Perfect Intent Or Imperfect Results?

A couple months back, actor/producer Mark Ruffalo, a champion of liberal and social justice politics, caught a mountain of grief for a social justice “transgression.” His crime? Casting a cisgender actor as a transgender character. One might understand if the social justice legions turned their wrath on a conservative producer over such an action, but Ruffalo’s one of their stars. The episode, which prompted something of an apology tour on Ruffalo’s part, illustrates the unfortunate reality that nothing short of perfection is acceptable to the Left’s stormtroopers.

It also informs us as to the Democratic Party’s approach to Donald Trump.

When Trump first got elected, Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer indicated that there was common ground where the Dems could work with Trump.

That was November. Today, the party, urged/compelled by the angry core of constituents, is engaged in full-throttle opposition to everything Trump does. There’s not a hint of cooperative tone, there’s not a whit of approval for anything, and every response is one of total outrage, as if every Trump statement and executive order involves the mass consumption of kittens and the wholesale slaughter of unicorns.

In a way, I feel for the Democratic leadership. They’re not stupid people, they know that don’t have the power to actually prevent Trump and the GOP from acting as they will, they must recognize that stone-wall opposition merely encourages the GOP to work around them instead of with them, and they certainly know that any policy goals they have are more likely to be achieved by working with him and them instead of carrying on as if Trump is a melange of Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot rolled in an orange egg roll wrapper. But, that’s not what the screeching ranks of party activists and chatterboxes want. They want no-holds-barred opposition, arguing that the GOP did that to Obama so it deserves nothing less from the Dems.

The problem is, for the Dems, that when the GOP “obstructed” Obama, it had been elected to do so, and it was given first the House and later the Senate by the voters. Furthermore, Obama himself was the root cause of “obstruction” in that he refused to accept the message behind of the 2010 mid-term elections (as Bill Clinton eventually accepted the 1994 midterm results) and work with the GOP House majority. Instead, he deemed himself and the Presidency ascendant over the Congress, a view that he, as a Constitutional scholar, should have known was wrong. But, truth be told, that’s something his supporters demanded – they wanted the President-King ideal, they wanted their guy to run things, and the thought of any concessions to Evil (as they view Republicans) to be utterly unacceptable. So, Obama fulfilled the desires of the Manichean us-vs-them confrontationists and stood imperious and defiant.

Back in the early 2000s, George W. Bush and the GOP of the time thought they had come up with a long-term formula for electors success. They combined social conservatism with a “lite” version of big, redistributive government and dubbed it “compassionate conservatism.” Their theory was that they could add moderate Dems to their soc-con base and built a permanent majority. But, they learned that one cannot out-Democrat the Democrats when hit comes to redistribution of wealth. Their big-government conservatism failed to work as intended, insufficiently capturing the middle, losing the small-government people, and ushering the Dems into power both on Capitol Hill and in the White House.

We see, again, that no one can out-Democrat a Democrat. There is no tolerance for compromise, even if compromise is the only path to success. Against Trump, uncompromising opposition and obstruction is the preferred approach. Better to fail utterly while wrapped in pure, unsullied indignation than to scratch out a few successes by consorting with the Orange Devil.

Twenty years ago, Thomas Sowell observed that liberal social policy was rooted in self-congratulation, that merely acting against a perceived injustice is sufficient to satisfy liberals, and that results don’t really matter to them. Today, in an era where being louder, more abrasive and “purer” than everyone else is how one gets heard, where people’s attentions are drawn in dozens of directions, and where being first is more important than being right, it’s obvious why zero tolerance is winning the ideological war within in the Democratic Party. Virtue-signaling one’s purity is far more important than achieving actual results.

Of course, the virtue-signalers don’t see it that way. Many think that total “resistance,” as they self-righteously dub their side, is how they’re going to get back in power and achieve results. Were Trump’s election an outlier, a skew data point, they might have reason to think so. But, the reality is that they’ve suffered over a thousand electoral losses these past 6 years. The nation has rejected the Democrats’ agenda, despite the deep-blue nature of several high-density population centers.

They’re in a zone where it’s more important to demonstrate their 100% anti-Trump bona fides than to actually win anything. Intent matters more than results – which is modern liberalism in a nutshell. Intent, when coupled with energy and fervor, are sufficient at the outset of an endeavor. But, at some point, results start to matter. All the noble intent behind ObamaCare matters little today, given that its implementation has gone so poorly, and voters since Scott Walker’s special election have been signaling their displeasure with it. Yet, despite the imploding mess and the electoral rejection, ObamaCare’s defenders won’t budge off their commitment to perpetuating it.

This reflects their broader attitude towards policy and governance. The Dems should be recalibrating. They should evolve their policy ideas to better align with the constituencies they lost and hope to regain. Instead, they’re pressing further in the direction that brought them their thousand losses, as if doing more of what didn’t work will suddenly turn things around.

Angry righteousness may feel great, but does is it accomplish here and now? Is acknowledgment of electoral reality such a Bad Thing that blind rage, no matter how impotent, is preferable? Is feeling good about one’s counterproductive purity, better than trying to accomplish something useful? Does the wrath of purer-than-thou scolds instill such fear that one dare not engage the opposition, even if there are gains to be made?

David Mamet dubbed socialism as the abdication of responsibility. The answer I seek is found in that observation. Purist rage and demands for unwavering obstructionism may feel like “doing something,” but it is in fact abdicating responsibility. The responsible approach is to accept the (however unpleasant) current political landscape and figure out how to chase one’s goals within its reality. No one of value will, a year from now, care about your purity today. They will care, however, if your non-pure and compromising efforts produce tangible results.

The history of the past few decades informs us that one-party rule here in the US tends to produce dubious results. Both the Republicans and the Democrats indulged in excesses when they controlled both the White House and Congress and had little real opposition, and it isn’t something we should cheer or desire going forward. An engaged Democratic Party can temper the worst tendencies of Trump and the GOP. A Democratic Party that stays on its current path, on the other hand, gives the Republicans every reason to simply ignore the Dems and do as they wish. Despite what the loudest partisans say, there are policy ideas with common-ground solutions can be found. Such would be better reflections of the will of the people than simply watching one side do as it wishes while the other side screams will.