Neoliberalism, My Ass

[KMOD]

Continuing my rant…

In this section, let’s talk about ideology for a bit.

Imagine, if you will, that you come back from your Caribbean vacation to find that your house is flooded. You have $20,000 available to fix whatever needs fixing, but instead of fixing the gaping hole in the roof, you decide to replace all of the floors and the carpet instead. That makes no rational sense, of course, which is what makes the liberal elites (who, quite ironically, call pragmatic progressives “liberal elites”) so frustrating. Much of what you read in the professional left is complete bullshit and has no basis in reality, but it is the rest of us who are crazy and “lack vision.” One thing I learned when I earned by political science degree is that political theory is just that, and bears little to no relationship to reality. Sorry if that’s hard to take, but it’s true.

Just this morning, I awoke to a new comment on my list of Obama accomplishments, taking me to task because I opened the list with a statement that we elected the most progressive president in history in 2008. The commenter said I was being inaccurate when I called Obama progressive, which is absurd on its own, but then he proceeded to prove that he didn’t understand what I said by citing President Obama’s support for the TPP as proof that he isn’t progressive.

Think about that a second. Not only did he not understand what I said, but he was commenting on a list of 358 improvements he has made to benefit society. In other words, in the minds of people like this, someone who says all the right things IS progressive, while those who make actual “progress” don’t qualify. You can feed tens of millions of poor people and disarm the police in black neighborhoods and you can cure cancer, but if you don’t think the TPP is evil and you don’t believe that income inequality is the key issue for most people, you can’t be progressive in any way. That is completely irrational and it explains why progressives are often the least progressive demographic anywhere. The loudest, most obnoxious group of white liberal elitists (note the lack of quotation marks) have decided that they alone have the authority to decide who is and isn’t “progressive” based on the other person’s position on a pet issue. Ideologically speaking, such irrationality makes the left look stupid and causes voters who don’t have the time to watch 10 hours of cable “news” every day to want to stay home on Election Day. Hence, the anti-progress GOP has far too much power.

Yes, I am pragmatic, but anyone with a brain will take pragmatic any day over profoundly stupid.

The view of ideology many of these people have is rooted in pure fantasy. PUBs and professional lefties have convinced themselves that the Democratic Party has become anti-ideological in recent years. I can’t tell you how many times I have heard that and it’s ridiculous. They claim that we Democrats have chosen to reject liberalism and progressive politics in favor of pragmatism, which they will happily say or write with sarcasm dripping from their fangs. You know, because to BE a progressive requires that we always say “progressive things.” Doing is always secondary to saying all the right things to them. Why can’t they see how moronic this sounds? I can be for all of the ideals of the progressive movement AND be pragmatic about achieving progress, because that’s how it’s done. That’s just how democracy works, folks.

read it all, it's great! http://pleasecutthecrap.com/neoliberalism-my-ass/

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