections and call it a fucking day.