Have you ever noticed how frantically eager some people are to tell you how hopeless the state of the world is? Point to any tiny progressive victory or corporate concession and they'll rush in to smother your tiny ray of light in dreary counter-examples, as if it were an outbreak of crabgrass threatening their carefully manicured lawn of misery.
Perhaps they think being a wet-blanket demonstrates superior radical understanding--a better analysis. But depression is not intelligence, and hopelessness leads to paralysis. It's the small immediate victories that motivate people to get started and keep going--not distant grandiose fantasies. Talking of big changes both scares people who fear change and exhausts those who want it. Small, reachable goals build confidence and attract allies. The put-downs of tragedy-addicted leftists, on the other hand ("Oh, yeah, but that's just a drop in the bucket! Meanwhile the multinationals are blah blah blah, and the government is blah blah blah, and look what's happening in blah blah blah!") de-motivate, discourage, and depress.
This addiction to tragedy sabotages people working to create positive changes in the world.
An even more crippling addiction is purism.
The neo-cons successfully built a coalition of people who disagreed on many points, but came together around the basic goal of gaining power and defeating the left. Their motto is: "anyone who agrees with us on any issue is on our team".
The left has the opposite 'strategy': 'Anyone we disagree with to any degree on any issue is the evil enemy and can't play on our team'.
The result: Right: Great Big Team. Left: itty bitty team.
Talk about shooting yourself in the foot.
Militant leftists tend to lump all their opponents--fundamentalists, traditional Republicans, the military, corporations--into one giant, evil, monolithic conspiracy, leaving themselves utterly paralysed.
If a viable candidate doesn't have a perfect progressive score on their issues-check-list, for example, they'll advise voters to vote for a nonviable candidate instead. Letting the most conservative candidate win is supposed to "teach" the more liberal candidate "a lesson".
Dogbert himself couldn't engineer a more self-destructive system.
Leftists need to be willing to ally themselves with anyone to attain specific goals. Multi-national corporations that aren't in the arms business, for example, are anti-war--it's bad for business. When NATO bombed Belgrade in the 1990s, the managing director of McDonald's in Serbia supported the Serbian cause wholeheartedly, and had his employees hand out free cheeseburgers at anti-American rallies. McDonald's in the U.S. gave him a bonus for keeping his restaurants open.
Many corporate executives are also beginning to take the long view on the environment, for business reasons. As Jared Diamond points out, "if environmentalists aren't willing to engage with big businesses, which are among the most powerful forces in the modern world, it won't be possible to solve the world's environmental problems."
But when a corporation corrects eleven of its twelve bad environmental practices will it receive praise or encouragement from ecological militants? More likely it will remain on the "enemies list" because of the twelfth. And the thousands of progressives working hard as ecological consultants to create meaningful change will be sneered at by militants for 'selling out'.
The left has been scratching its collective head for half a decade now trying to understand how the lunatic fringe on the right managed to maneuver itself into power. One reason is that while the neo-cons may be clones of the Taliban in their ideology, they don't demand Taliban-like ideological purity in their alliances.
I can sympathize with the discouragement of the tragedy-addicts. And I can even--with some effort--respect the ideological purity of those who don't want to soil their dainty hands by contact with the mundane institutions of our ordinary corrupt world. What I object to is the fierce effort both types of addicts make to recruit others to their habits.
Especially when the far right is in power. Those guys aren't into purity.
And they're not into tragedy.