In the wake of my recent post in the progressive blogosphere, I find myself thinking a lot about cynicism. The article, “Now What? A Cautionary Note, and an Invitation, to Progressives”, appeared on Truthout.com, outlining the inevitability of letdown after victory, and the need to shift the progressive group identity from underdog to agent of change, via accountability and cooperation.
Readers posted comments in reply. Some loved it; some missed the point; some understood but struggled emotionally with how to negotiate this. A significant subset simply dismissed my ideas out of hand as unworkable. This last group is worth examining.
To some of these readers, there was no progressive victory; they see virtually no difference between Obama and George W. Bush. Some were unable to recognize any progressive content in Obama’s policies, focusing exclusively on the centrist aspects of Obama’s initiatives. Some readers were ardent supporters of Obama who already felt profoundly let down by compromises Obama appears to have made (ironically, these people were demonstrating the very thing I wrote about in the article.)
The thing these people seem to have in common is cynicism. Whether they are too disheartened to concede that any forward motion was signaled by the recent election, or they have found their way to total disillusionment so early in the game, these individuals are apparently not able to hold out any hope for change for much more than, at best, a brief moment.
Cynics, I’ve found, are brokenhearted people. Often they appear in therapy unable to have satisfying relationships. Long ago, they once held out hope (as we all do when we start out in life). But, since that time, they have been bitterly disappointed, so that now they no longer allow themselves to believe that anything other than further disappointment is possible.
Their cynicism protects them from risking further letdown. Even one more disappointment would be more pain than the cynic feels ready to bear. So, the cynical person must deny the existence of any opportunity for positive change to protect oneself from the potential pain of losing. What appears outwardly to be confident bravado in disparaging other’s optimism is really just fear of being harmed again, and a searing need to avoid that risk.
What’s interesting about cynics is that, often, the hopes that were dashed were in fact not hopes grounded in reality at all, but wishful thinking that did not come true. This is an important distinction. Cynics are typically not people who had realistic adult expectations dashed, and are now struggling to recover equilibrium. They had idealistic aspirations or childhood wishes dashed, and have given up ever since.
Although they appear outwardly to be opposite to one another, cynical people are no closer to realistic assessment of the conditions of their environment than the idealists they disparage. Both have stalled in the developmental process of learning to balance one’s internal desires with the demands of the current world they inhabit. Ironically, idealists who lack a counterbalancing pragmatism, who have not yet learned to evaluate their situation with an eye toward practical planning for how to approach their goal, are at risk, in fact, for becoming cynics themselves.
The tendency to waver between cynicism and idealism has plagued progressives for too long. It’s time instead for some hopefulness tempered by realism.
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Hello, Sue. Though most progressives refuse to acknowledge it, the ultimate source of our cynicism is the sociological near-certainty the electorate itself will betray President Obama’s intentions. The huge potential of such betrayal is the precise context of the venomous Limbaugh’s repeatedly spewed maledictions the President will fail.
Post-Katrina findings that 75 percent of the Caucasian electorate was in stubborn denial of the obviously malicious racism in the Bush Regime’s response provides an accurate clue to Limbaugh’s purpose: reanimation of a national racism so deeply malevolent the election of President Obama is one of the genuine miracles of human history.
Another such index to Limbaugh-potential is the performance of the nation’s bureaucrats, the working-class people who staff the local, state and federal agencies and whose conduct is not only a microcosm of working-class values but determines popular attitudes toward government and governance. Progressive or potentially progressive nations and communities have responsive bureaucrats; oppressive realms have bureaucrats notorious for their despotism.
While there are local exceptions, U.S. bureaucracy is generally the worst in the industrial world: the worst public schools and the most ignorant students; the most miserly safety net and the most lethal poverty; the laziest employees and the most wasteful ratio of taxes to services — and therefore, predictably, the greatest public distrust of government.
The malfeasance at the Department of Veterans Affairs is depressingly typical of any number of agencies at any level:
http://www.armytimes.com/news/2009/03/military_ve...
Equally evident in caseworkers whose deliberate negligence fosters murderous child abuse and highway inspectors whose calculated dishonesty facilitates deadly bridge collapse, the problem is not predatory executives versus defiant workers but an entire Moron Nation in which public schools and mass media have reconditioned the working class to embrace the ethos of moral imbecility that formerly defined only the capitalist ruling class. There is no obligation beyond self; maximum greed is ultimate virtue; wealth is virtue’s divine reward; poverty is divine punishment for insufficient greediness.
Such is the ethos of the U.S. today: infinitely resistant to communal values, easily re-agitated into the Reaganoid/Limbaugh solidarity of de facto one-party dictatorship that has already looted us beyond recovery.
It is this reality of a people irremediably conditioned to lockstep moral imbecility that will almost certainly be President Obama’s undoing. Thus, among progressives, a cynicism that in bitter truth is the height of rationality.
The fact that the American electorate was capable of the “miracle” of electing Obama suggests that it may not be “rational” to always assume the worst will happen. We are living in unprecedented times. No one knows what is going to happen. The trick is to be able to accept that uncertainty instead of comforting oneself with the belief that it will inevitably be a disappointment.
Perhaps Sue because I have lived and worked in the rural United States nearly as much as I have lived and worked in major cities — perhaps because I have been not only a journalist and a civil rights activist but also a union member and a blue-collar worker (and have therefore witnessed from four distinct perspectives the depths of this nation’s bigotry and reflexive hatefulness) — I have no comforting illusions about the resilience of its seeming conversion to progressive values.
Indeed the betrayal of President Obama has already begun: note that both The Wall Street Journal and Huffington Post (links below) are now reporting the proposed Employee Free Choice Act — the single most important legislation since the Wagner Act in terms of liberating the U.S. from enslavement to the capitalist ruling class — is almost certainly doomed. Not by Republican opposition, but by traitorous Democrats responding to a combination of ruling class pressure and the suicidal anti-unionism of a theocratically conditioned, southern or redneck-state electorate so morally imbecilic and aggressively ignorant it identifies totally with its oppressor and is therefore hopelessly reactionary — its stubbornly Ku Klux mentality infinitely beyond the reach of any persuasive process of political re-education.
Thus is the revolution murdered at birth: the Employee Free Choice Act was the one true weapon for change in the President’s arsenal, indeed the ONLY such weapon, and without it — without the shock troops of a re-empowered and re-mobilized working class — the entire progressive program is reduced to a meaningless exercise in slogans and chanting.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123664230925077531.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/03/10/employee-free-choice-act_n_173523.html