The netroots vs. Obama: what should they do?

Obama is not the perfect vehicle for progressive ambitions, but that does not mean there is not a historical opportunity for social change, argues Dale Carrico, who regrets the kneejerk purist reactions of many on the left. Now is the time to put pressure on the administration.

Dale Carrico:

The Netroots should be a prop to our President rather than an ineffectual narcissistic scold wallowing in paranoid or idealistic abstractions, it should be organizing its energies to proffer a prosthetic backbone for the timorous Reid, to make the Republicans immolate themselves for their ideology or domesticate themselves in the face of changed realities, to pay for the choices they are making earlier rather than later, because there is a lot of work to do beyond this stimulus.

We will need to push Obama from the left to keep him strong in the bloody fight for Unions to come (probably the definitive fight of this historical moment in the grand scheme of things), and to move him to a more universal healthcare system than the one he is offering now in the name of needed reform.

The Netroots in Opposition have managed to turn the tide of three decades of disastrous Movement Conservatism and Washington Consensus. This is a real accomplishment.

But the Netroots needs to re-evaluate its default strategies and knee-jerk perceptions and narrative frames of first resort if we would function to facilitate more progressive outcomes with a wildly popular center-left Obama presiding over congressional majorities in a world pressuring the corporate-militarist hegemony of complementary neoliberal and neoconservative ideologies and extractive-industrial-petrochemical-broadcast social formations. Conventional opposition is not apt to the changed demands of taking the initiative in the face of problems or facilitating most-progressive actually-possible outcomes among the options at hand.

I have no doubt that the Netroots will adapt to these changed circumstances. It is the responsiveness of p2p formations like the Netroots to diverse local knowledges that render these formations so smart and resilient in general. Just as I feel it is absurd in the extreme to declare Obama a failure or denounce him as a traitor to progressivism after a few weeks in the hornet’s nest, it would be just as wrong for me to declare the Netroots a failure just because they are a bit deranged in their focus and response time in the aftermath of the transformative Election 08.

I just hope we adjust sooner rather than later, since there is work to be done that won’t ever be more accomplishable than it is right now, and won’t easily be accomplished at all without the effective educational, agitational, and organizational resources of the Netroots at its disposal.”

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