A similar problem occurs when progressives latch onto stories that are based entirely on quotes from anonymous Democratic sources. For example, it is becoming hard to count the number of times during the Iraq supplemental fight that differing groups of commenters on progressive blogs have gone ballistic over AP, New York Times, or Washington Post stories where anonymous Democratic sources have indicated that a Democratic cave on Iraq is imminent. Even though we don't know who these sources are, how close they are to the leadership, or how much influence they have over the process, there are many in our own ranks who seem ready to cry bloody murder at the first sign of Democratic weakness on the supplemental bill. Yesterday's frequent outrage in the comments and diaries of places like Dailykos and Democratic Underground what now appears to be an inaccurate AP story on Democrats getting ready to cave on Iraq in a good example of this.

Personally, based on my past experiences in getting burned by similar reports, I did not join in the chorus yesterday. After buying into a few similar anonymous reports back in February and March, my general philosophy has been to wait to see what is actually in the bill, and keep piling on the pressure in the meantime. It needs to be remembered that Democrats who feed anonymous quotes to a journalistic corps that is perpetually chomping at the bit to write the next "Democrats divided" or "Democrats cave" story on any given subject have an agenda, and usually that agenda is not favorable to either the leadership or to the majority of Democrats in the Congressional caucus. This is a long established means of undermining Democratic unity and triangulating against the base, and deserves just as much skepticism as stories that put words in the mouths of prominent Democrats. Essentially, those two types of stories are the same, as more often than not they both seek to rewrite reality and portray Democrats according to long-running narratives of "division" and "weakness."

Beyond this media skepticism, however, there is another reason I haven't typically joined in the Sturm und Dang over the latest outrage on Democratic caving (whatever that issue may happen to be at any given time). Simply put, my expectations for what Democrats will accomplish in their first two years of power in Congress are pretty low. It always seems strange to me when I see progressives grow angry over Democrats in Congress not moving to impeach, or not simply cutting off all war funding by never introducing any new Iraq supplemental bills to the floor of Congress. Expectations of this level seem absurdly high for a party that is only now, in the last few years, coming out of a right-wing drift that was so out of hand Joe Lieberman was our Vice-Presidential nominee less than seven years ago. Further, the two most prominent consultants in the Democratic Party infrastructure had actually wanted an even more right-wing nominee, Zell Miller, instead of Lieberman. About half of the federal officials of the party went along with the drumbeat to war in 2002-2003. In the late 1990's and early years of this decade, Social Security privatization was absolutely on the table for many in our leadership. It was a democratic President who pushed through NAFTA and welfare reform against the majority of voters in his own party, and then signed DOMA with only about 30% of Democrats dissenting. Further, not four years ago, one-time DLC "golden boy" Howard Dean was taken down by an assortment of Democratic elders for being too left-wing, too aggressive against Bush, and for even associating with dirty grassroots hippies. Basically, we are still struggling to resurface from an era where the DLC-nexus, LieberDem machine had a stranglehold n the party, and as such my expectations for what the party can accomplish, even when in control of Congress, are not particularly great. I never expected us to get much legislation passed apart from the broadly popular first 100 hours agenda. I certainly did not expect a Democratic Congress to end the war before Bush left office, much less actually impeach him. After all, this is the same Democratic Party that I spent much of my twenties not joining because I thought it was too right-wing, and the same country where opposition to the Iraq war was considered heretical just four years ago. I always imagined that progressive change would take a long time, and have many bumps in the road.

