The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the
reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe
that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible
reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment
principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the
world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and
when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that
reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other
new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort
out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to
just study what we do.”

I think that everyone in the lefty blogosphere is familiar with that
anonymous 2002 quote in Ron Suskind’s New York Magazine piece, later
rumored to be by Karl Rove.  In
fact, the whole “reality-based community” label adopted by many in the
lefty blogosphere came from that one
quote.  It’s come to stand in for almost everything that’s
wrong with the Republican Party: divorced entirely from actual facts,
contemptuous of expertise, based entirely in the notion that mere will
is sufficient to change the world.  And the strong form of
that statement, which is the form apparently embraced by the Republican
Party, is basically the foundation of a destructive insanity.
 There’s a weak form
of the principle stated in that quote, though, and that weak form
should shame most of the
institutional Democrats in the United States, and certainly most in
California.

I’ll explain the weak form of the principle of the Suskind quote in a
moment, but first,
let’s look at the Democrats.  Outsiders,
activists and bloggers hear from institutional Democrats on a regular
basis in a variety of forms ranging from the pedagogical through the
patronizing to the contemptuous, is “Politics is the art of the
possible.”
 For example, it’s much of sacguy’s
oeuvre
here at Calitics.  As with the Suskind quote, there is a
strong form and a weak form of this
statement.  The strong form
adopted by institutional Dems is probably best restated as:

Politics is the art of the possible right now in this
static
environment which will never really change, and the Republicans are
insane, so be thankful, give us your money and your vote and just shut
your yaps already.

This reflects at best an inability to imagine that the
environment
is not actually static, and at worst a sort of corrupted fecklessness,
a willingness to use the insanity of the Republicans as an excuse to
Sistah Souljah and dismiss as naive people who demand more principled
behavior from their leaders.  But the weak form of this
principle,
which ends at “possible”, is something very different. If politics is
the art of the possible, the question then “what is actually possible
given the current environment as the starting point”?

The answer (circling back) is the weak form of the the
principle underlying the Suskind quote, which weak form is probably
best stated as:

It is
possible to change both the rules of the game and the underlying
structures of your environment so that you can significantly increase
your ability to act.  

This has been partly
explained with respect to rhetoric and propaganda by the
Overton Window theory.
 On a practical action level for the Republicans, it means
things like privatizing government to break government employee unions
while funnelling taxpayer money to big Republican government
contractors,
packing the courts with Federalist society appointees, changing
employment law to drive workers into a permanent crouch, and the like.
(I could go on, and may in future writing, but that’s a decent sample.)

It’s easy to understand why someone like Rove is so contemptuous of
the poll-driven timidity of Dems, who are plainly believers in
an entirely static environment.
 Rove has been very good at using for his advantage the
Republican machine built up over the last 40 years, which is a machine
built expressly
to change rules and underlying structures, to change what is possible.
 As a progressive, it’s actually difficult not to feel that
contempt for the Dems oneself,
especially after debacles at the national level like the recent FISA
capitulation and the condemnation of Move On.  It seems that
not only do many institutional Dems
not recognize that the range of their ability to act can be changed,
they’re
unable to recognize when it actually has changed, or
more likely, not interested
in increasing their ability to act.  As long as the Republican
Party is basically insane, the Dems can use that insanity as an excuse
for not actually doing anything, while
still reaping the benefits of institutional power.

I know I used a lot of shorthand and not a lot of links here, and most
of the paragraphs could be expanded to longish posts in and of
themselves (and maybe I will find the time do that), but I wanted to
try to lay out these basic points.  I have no doubt that this
is ground that has been gone over by people writing in the academy, but
I’ve not really seen the contrast drawn in the less-elevated domains I
frequent.   The two parties’ way of thinking about the scope
of the possible (to the extent an agglomeration of individuals and
interests can be said to have one way of thinking about this sort of thing) is very different,
and they’re both pathological.  But there is a nuggest of
truth when you combine the two ways of thinking:  The scope of
possibility is far larger and more fluid than  the Dems seem
to believe, and needs to be grounded in the actual world in a way that
the Republicans don’t seem to think is necessary or even desirable.