"The Professional Left" or De-Professional Left?

I find it interesting that few of the people who seem to have been and feel that they were targeted by Robert Gibbs' derogative term "the professional left" are professional commentators at all, but part of the mass amateurization of criticism across the left blogipelago. Paid, professional commentators in traditional and broadcast media may be irritating, carping, vapid, corrupt, incompetent gossips, certainly, but only rarely seem to be making ideologically consistent cases against the Obama Administration's too corporate-military friendly stances of the kind that seem to have really gotten under their skin and provoked the annoyance registered in that term.

I am of two minds about the sorts of criticisms that have raised Administration hackles. I mean, I'm a dirty fucking hippy faggot commie who teaches at an art school in San Francisco, I think the Administration is timid on queer issues, wrong on Afghanistan, and too corporatist on the economy. And, sure, I think it is necessary to push Obama from the left on these and other issues, in part because I think he is more open to being pushed from the left than any other President in my lifetime has been, whatever my frustrations with him. I also do think that the Administration has a string of substantially progressive legislative accomplishments to its credit, achieved in the midst of extraordinary distress in this country, and in the face of literally historically unprecedented obstructionism, for which they get little credit because these accomplishments are measured against legislatively unrealistic logically-optimal ideal policy outcomes (like single-payer and nationalizing the banks, both of which seemed to me great ideas not worth trying for in 2008-2009 unless by "trying" you mean to engage in organized revolutionary activity of some kind, which seems to me not a great idea at all).

I think this sort of pointlessly unrealistic and often ultimately demoralizing critique happens as often as it does largely because the left-blogipelago (a description which has the virtue of better giving the lie to overgeneralizations of the kind I am making here than the more conventional imagery of a smooth "blogosphere") has been climbing a steep learning curve as it shifts from the blanket resistance to the Bush Administration era of its infancy to progressive advocacy actually responsible for governing a diversity of stakeholders with many of whom one disagrees. If that seems patronizing of me to say, let me be the first to add that I have been among the ones who has had to do some serious learning about how the Senate actually works and how political parties in the US actually operate and so on, all the while blogviating away, come what may, like the rest.

And more to the point, I would argue that it actually remains to be seen if peer-to-peer formations of education, agitation, and organization, providing, for example, rapid pushback against broadcast-mediated narratives in the current newscycle, or small campaign donor aggregation successfully challenging incumbent candidates whose voting records fail to reflect their progressive constituencies, really will have the substantial and democratizing impact on Democratic party politics we hope they will.

It seems to me that the record of online activism -- even including such high-profile success stories as MoveOn.org -- and especially incumbent candidate challenges is, to be generous, mixed so far. The lesson of the demise of Acorn, an actually indispensable and not yet replaced or avenged community organizing formation, and largely without a peep, in the face of a firestorm of utterly bogus mass-mediated broadcast-incumbent outrage, seems to me a terrible portent for those of us who have had rosy expectations for p2p-democratization (me, for one). And it remains to be seen whether or not the capture of so much peer to peer organizing energy by Obama for America is ultimately a dysfunctional domestication of left p2p-formations or might facilitate the p2p-democratization of the Democratic Party apparatus over the longer term.

To the extent that Gibbs' derisive denigration of "The Professional Left" seems much more precisely to denigrate the "de-professional left" of p2p educators, agitators, and organizers, I cannot claim to think this bodes well for my own hopes for the latter.