Politics-- The Art Of The Possible? Please, Give Me A Break

-by Valley Girl

"Politics is the Art of the Possible."

Hearing that phrase always makes me grind my teeth. One person on a college email list I am on (all Democrats) likes to repeat this phrase. Sanctimonious Bullshit I say.

On his twitter stream, Howie posted a link to a Jacobin article, which I read with great interest. And having read that, I went off to Google and found an excellent, thoughtful article from 2010 about “the art of the possible.” I will use an edited version of this first here, because it sets the stage for the more recent Jacobin article. [my additions are bolded]

The problem with “the art of the possible.”

Whenever a commentator declares that "politics is the art of the possible," I'm on my guard. What I'm being told, I suspect, is to accept apparent present conditions as immutable facts of life, and to trim my goals accordingly. I'm being told to let injustices stand.

Like all banalities, the familiar dictum contains an obvious truth. To be politically effective, you have to be able to distinguish between your desires and realities on the ground, between aspirations and resources.

But like most banalities, it begs more questions than it answers. How is "the possible" defined? Where are its limits drawn? Who draws them? Theoretically, the possible is an elastic and speculative category. But the dictum draws no distinctions between the immediately unlikely and the ultimately impossible, takes no notice of the infinite and shifting gradations between them, and of the impact of human agency in shifting an outcome from one category to another.

What's usually meant when politics is pronounced the art of the possible is that politics is a calculation of the probable, an exercise in the pragmatic, the expedient or the opportune.

The adage implies forcefully that minimal improvements or lesser evils are the only realistic aim--and any demand for more is self-indulgence. It's an injunction not only to compromise, but to get your compromise in first. To placate hostile forces in advance, as Obama tried to do with health care reform.

Obama's election was in itself a vivid display of the eruption of the supposedly impossible into the realm of the ordinary. The slogan "Yes we can" evoked a defiance of assumed limitations. Now Obama's supporters are being lectured for expecting too much from the president, for not understanding that "politics is the art of the possible." Here, as in so many instances, the "possible" is a code word for what vested interests will permit.

...When people speak of politics as the art of the possible, they imply a world of unexamined assumptions about the limits of the possible-- a world that embodies only the limits of their own experience or imagination. In its unreflective way, the dictum treats the superficial conditions of the moment as unchangeable realities. In effect, it serves as a denial of possibility, a closing of the aperture into the future.

It also urges us not to feel the urgency of injustice. The dictum is cold comfort to the oppressed, the victims of poverty, discrimination and violence, who are asked to continue suffering while distant arbiters decide what is or is not "possible" in their case. It sacrifices the poor, the hungry, the desperate on the altar of a self-serving pragmatism.

Impatience, in fact, is a necessary political virtue. Without it, even the most gradual change is inconceivable. And a politician who is not impatient with injustice, with needless death and destruction, is worse than useless.

Those who dispute the dictum are accused of utopianism, which is condemned as an intellectual and emotional error--not just a mistake, but a danger. Of course utopias are no substitute for the practice of politics, and can serve as an evasion of present responsibilities. But a practical politics stripped of serious ideas about what would constitute a just human society is a greater and more common menace.

…Utopias provide a perspective from which the assumed limitations of the present can be examined, from which familiar social arrangements can be revealed as unjust, irrational or unnecessary. They are a means of expanding the borders of the possible.

You can't chart the surface of the earth or compute distances without a point of elevation--a mountaintop, a star or a satellite. You can't chart the possible in society without an angle of vision, a mental mountaintop that permits the widest sweep. The pundits championing the art of the possible are the flat-earthers of today, afraid to venture too far from shore lest they fall off the edge.

It's striking how often pundits of "the possible" rest their case on all kinds of gross improbabilities.

In insisting that there was no alternative to neoliberal economics, many assumed, in defiance of obvious objections, that speculation had no limits, that wealth-making could be severed from productive activity, that private interests would magically coagulate into public benefit, that industrial growth could be limitless on a planet with finite resources. Here, the art of the possible has been revealed as a dismal pseudo-science, its certainties built on foundations of sand.

