Like a lot of people who voted for Obama, I’m pretty upset about the election results in Massachusetts tonight. On the one hand, I knew full well that Obama would never meet my expectations, which were considerable, and that he had no desire to do so, with his post-partisan belief in abstract “reform,” and even more troubling faith in the Republican Party as acting in good-faith, having been made clear early on in the campaign. I suppose, then, that I’d have no good explanation for why I feel so betrayed and disappointed, and even guilty for being so, as these sentiments bear witness to some small kernel of hope I had that things might be different this time around.

So now I just want to selectively quote Brad Johnson’s brief post over at An und für sich regarding the recent narrative taken up by certain liberal progressives about how this sort of disenchantment was predictable from the beginning given Obama’s lofty rhetoric and promise of hope and change, and that people who took Obama seriously should become more pragmatic, more “realist.” Here’s what Brad writes:

As I reflect on the latest setback to the Democratic party’s legislative agenda in tonight’s election in Massachusetts, I’m reminded of the increasingly prominent narrative making the rounds amongst the A-list liberal bloggers. Basically, so we’re told, we should’ve known better than to expect anything more than what we’ve gotten so far out of an Obama presidency. Sure, he used flashy, inspirational rhetoric to secure an unprecedented coalition of support, but if you really believed the rhetoric, you weren’t actually listening to the message. In effect, those who feel either betrayed or let down are really just feeling the bitter sting that comes on the backside of naivety. Politics is hard; compromise is necessary; Obama has been very up-front about his feeling son Afghanistan, health care, etc. etc etc.

I’m not going to disagree with the practical relevance of this line of thinking. Nor do I underestimate its power as a kind of pragmatic consolation. I am also amongst the first to be annoyed by the residual Obama demagoguery amongst the limousine liberals here in the Bay Area. What I resist, however, is the conclusion drawn: i.e., that those who believed then should either “grow up” or “shut up” now.

…In short, then, it is not the responsibility of the disappointed merely to grow up. More precisely, I should think it is a matter of what they are growing into. If growing up means merely reasoned political pragmatism, then I fear for what the future brings. If it means, however, the disenfranchised become capable of making their demands and expectations effective — that is, of being able to discern the various shades and scales of a leadership’s failure, and responding in such a way that is neither wholly complicitous with its failure or at odds with its professed aspirations — then by all means, let’s grow up, but never shut up.

This all strikes me as exactly right. Furthermore, I think the most problematic part about this whole “realist” attitude about “growing up” is that it’s fundamentally idealistic, in the sense that it relies on the belief that piece-meal progress is the only desirable and possible outcome of the political process. But I think what the past year (and past several years) has shown is that such reform is impossible, that the deck is rigged, yet we continue to play as if it’s a fair game. In that sense, “realism” (and its cynical variants) is at its core an idealism of the present, the most intense form of ideological belief there is: the belief that the system will last forever.

In other words, the “realm of the possible” is at once the realm of the purely ideal, the impossible, because the system in place is designed such that it can’t ever really happen, the “possible” can never actualize itself. From this perspective, I would argue, only the impossible is what is possible, because it means changing the system itself, fundamentally altering the coordinates to change how we organize possibility and impossibility. But you can only do that if you, first, accept the fact that the system is plagued by an irreducible antagonism that can’t be contained within it: this is why, although they’re obviously racist, reactionary, astro-turf stupidity (without granting the liberal class bias in this judgment), the Tea Parties contain a utopian element. Although they clearly misdiagnose the antagonism as one between the People and some abstract notion of the all-pervasive “government,” they are at the very least willing to acknowledge the primacy of social antagonism, which is precisely what is lacking in the Obama administration, its fundamental unwillingness to name the antagonism. This is demonstrated by their not exactly shocking decision to not take a hard-line against bankers and big business, which have ruined so many people’s lives in the recent economic crisis.

If each failure made by the exponents of reform, then, makes me feel that I should be even more cynical, even more jaded, and even more pessimistic, it’s important to keep in mind and never forgot that this is only because the possible is impossible if we accept liberal capitalism as the horizon of our eternal present without a future, that the system is here to stay. What pessimism really means is fighting for the impossible, because the impossible is the only real possible alternative to our present sociopolitical nihilism.