9.20.18 - Easy and Hard Constituencies

One simple but explanatory insight on American politics: the reasons conservatives speak and act with such a greater presumption of legitimacy than progressives is that they serve a much more easily satisfied constituency.

I was just listening to The Intercept's report on Puerto Rican recovery and history. They included a section decrying the 2016 PROMESA Act that Obama signed to try to help the island restructure its debt, having declared bankruptcy to the tune of $120+ billion. The Act was progressive in that it gave a shit at all about Puerto Rico, but fell well short of the comprehensive reform that would reverse the island's damaged history with its colonial owner.

In reality, of course, nothing would really satisfy the progressive base short of the installation of utopia — on the island and everywhere else. Even if the PROMESA Act reversed the harmful strictures Congress has imposed on the island, or even if they made it the 51st state and flooded it with funding, things wouldn't be perfect and there would be progressive agitators trying to wail about the urgency of fixing whatever there still was. This is as it should be, obviously — we need the dynamic of self-reinforcing improvement to persist — but it's also fundamentally impossible to quell. There will always be some improvement; some needless death; some police reform; some jobs guarantee.

Conservative politicians have it easier. They need to serve their donors fiscally, their hayseed supporters culturally, their nativist id structurally. Those are all very easy things to do. Not only are they fundamentally itching for preservation of the extant, but they only have to cut and argue for selfishness and appeal to this blood myth of Christian marketism and guns to be pure. Success is achievable for the conservative and impossible for the progressive.

The damage comes through when Democrats (hardly progressives by any measure, but) act with a trepidation seen nowhere on the Right. The most brazen tactics can keep Merrick Garland off the SCOTUS, but forget your flag pin and the true Americans will be all over you.

Maybe if Democrats felt like they were delivering rock-solid victories for their constituency, they'd be as ballsy. Unfortunately, that base is too diverse, too divided, too aspirational.

Even outside the realm of legislative policy, think of the difference on something like gender. Social conservatives win if they preserve the traditional binary and gender roles. And what would progressive "victory" look like? Well, it starts with a radical elimination of society's right to categorize an individual in any way, and it probably continues to a totally libertine free-for-all (in which no one ever gets hurt). This is not possible.