On Bernie Sanders, progressivism embarrasses itself

Would you like to know why I don't join movements? Why, as a democratic socialist, I don't join fellow left wingers in their idealistic hoopla? Why I find today's loosely organized "progressivism" a rather dismal epithet instead of an admirable word? I'll tell you why. Strike that. I'll let one Joe Dinkin, writing for The Nation magazine, tell you why, after taking Sen. Bernie Sanders to task for "failing" to blow smoke up the incorrigibly idealistic asses attending NetRoots Nation's annual emotional breakdown:

Here’s one stab at a better response [Sanders] could have given: "We need a democratic revolution, and you are part of it. I admire your courage in speaking up. I learned of the troubling death of a black woman in police custody, and, yes, I will say her name: Sandra Bland. I will say her name because black lives matter. I admit I don’t have all the answers. But your fight is my fight. For dignity and equality for all. I need you to fight with me and help me learn. Together we can change both politics and culture and ensure that black lives matter."

I suspect a lot of people would have been blown away.

Those in attendance might well have been blown away. And that's the problem.

What Dinkin offers — need I even point this out?; to you, probably not — is but a left-wing version of right-wing bullshit. What he writes says nothing — the bullshitter, in this case Dinkin, "does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose." That, from Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt's On Bullshit. Dinkin would have Sanders suit his purpose, which is to demonstrate an unerring, crowd-pleasing sentimentality that, one realizes upon reading and rereading it, says nothing. It contains no actual political program; it is empty triumphalism; it is unpromising demagoguery; it is superficial sloganeering; and it is pathetic.

It also demands that a socialist materialist elevate race over class, which would utterly undo Sen. Sanders' entire, lifelong ideological approach. Dinkin doesn't demand much, does he.

Progressivism, NetRoots-style, needs to grow up. It is bloated with naive, self-pleasing, self-celebratory, conformity-demanding rhetoric, and it has nothing to offer others but face-palming.