Politics as Human Focused and Reality Focused

When we humans "do" politics we focus on other humans rather than extra-human considerations. I suggest that we do so at our own peril. Politics as we now do it can be called inter-politics, that is between humans in the context of their societies. This leads us to suppose that the important issues lie between human beings rather than between human beings and the context in which their species exists.

Barack Obama, despite strong campaign appeals to progressives to accept his "vision", has created a cabinet composed mainly of Clintonite retreads. Despite all the hype, he has time and again rejected the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, which was the wing that gave him so much support during the election. I ask why this profound shift after being elected?

In what follows I may be giving Obama the benefit of the doubt.

Let us assume that what we have witnessed, including giving the prominence of the inaugural prayer to Rick Warren, is Obama's effort to "bridge" the gap between left and right, that is between two human groups. Notably, Bill Clinton tried this with his Democratic Leadership Council, which pandered to the Religious Right and to corporate domination of the economy. It did this with what we now know as disastrous consequences. It is no consolation to see Obama go to the same people to facilitate his "bridging" act. In both these cases I suggest we are looking at people-driven politics rather than reality-driven. Clinton and Obama have looked to the political middle for what is needed.

Reality does not necessarily lie at the middle. The real world requires large scale addressing of issues mankind has never had to face before, e.g. global warming, massive over population and critical environmental degradation. It is, in my estimation, the primary job of the politician to bring these kinds of issues to center stage so that they can be addressed in the terms they require while there is still time to do so democratically. Continuing neglect will necessitate dictatorship as in China's mandated family size with its horrific impact on female babies. It should be noted that the Republicans have not sought to build bridges, rather they have reveled in playing hardball, including shutting down the federal government under Newt Gingrich and creating an imperial presidency under G. W. Bush. They have thereby moved the "center' further and further to the right to the point that we face incipient fascism. This method of doing politics references only the political power of groups of people and focuses on the ways to manipulate people rather than on the problems the people face. I suggest this is a fruitless way to go about politics in the desperate times we face. Among other things it is too easily controlled by ideologies and people's perfidies and bigotries.

The politics of reality, on the other hand, can bring people together based upon the common threats they face. This is most notable in wartime, when desperate circumstances override ideological differences.

The progressive mission should be a fundamentally reality-driven politics presenting the real world as humanity faces it and articulating clearly and forcefully the consequences for humanity if it disregards the necessary.

In a politics of reality human population would rise to a major focus of political concern. One may ask how this issue can be made politically viable when major religions oppose methods for dealing with it. The politics of this reality require an Al Gore of population growth to make clear what the consequences for humanity will inevitably be. For example, as Gore showed the before and after of glacier melt, we need to show the before and after of population growth, the massive suburban sprawl since the end of World War II , a major source of global warming, the food riots in India and Africa and the massive congestion of our cities. It must make clear that advocates of population growth are enemies of mankind.

Another reality that needs to be faced is the fact that the job will be decreasingly available as a means of distributing the gross annual product. As automation, computerization and robotization increasingly set in, jobs will increasingly disappear. We are seeing some of these consequences in a United Sates economy built on finance, not manufacturing and in social disruptions like the youth rioting in Athens specifically because there are no jobs. What, if anything, will replace the job as a means for distributing the wealth generated by society's productivity? This is not to mention the job's psychological and social function of establishing personal significance, an even more profound victim of automation. My father was proud of the fact that he never went on the "dole" during the Great Depression although he sometimes made less than WPA paid. Until society creates the moral equivalent of the job, increasing numbers of citizens will be psychologically and socially on the dole.

In brief, the issue of Right and Left should be replaced by the issue of Fantasy, either religious or economic, and the Real as our planet presents it to us.

Bob Newhard

An Age of Ideologues

When Allan Greenspan confessed to Congress that he knew that the mortgage crisis was immanent, but said nothing, he did so because he believed the market would correct itself without massive government interference. He said acting on this belief had worked for forty years and he was very surprised when it did not do so this time. I was dumbstruck by this admission. Capitalism has been subject to the boom and bust cycle since its inception. As long ago as the 1830s the economist Henry George was wrestling with the problem of how to mitigate this process to minimize the suffering that went with it. The Great Depression, a mere 70 plus years ago, is an obvious warning, especially when so much of the regulatory apparatus designed to protect society from a repeat had been dismantled by "free market" ideologues from Ronald Reagan on. All this was known to Greenspan, but he could not believe that the free market would not correct itself. This is the mark of an ideologue, in this case an Ayn Rand-believing, libertarian ideologue. The largest economy the world has ever seen was placed in the hands of an ideologue.

It is common to believe that the 19th or 20th centuries were the period that saw the rise of ideology to prominence. Socialism, communism and capitalism, each of whose adherents refuse to call it an ideology, a term of denigration reserved for the other two isms, were predominant. I want, however, to use a broader conception of ideology to include systems of belief devoid of evidence, in politics and religion as well. I believe we live in an age of ideology because of this age's extreme multidimensional complexity. In such an environment people seek simplicity in all-encompassing explanations. Living within the scope of knowledge is not enough to assuage the fear of the unknown, which is what extreme complexity amounts to.

As population increase and environmental degradation reduce mankind's survival options, it will become increasingly important that knowledge, with its concomitant tentativeness, increasingly replace ideology. The fundamental question here is whether human beings, who have for millennia relied upon one form or another of ideology to guide them through the unknown, can be brought to rely on knowledge as the guide into the unknown. Ideology's main attraction has been the emotional satisfaction it provides. Knowledge can offer no such all-encompassing assurance.


An alternative to ideology now in increasing vogue is "pragmatism." When Barack Obama began his campaign he focused on "change." He talked in terms of his "vision." Since winning the election he is talking increasingly of "pragmatism". He says we must see what works and if it doesn’t try something else. This is not knowledge at work: It is trial and error on a massive scale. What is needed is a broad assessment, based upon what we know, in order to give some cumulative and continuing benefit. We know from the history of the Great Depression that the way to get the economy going again is to feed money in from the bottom, i.e. through jobs. We know that the economy of a large society needs, to a certain extent, to be planned and we know that the capitalist market is exceptionally vulnerable to human greed, i.e. over-speculation. We also know that the world's population is going to have to do with less. This is the kind of knowledge that has to be brought to bear on our current fiscal crisis, not simply trial and error pragmatism or economic ideology.

Bob Newhard