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Monday, November 10, 2008

Re-Working the Center

When glowing declarations about "moving to the center" actually mean realigning public policy to better reflect the center-left views that Americans have supported for generations rather than moving to the far-right while bought-and-paid-for corporate-military media figurines peddle such out-of-touch extremism as some kind of commonsense populism, well, then "moving to the center" is a different phenomenon than we are used to hearing about and not necessarily something to resist or fear.

We all need to thoughtfully assess the actual actions and policies Obama captions with phrases like "moving to the center" before unreflectively freaking out about them. Subversive citations of slogans like "bipartisanship" and "moving to the center" in the service of leftward realignment do powerful and even necessary rhetorical work for progressives.

People are investing Obama's utterances and personnel choices with a significance that in many cases looks more like superstition than intelligence right about now. Some skeptical scrutiny is very sensible, some progressive pressure is very useful, but to trampoline from the trickle of conduct and information presently available to declarations of Progressivism Betrayed Again are nearly as absurd as those that deem Obama the arrival of the Age of Aquarius.

It seems to me a center-left shift from the far-right falsely figured as center is an undeniably good thing for people of the radically and socially democratic left like me, but it certainly isn't something I am going to confuse for my own politics or mistake as good enough to settle for. A center-left shift refigured as the commonsensical mainstream it has actually long been but has rarely been recognized to be sweeps away a crippling rhetorical minefield for actually democratizing politics, and hence represents an opening for truly progressive work. Not the accomplishment, an opening.

As Obama put it in his victory speech in Grant Park: "This victory alone is not the change we seek. It is only the chance for us to make that change."

There's a lot up for grabs at the moment. A center-left vital center is a good foothold on which progressives can build, a firm purchase on history from which to make a difference that makes a difference.

I think we need to allow ourselves to enjoy the beautiful and hopeful accomplishment represented by Obama's Presidency, we need to understand that a center-left Administration is truly good but not good enough for progressives, and then we need to build on what is good and demand more rather than assume the worst, abandon painful compromises with stakeholders who share the world with us but with whom we disagree, reject the real good at hand for ideal perfections in our heads, pretend that a center-left America is actually as radically left as we are, and so on.

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