http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/fitch111006p.html
My favorite bits:
"Ideology" can be understood as the distortion of social reality caused by social perspective. The prism of ideology explains why pro-business and pro-labor economists can never agree on such basic questions as whether raising the minimum wage helps or hurts low-wage workers or whether mass immigration increases or decreases the number of jobs for natives or whether cutting taxes produces more or less revenue.
Third Way centrists think that tacking back and forth between left and right immunizes them from ideology. They confuse history's direction with their own tropism for office, history's locomotive with the gravy train. Just because partisan advantage can be found in the middle doesn't mean that's where truth or wisdom or justice necessarily lies. However much they insist on a values-first approach, the values of centrism are mostly situational. Stalin -- who could argue equally well for the Popular Front against Hitler, for the Hitler-Soviet pact, and then for the Great Patriotic War against Nazism -- was a centrist.
Civic republicanism, the new vision for the new Democrats, is egregiously ideological in just this centrist sense. It's neither republican nor civic nor even particularly Democratic. The civic republicans' notion of the common good resembles Herbert Hoover's concept of "public interest" much more than the Roosevelt-Truman emphasis on the interests of "the little guy." And for all its emphasis on the need to put values first, it's essentially amoral. In Sartrian terms, it's less of a philosophy than ideological exercise in bad faith......
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Generally speaking, bad faith means a willful blindness to the defining aspects of a situation. Selective vision enables the actor to avoid choice. Having it both ways confers a material advantage, which the actor ignores, assuming a dubious moral posture.
In the civic republican version of bad faith, the gradual abandonment of liberal commitments to the disfavored is transformed into the virtue of gradualism. The simple reality that a harsh struggle is going on between haves and have-nots is transmuted into the notion that we're all in one boat -- or community. And a rising tide lifts them all. But as recently as 2004, Paul Krugman observes, the U.S. economy grew at a strong 4.2 percent. Yet the real median family income -- the purchasing power of the typical family -- actually fell. Meanwhile, he notes, poverty increased, as did the number of Americans without health insurance.19 <http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/fitch111006p.html#_edn19> The conviction that the low-end boats will somehow levitate themselves despite the trends that have persisted for a generation is rebranded as Tomasky's virtue of "optimism."
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