For as long as I can remember, liberals have delighted in styling themselves “Progressives”.
But it must be obvious to anyone born in 2008, never mind adult political observers, that the left has definitely not been progressing of late.
It is time therefore to come up with a new term to describe liberals.
My choice is “Processives” since one key reason often overlooked accounting for why the political left is becoming increasingly irrelevant is their bizarre fixation on process. Incremental actions and steps taken to achieve a particular outcome increasingly matter more to liberals than the end itself.
Whether it’s process geared towards spending taxpayers’ money on perpetuating identity politics or bolstering interest groups, liberal politicians are like those middle managers who spend their entire working week in useless meetings and then when they leave the company, their former colleagues ask “What did that person actually do?”
In his 1988 book Intellectuals Paul Johnson wrote that a common theme throughout history is that the left puts ideas before people. Not anymore. Now the left puts process before ideas before people.
White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer told reporters earlier this week: “My concern, to be perfectly blunt with you, is that you seem to have an obsession with the process and not the substance.”
Spicer is certainly onto something but he mistook the media for the political left.
The Democrats’ appetite for technocracy knew no bounds. Read back to Barack Obama’s campaign manager Jim Messina marveling at the machinery that was to get Obama re-elected (the coalition-of-minorities mindset of course spectacularly backfired with Donald Trump’s election victory).
The obsession with process contributes to what makes Obamacare recognized as such an across-the-board disaster rather than merely being a bane for Republicans.
Think of the measures within the complex Affordable Care Act requiring companies with 50 or more employees to provide health care to anyone working over 30 hours a week or the de facto tax requiring small companies to submit 1099 forms for all transactions over $600.
Or wonder at how New York Mayor Bill De Blasio spoke with such weird passion last September about a drive to have 30 percent of all city contracting dollars will be spent on minority and women owned businesses by 2021.
Without such a mania for process, Hillary Clinton might well have been President. One of the reasons why her email server was so damaging was that the labyrinthine web weaved by the Clinton modus operandi ensured the scandal would not go away quickly.
Ditto with the Wikileaks DNC email leaks. (Although the fixation on process might have numbed some of the most outrageous revelations such as Bill Clinton aide Justin Cooper’s recollection that on at least two occasions Hillary’s old cell phones were smashed with a hammer).
Interestingly over in Britain there has been a backlash against the liberal process addiction. Labour Party grandee Shaun Woodward recently told an advertising conference in London it cost his party the 2015 election.
“Gone was aspiration,” Woodward said of the Labour Party’s election manifesto. “It was pretty lost on the social justice front too. It became about process. It was obsessed with process and would indeed create the process that would end up with it being possible to end up electing Jeremy Corbyn” [the current Labour Party leader who bears more resemblance to a hobo crank wandering the banks of the River Thames than he does to a potential Prime Minister.]
The right in Britain has woken up to the dangers of process. Lord (Tim) Bell- a former adviser to Margaret Thatcher- wrote in his recent memoir Right Or Wrong that the left is “dealing with everything through a cyclical process. They want to obliterate the concept of an individual’s imagination and innovation and common sense. They don’t want progress or change.”
Lord Bell is dead right. The left needs to change and become much simpler in how they operate and articulate their ideas. Right now the Chuck Schumers and Dick Durbins are prisoners of process.
Without seeking to compare Democrats to Nazis, the current liberal political high command’s way of doing things resembles the scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark when Indiana Jones’s French archaeologist rival Belloq tells his Nazi ally Colonel Dietrich, “Archeology is not an exact science. It does not adhere to time schedules.” Dietrich responds: “The Führer is not a patient man. He demands constant reports and he expects progress.”
It’s not up to those of us on the right to solve the left’s problems for them (and actually the Trump administration could probably do with possessing more process-driven operational capabilities but that’s another story). But clearly liberals need to do something to capture the public’s imagination beyond championing a seemingly unending cycle of politically correct initiatives and metaphorically throwing money against walls in places the majority of us never visit.
Until they start having protest marches against their love of process, this problem- accentuated by technology- will continue to undermine the left. Conservatives love to say the political left is dishonest but a bigger problem is that they’re so dysfunctional.
Or to frame it in legalese, how can you ever hope to present knockout evidence in the court of political public opinion if you spend so much time struggling to bring your case to trial?