It is very much the vice of the center-left. The right is bolder, more confident, more reckless and strongly driven by their own utopian visions (which would be dystopias for the rest of us). In contrast, liberals advise each other to trim their ambitions, to sacrifice their goals in order to remain politically viable.

In the wake of 9/11, liberals in the U.S. largely signed up to the Afghanistan invasion--because to fail to do so would place them outside an apparently immutable pro-war consensus. Those who kept their nerve and set about building an antiwar movement proved the more farsighted.

Of course, if your politics is about personal aggrandizement, then it will be "the art of the possible" in the narrowest sense. But for those who seek in politics a means of changing society for the better, it must be the art of redefining the possible. The art-science-craft of coaxing from the present, with its complex mix of possibilities and limitations, a just and sustainable human future.

Now back to the Jacobin article Howie posted on Twitter, The Midterms’ Winners, Losers, and Double-Losers. Keep in mind the first article above while reading below, because they mesh perfectly.

By running to the right, Democrats insist on losing twice: at the polls and in constructing an inspiring agenda. Bold left-wing politics are our only hope for long-term, substantive victory.

In the throes of an identity crisis and scrambling to recover ground lost in 2016, Democrats tried a wide array of tactics in this year’s midterm elections. Some tacked left, others tacked right. Both strategies yielded mixed results. But the major difference between the two approaches is that the Democrats who parroted conservative talking points ceded politically to the Right, even when they won their elections. Those who articulated a bold progressive political vision claimed a crucial victory for the Left, even when they appeared to go home empty-handed.

When Democrats compromise on left-wing values to win office, that’s a draw for the Left at best. This is because the task of the Left in the political sphere isn’t simply to prevent Republicans from gaining majorities-- it’s to defeat the right-wing agenda, in all its forms. If that’s your goal, incorporating conservative positions and rhetoric into your own campaign is an unsound strategy, destined to undermine you in the long run.

Not Whether, But How You Win

Consider the case of incumbent Democratic Senator Joe Donnelly of Indiana. Donnelly tacked way right-- touting his collaboration with Trump and voicing support for the proposed border wall, promising to “cut regulations that cost jobs,” positioning himself as the more reasonable of two pro-life candidates, and warning that Medicare for All would pass “over my dead body.” He calls his brand of politics “Hoosier common-sense middle,” but the word he’s looking for is “conservative.” [editor: or opportunism and inauthenticity, long the mark of Donnelly's political career, both in the House and then the Senate.]

Donnelly lost. Even with an incumbent’s advantage and the ringing endorsement of Barack Obama [Proponent of the “The Art of the Possible,” “President Pre-compromise,” who visited Indiana for a last-minute rally with the senator, [Donnelly] was unseated by Republican challenger and Trump acolyte Mike Braun. Braun is an aggressively pro-corporate multi-millionaire businessman and free-market evangelist who exploited a man’s death against his widow’s wishes in a campaign ad designed to spread fear about undocumented immigrants.

[Bernie] Sanders did something even more important than defeating his opponent on the political stage: he gave millions of people permission to take their innate disgust with economic inequality and exploitation seriously as a political framework.

There are two main reasons to be leery of Donnelly’s approach. First, it doesn’t work.

When Democrats tack to the right-- often on economic issues, less often on social ones-- they justify it as a shrewd stratagem, even a prerequisite for victory. But the idea that Democrats stand a better chance at winning office if they posture as Republican-lite is baseless. Ordinary people, whose living standards are declining as their wages stagnate and their safety net disappears, are increasingly attracted to distinct and explicit political agendas and proposals for bold change.

Not even the very worst Democrap running for president

So when a Republican puts forth a brazen (if dystopian) vision of the future, and a Democrat responds by proposing a watered-down version of it, the Republican has the advantage. This is clearly what happened in Donnelly’s case. It’s also the reason that arch-centrist Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump, and why Bernie Sanders beat Hillary Clinton in Indiana.

Second, politics isn’t just about whether a candidate wins. It’s also about how they win, and on whose terms.

Elections are a unique opportunity to speak to people on a mass scale about the principles and values that should order society. Political candidates have a chance to say whatever they want to thousands and sometimes millions of people at a time. The choices they make about how to wield that power shape the popular conception of what ideas are admissible, what policies are desirable, and what social transformations are achievable.

