Matt Yglesias groans when he sees the obtuseness of NYC’s anti-Bush protestors:
If there’s anything I hate more than the Farm Bill, it’s protestors. Absolutely hate ‘em. If people put all the time, energy, intelligence and ingenuity that they currently spend doing these things into boring jobs in Washington that involved ties and desks and offices then progressive politics would be about five times as effective as it is.
I agree with the sentiment, to a point: often the left has an attachment to the aesthetic quality of its politics well over and beyond its substance and therefore is not inclined to entertain arguments of instumentalism (what compromises might need to happen to get things done). That may best say why they’re left.
But Matt is being disengenous if he thinks we can all go work in the important jobs if only we’d get over our fear of desks and ties. The cultural distrust works the other way, too. I am not familiar with DC political culture, but even from my corporate job, I know that being, say, gay and a city-dweller and someone with an academic (rather than pre-professional) education can put one at odds with the company culture and limit one’s role in it. The nature of institutional power (or racism or other social vectors of oppression) is that it demands more adaptation from certain individuals than others. Now, there are plenty of progressives in DC who fit the political culture of government bureaucracy or what not, but that doesn’t mean everyone can.
Equally, I doubt these jobs will magically open up just because would-be protesters decide to take them. The biggest constraint is the lack of money for liberal-left thinktanks, institutes, roundtables or whatnot. The lack of paid employment gives such entities significant power in hiring; from what I gather the American Prospect is disproportionately Ivy League educated. What about those progressives with less marketable academic credentials? And not everyone has the luxury of unpaid or underpaid years of interning or journeyman work that these jobs often entail.
So perhaps no one really wants to harness the protestor’s energy and ingenuity, so it comes out in the way it does.
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