Sometimes I think I can be unreasonably impatient with idealists. There’s a role for explaining how things ought to be even if it’s completely unrealistic. A climate scientist might argue that we should stop putting carbon in the air starting tomorrow, and they probably can make a strong case to back up their position. They just shouldn’t expect politicians to take much time today trying to accomplish this, since it’s an impossible ask.
That’s kind of how I feel about the more than 200 political scientists who “have put forward a sweeping proposal to change the way the United States has conducted its federal elections for nearly 250 years.” Their idea is that we should do away with winner-take-all elections and adopt proportional representation. They make a great case for why this would be beneficial to the country, but it feels like wasted energy.
The obstacles should be obvious, beginning with the basic problem that you’re asking legislatures, which are by definition made up of people who have won under the current rules, to change things up so radically that their own positions and degree of power could be imperiled or diminished. That makes them unlikely to change state and/or federal laws, or to amend the U.S. Constitution.
Pragmatism isn’t necessarily antagonistic to idealism, but it deals in the realm of the possible. I’m reminded of this subset of health advocates who would rather not have people insured under the Obamacare reforms because the best solution would be a single-payer system. A lot of people suffered and died while nothing was getting done. Pragmatists stepped in and found a way forward.
Still, there was value in people advocating for single-payer and explaining the reasons. They helped the pragmatists make their case that something must be done.
It’s just hard to listen to people make unrealistic demands and harshly criticize people who won’t pursue their hardline dreams.
We can make progress on how our elections are financed and conducted, taking into account where we are as a country and how difficult it is to create fundamental change. I’d much rather see a plan for that than this open letter from political scientists.
It’s the idealists who convince younger people and relatively open-minded not-young people that the system is dysfunctional and needs to be replaced in order to solve the problem.
Some of them hoot and holler and demand everything to be changed right now or they’re going to stay home and binge watch Storage Wars. Most of them, however, go about convincing other people that they’re right so that some changes can occur around the periphery sooner than they otherwise would, in hopes that enough people will adopt the same beliefs to replace the system at some point in the near future, hopefully within their own lifetimes.
The trick is to ignore the ones who want full-scale Social Democracy in September of 2022, and embrace the ones who are trying to warn everyone that if we don’t have Social Democracy by the 2030s, Eco-Fascism is pretty much going to be the default – and not just here, but everywhere.
I’m guessing it’s (in part) your organizing background that both makes your blood boil at idealists like those political scientists…and allows you to recognize that idealists have a role to play in trying to make our world a better place.
Part of what’s infuriating about this is that these are *political scientists*!!! It’s literally their job to think clearly about politics. It could drive one to despair that so many of them are so disconnected from the realities of politics.
At moments like these I find it helpful to go back to a 1938 essay by John Herman Randall (also a political scientist) titled “On the Importance of Being Unprincipled”, a wonderfully clear and witty and scathing attack on unrealistic academics and a defense of the give-and-take and messiness of democratic politics in general and the actions of FDR in particular…especially when contrasted with the rising dominance of totalitarian governments of the left and right elsewhere in the world.
Adding: one under-discussed aspect of the Biden administration is the degree to which it has made politics *work*—passing major legislation (on a bipartisan basis, to the dismay of many Democrats, when possible and on party-line votes when necessary), issuing meaningful executive orders (e.g., student loan debt forgiveness), rebuilding the capacity of government agencies to act effectively, intervening effectively in major private sector disputes (e.g., the railroad contract negotiations).
It often hasn’t been pretty, but cumulatively it adds up to the best possible argument against fascism.
Ideology is the great crippler of young minds. Ideology is a box into which one forces one’s mind, a self-imposed intellectual prison.
I’m a blue check on twitter (under a different name) and was recently harassed by PETA idealists. With a distinct ideology. Net result: I blocked them all, and ordered a new shipment of Chicago hot dogs and fixins’. (Yes, including radioactive green relish and sport peppers.) Sometimes idealists actually solidify opposition by virtue of their extreme positions. Sometimes idealists glom onto a hashtag because it sounds cool – #Defund, for example – which by virtue of its idealistic imbecility ensured that police departments would face no pressure to reform, and Democrats would spend the next decade kissing law enforcement’s ass.
Communists started out as idealists. So did Italian fascists and German Nazis. Eugenics is an idealistic position. Racial purity is an idealistic position. There’s a tendency to equate ‘idealism’ and Leftism. Ain’t necessarily so. Or to assume that any ‘ideal’ must be a virtuous one.
So, some idealists are necessary. Some idealists do good. Some idealists just make mischief. And some idealists are evil.