08 Oct 2015

Every time Obama issues another public ultimatum to Congress (before doing what he wants to do anyway) he phrases it in terms like "common sense" or "pragmatic". It's "non-ideological" he insists. The left's ideological agenda just happens to be the common sense pragmatic non-ideological solution.

Obama may be the most radical political figure to occupy the White House, but he is careful to avoid political labels. His leftist allies calculatingly compare him to Reagan or Roosevelt. He's not an ideologue. Just another one of those "Great American Leaders" bent on helping ordinary people.

A big part of the left's latest successes can be attributed to this non-ideological rebranding.

The old left (both old and new) was a political movement that wanted to be understood in terms of its ideology. The post-leftist left wants to be seen as progressive. It emphasizes policies linked to people instead of ideology. The ideology is still there and choking entire university departments to death, but its public face emphasizes an apolitical technocracy of pragmatists and caring social workers.

It's not a new idea. Communists heavily leaned on non-ideological front groups. Its activists were writers or grandmothers even when they were parroting Soviet talking points. They weren't anything political. They were just ordinary common sense folks looking for pragmatic solutions.

But American leftists used to be more like Bernie Sanders and less like Barack Obama. Today Sanders is a strange romantic anachronism which is why he attracts so much of the left. The modern leftist politician follows a left-wing line, but without a lot of the ideological trappings. He does his best to sound like a reformer. He's a political extremist who tries to sound like a moderate.

Bernie Sanders appeals to the left for the same reasons that post-left lefties like Hillary and Obama don't. Hillary and Obama pursue their goals, but Sanders talks their talk. He doesn't pretend to be the voice of a new generation looking to find common ground. He doesn't pretend to be anything except a political extremist convinced of his rightness and unapologetic about it.

But Sanders' only real function is to serve as a stalking horse for Biden, weakening Hillary to enable a third proxy term for Obama. Bernie Sanders is what the left used to be. It's now a collection of political shapeshifters like Obama and Hillary who bury their radicalism beneath a paper thin veneer of moderation and caring. His kind of leftist never sold well and doesn't sell in this type of market.

Americans are suspicious of political agendas. They like their leaders to be common sense apolitical pragmatists who put people ahead of ideology. So that's what the left pretends to be.

The public face of the left has become non-ideological. No longer even liberal, but progressive. There's no Marxism here, folks. Just science and humanitarian impulses.

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http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2015/10/...ind+the+News%29