When I read other bloggers and progressive activists complaining about things like the hydrocarbon clause in an earlier version of the Iraq supplemental, and using that clause as justification to argue things like "the Democratic Party leadership should now officially be labeled conspirators in the war effort," what I find most remarkable is how I no longer share the perspective that could lead one to make such a conclusion. At my core, I at least think I am just as skeptical of the ideological predilections of most members of the Democratic Party as writers like Matt Tabbi (who I linked above), but our skepticism now comes from fundamentally different perspectives. For some progressives, there seems to be a desire to pounce on anything negative, compromising, or seemingly right-wing the Democratic Party might do as a means of justifying their wish to keep a distance from the Democratic Party, or even from contemporary electoral politics altogether. This perspective seems to me to be based on having higher expectations for the Democratic Party in the short term than I do, and a general unwillingness to associate with the Democratic Party until it reaches those expectations, rather than working within the party to help it reach those expectations. By way of contrast, from my perspective, the negative, right-wing compromises people point out in the Democratic Party are simply a given, as they are reflective of long-standing power imbalances that have gone unchecked by those who wish to withdrawal from the Democratic Party and electoral politics. From this vantage point, anything the Democratic Party accomplishes beyond negative, right-wing compromises is a positive sign of the improving situation within the Democratic Party caused by increasing and more effective progressive involvement within the party. I never thought we would, for example, manage to kick Joe Lieberman out of the party, force Democrats to run against the Iraq war, and then send a bill with a withdrawal timeline to Bush's desk. Just eighteen months before Bush vetoed the Iraq Accountability Act, Rahm Emanuel refused to even mention Iraq in televised interviews, Joe Lieberman was penning Iraq op-eds in the Wall Street Journal on behalf of Democrats, and fewer than a dozen Senators supported a timeline for withdrawal. When placed in the broad context of the American political struggle over war in Iraq, starting in early 2002 with the drumbeat and continuing straight through to the fight over the Iraq supplemental, progressives clearly have the momentum, and the Democratic Party is moving in a progressive direction. And I don't think we would have accomplished any of that had progressives stayed aloof from electoral politics and the Democratic Party.

Now, I admit that there are potential flaws in my perspective. With expectations as low as mine, it is easy to be happy with what Democrats virtually no matter what they do, which can be dangerous. Further, it is possible that my skepticism of media reports on Democrats has begun to cause my skepticism of the party itself to deteriorate. I tend view media reports on dividing / caving Democrats as mainly representative of a systematic, structural power imbalance that the Republican Noise Machine and DLC-nexus have long used to greatly disadvantage progressives in the national discourse. However, sometimes such stories are actually representative of Democrats caving / dividing. Because of these dangers, the Sturm und Dang perspective on the Democratic Party, where the sky is always falling and what the party accomplishes is never good enough, serves as a useful counter-weight to the Realpolitk perspective that I often espouse. It is important to have regular discussion between progressives whose first inclination is to defend the Democratic Party on the grounds of pragmatic, long-term progress, and those progressive whose first inclination is to attack it for failure to reach lofty expectations in the short-term. Without perspective both on what lefty progressives are aiming for, and on how that can be achieved, both the Realpolitk and Sturm und Dang groups can quickly lose their way. The 2000 election is a perfect example of how bad such a situation can become.

If things end up going badly in the Iraq supplemental fight this week, or on new trade deals this summer, I hope this is something everyone in the progressive movement remembers. While a watered down bill that funds the war through September, or harmful trade bills with a couple new countries would be damaging, we have still made tremendous progress by working within the party these past few years. At the same time, it would be wrong to declare total victory and reserve any criticism of our performance to date. The real danger would come if we drop our system of checks and balances that prevents high expectations from leading to defeatist strategies, or allowing our desire for pragmatic progress to result in far too extensive compromise with the political status quo. I write this because we all know there are those who wish to swear off further communication with different groups in the progressive movement, or even just the progressive blogosphere, because they view certain people and groups as moving too far in one direction or the other. If that were to happen on a wide scale, that would be the only way for us to truly be politically defeated in any of these fights. Remember to fight those urges, and to keep the lines of communication open at all times, because communication among diverse perspectives has been an essential internal check and balance that has led to the successes of the progressive movement over these past few years. there are lots more fights to come, and if we stop talking to each other / start swearing each other off, we will lose them all.