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Moving Forward Without Dogma

By Ken Brociner

Despite the severity of the current economic crisis, the morale of the progressive movement remains sky high. Liberals, progressives and leftists worked their tails off to help elect Barack Obama—and this time we won! Hundreds of thousands of progressive activists worked directly with the Obama campaign, while similarly large numbers worked in parallel projects such as the all-out mobilization organized by… return to article

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    I think the questions that Brociner raises are important ones, but I don’t entirely agree with his answers.

    Brociner says that the left wisely put aside its purist tendencies in order to get Obama elected, and that it should continue to leave them aside in order to get things accomplished. I agree with the first assertion but have reservations about the second assertion.

    Yes, it was wise to unite behind Obama during the electoral period. It is in the nature of elections to force coalitions; we have a wide diversity of viewpoints but relatively few candidates have any possibility of winning. A few purists continued to support Nader or the Green Party, and they’re certainly entitled to do that, and they even served a useful purpose in keeping the pure message alive, but in purely practical terms, if more than a few had taken that route, I would have agreed with Howard Zinn that they were “not doing the progressive movement any good.”

    However, outside the electoral season, I think it is time to encourage the development of that wide diversity of viewpoints. We need to think boldly and experiment with different ideas; otherwise the “change” that we have all called for will turn out to be overly cautious and meek.

    Brociner’s article doesn’t mention this point explicitly, but I think part of what he is talking about is the contrast between Obama’s nonadversarial style of campaigning and the highly adversarial style of analysis adopted by Chomsky and Klein. The nonadversarial style is more effective for winning over your opponents’ supporters. The adversarial style is intended, not to win over your opponents, but to better inform people who are already in your base.

    Brociner correctly states that Chomsky’s tone is often bitter. Klein seems to avoid that tone. However, Brociner also says that both Chomsky and Klein hold “an overly conspiratorial view of world politics.” I will grant that it is conspiratorial, but I’m not sure that it is overly so.

    —My comment continues for many more paragraphs. If you’re interested, you can read the rest of it at

    http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=78397114 4&blogID=466305312

    United States Posted by LeftyMathProf on Jan 25, 2009 at 5:40 PM

    I have to disagree with your position on the Balkan where you write “For example, when the Clinton administration finally did the right thing by intervening in order to stop Milosevic’s brutal aggression in Bosnia (1995) and Kosovo (1999), Chomsky adopted positions that assigned such sinister motives to NATO that they crossed over into a form of demonization.”.

    The way the US supported Izetbegovic in withdrawing his signature from the Lisbon agreement in 1992 is well known. This formed the start of the real fight. So your position that Clinton only worked for peace doesn’t hold.

    As for Kosovo. Before the war there were hundreds of death. After the war started thousands. So in this respect Chomsky is right. There is also little doubt that Clinton wanted to get rid of Milosevic. He supported the KLA and he offered Milosevic at Rambouillet an agreement that no Serb president would have signed (it offered NATO free access to all of Serbia). If he really had been only worried about human rights in Kosovo he would have pressured Milosevic to restore autonomy for the Albanians. That could have been achieved without war.

    Netherlands Posted by Wim Roffel on Jan 25, 2009 at 5:58 PM
    Page 1 of 1 pages

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