Political campaigns are always either expanding or constricting the imagination of the public. For a candidate whose sense of political purpose extends beyond selfish careerism-- someone who wants not simply to improve their personal station, but for their political ideas to become ascendant in the long-term-- a campaign is an opportunity to educate and inspire constituents with a positive, unambiguous plan for a better society.

When a Republican like Braun stokes the fires of xenophobia and racism, and a Democrat like Donnelly responds by reiterating his support for a border wall to keep immigrants out-- promising that he won’t let the “[menacing voiceover] radical left” abolish ICE and asserting that we must do “whatever’s necessary to protect our border”-- this entrenches rather than challenges the conservative worldview. It’s a political victory for the Right, no matter who wins office.

Similarly, when a Republican calls for “market-driven health care solutions” as part of a larger program to pad corporate pockets at the expense of working people’s health, and a Democrat responds by aiming his indignation at the segments of the Left seeking to attain universal public healthcare, the Democrat has thrown the match. He’s wasted his opportunity to lay the groundwork for long-term left-wing victory by proposing an alternative to the right-wing capitalist vision of a world where people are subordinate to profits.

Winning on those terms is far from guaranteed-- and it’s hardly a victory at all.

A Widening Split

Donnelly’s a somewhat extreme example, at least on social issues. Though many Democrats agree with him on the need to cater to large businesses and the impermissibility of Medicare for All, most are pro-choice and oppose Trump’s border wall. But Donnelly’s strategy is not as anomalous in the Democratic Party as you might think.

Barack Obama could have gone anywhere in the country in the days before the midterm elections. He chose three, and one of those was Indiana. There, he stumped for a man who decided to campaign against a racist capitalist by shadowboxing with imaginary “radical left” opponents. Obama threw his weight behind Donnelly-- who openly opposes amnesty for immigrants and refugees-- by saying, “We need leaders who will actually stand up for what is right.”

Politics isn’t just about whether a candidate wins. It’s also about how they win, and on whose terms.

Thus we saw how the Democratic Party establishment is fully on board with this strategy of Thus swapping political conviction for what they assumed would be partisan victory.

Mostly this manifests as a fetishization of compromise. The Democrats recovered a majority in the House yesterday. Instead of taking the occasion to claim a victory for the Left over the Right, Nancy Pelosi promised that Congress would now function as a “bipartisan marketplace of ideas.” Even in their wildest political fantasies, basking in the glow of victory, Democrats see themselves sharing governing power with Republicans rather than defeating Republicans’ ideas.

This obsession with combining left and right politics, instead of simply pushing against the Right from the left, is the same strategy that for more than thirty years has kept Democrats busy mastering the art of compromise while Republicans pursue their high-octane austerity, privatization, and reactionary social agenda without any pretense to bipartisanship. Not only is it pathetic to behold, but the payoff is supposed to be electoral victory. That victory has been elusive.

Meanwhile, concessionary centrism from the Left matched by zealous ambition from the Right have combined to produce a rightward drift in American policy, especially as pertains to corporate empowerment and evisceration of the public sector.

But there is a split widening within the Democratic Party, and not every candidate in the midterms struck a centrist pose. Quite a few Democrats tacked left instead, contra Obama and Pelosi.

National Nurses United found that in 52 percent of congressional races, Democratic candidates supported Medicare for All or single-payer health care. This surge in candidate support for Medicare for All is pretty astonishing considering that two years ago Hillary Clinton, then the face of the Democratic Party, assured the public that single-payer healthcare will “never, ever come to pass.”

Candidates have changed their tune because the national conversation has shifted dramatically-- and that’s happened because Bernie Sanders has a different conception of the political value of an electoral campaign than mainstream Democrats do.

In 2016, when he went head-to-head with Clinton in the Democratic Party primary, his goal was not to simply beat his opponent by whatever means necessary-- though, tellingly, he did come much closer to winning than anyone expected, given that party elites reviled and actively restrained him. Instead he acted like a candidate acts when they have a clear political vision, and their goal is to popularize that vision and inspire a new constituency that will fight for that vision for years to come.

To this end, Sanders put forward a bold platform that tested the limits of what Americans thought was possible, while remaining achievable on the condition that Americans could muster the political will. He unflinchingly campaigned on ideas that would transform working people’s lives but that few Democrats had the guts to publicly propose, including Medicare for All to tuition-free college and student-debt forgiveness.

Putting this platform before a mass audience not only established new norms of legitimacy in the political mainstream-- it also worked to rewrite the narrative about the balance of power in American society. Sanders’ platform told a story about America with a new protagonist, the non-affluent majority, and a new antagonist, the ruling-class minority that profits from everyone else’s hard work and desperation.

As a result, even though he lost the primary election, Sanders emerged over the next two years as the most well-liked politician in America. Popular support for Medicare for All shot up from 21 percent in 2014 to a whopping 70 percent this year. Popular support for tuition-free public university reached 60 percent, up from an idea so obscure that pollsters didn’t even inquire about it.

By treating his campaign as an opportunity to reset the terms of the debate and raise the expectations of the ordinary people who comprise the broad working class, Sanders did something even more important and long-lasting than defeating his opponent on the political stage: he gave millions of people permission to take their innate disgust with economic inequality and exploitation seriously as a political framework. A majority of Americans now want to eliminate the private insurance industry and replace it with a single public alternative, and more than half of Democratic congressional candidates ran on the issue this November.

Candidates who backed Medicare for All and other progressive policies sustained a combination of defeats and victories. But they had in common a willingness to walk through the door that Sanders opened and use their campaigns to raise ordinary people’s expectations for what a good society can look like.

In an era dominated by unhinged Republicans and equivocating Democrats, running a widely observed campaign aimed at generalizing progressive and democratic socialist principles is a victory for the Left, whether or not the candidate defeats their opponent. When the Left runs as the Right and it loses, as Donnelly did, that’s a double loss. When the Left runs as the Left and it wins, as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Julia Salazar, and Franklin Bynum did this midterm season, that’s a double victory. And even when explicitly left-wing candidates don’t win office, their losses aren’t complete if they’ve dedicated their campaigns to articulating and popularizing progressive and democratic-socialist ideas on a mass scale. Let’s build more of those kinds of campaigns, instead of insisting on losing twice.

Kirsten Gillibrand, another would be Democratic presidential contender

Closing note: I (VG) graduated from college in 1969. It was a time of great social upheaval. I found an email I wrote to someone on the college list, back in Feb. 2013.

Our conversation happened to remind me of something I hadn't thought about in a while. I remember coming to this view back in college or thereabouts. Probably arose b/c of observations re: women's lib, and more general political protest that included violent actions (Weathermen, etc) and to a lesser extent very radical views from women's libbers. Even though what they did and said went beyond what I might have done myself, I was NOT willing to condemn them, privately, or especially in political conversations, of which there were many at that time. As best as I can recapture my thoughts, I felt that those on the extreme left were the ones driving political change in a positive direction, and I applauded their courage and commitment. Seemed to me that those who would take the "let's be reasonable" stand-- "those radicals are nuts"-- didn't do much to change things. My view was that those who pushed the boundaries way way beyond the comfort level of most people were essential to change. They pushed the boundaries such that what was considered acceptable middle ground, or whatever, moved to the left also. That was my own untutored analysis, based on my own opinions and observations at the time. I remember quite well coming to this point of view, and it seemed rather obvious to me at the time.

Only later did I learn, via internet reading, (20-30 years later) that this had been codified as a principle-- the Overton window or window of discourse. The term is derived from its originator, Joseph P. Overton. His political aims were quite different from mine. Nonetheless, his stated theory is seemingly identical to what I at arrived at on my own. And, right now (2013), the ultra die hard religious right, and the ultra conservatives, and the neo-cons are pushing the Overton window firmly in a rightward direction. Way back when, in college, of course, I saw the radical lefties pushing the window to the left.

Back to the present: We have to keep pushing the window of discourse to the left. The ideas that Bernie champions, which after all are supported by a majority of voters, need to be put front and center. Read this from DWT.

The Man in The Middle lost-- and now we have a fascist in his place