In 2009, then-White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel infa­mous­ly said that pro­gres­sives are ​“fuck­ing retard­ed.” Late­ly I’ve begun to think he was cor­rect – though not for the same rea­sons as Emanuel, who thought that pro­gres­sives held unre­al­is­tic expec­ta­tions for his boss, Pres­i­dent Barack Oba­ma. Pro­gres­sives are retard­ed because they had those expec­ta­tions for Oba­ma to begin with, and poured so many of their hopes and aspi­ra­tions – not to men­tion dol­lars – into elect­ing him.

Sure, Oba­ma was way bet­ter than his oppo­nent John McCain, though it was always ques­tion­able – and still is – whether Oba­ma was going to be bet­ter than Hillary Clin­ton. But the course of pro­gres­sives’ ​“rela­tion­ship” with Oba­ma – from infat­u­a­tion to let­down to spurned – shows a bewil­der­ing lev­el of ​“drink the Kool-Aid” naiveté on the part of some oth­er­wise sharp peo­ple. How could this have hap­pened? Are there lessons to be learned for the future?

Dur­ing the pres­i­den­tial cam­paign, while Oba­ma deployed the lofty rhetoric and vision in his speech­es that became his stock in trade, some of us were point­ing out that there was noth­ing in this for­mer state sen­a­tor and then‑U.S. Senator’s unre­mark­able record that indi­cat­ed he was a strong or reli­able pro­gres­sive. Some­times he had pro­gres­sive ten­den­cies, oth­er times not. A friend of mine from Chica­go who had Oba­ma as a law pro­fes­sor pre­scient­ly pre­dict­ed that an Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion would be char­ac­ter­ized by ​“ruth­less prag­ma­tism,” not pro­gres­sive idealism.

But many pro­gres­sives believed, quite fer­vent­ly, that in the course of find­ing that ruth­less prag­ma­tism, Oba­ma would clev­er­ly fig­ure out how to lean strong­ly pro­gres­sive. There was always a nod and a wink com­ing from the Oba­ma move­ment that seemed to say, ​“Don’t wor­ry, he’s more pro­gres­sive than he’s reveal­ing. That’s what you have to do to get elect­ed pres­i­dent in the Unit­ed States.” When some of us con­tin­ued to express doubts, these Pan­gloss­es got upset. Very upset. ​“It’s time to get on board,” they said. And I felt like Bon­go, the one-eared rab­bit in Matt Groening’s Life in Hell car­toon, shut up and gagged in a deten­tion room.

How can so many bril­liant peo­ple have fall­en for so much hokum? That ques­tion is not an easy one to answer. Per­haps at some point Ari­an­na Huff­in­g­ton, Robert Kut­tner, Michael Moore and oth­er left-ish pun­dits will engage in a bit of self-crit­i­cism and enlight­en us as to how they were hood­winked so eas­i­ly. Because here’s my fear: Pro­gres­sives don’t seem to be learn­ing from their mis­takes. Right before Obama’s inau­gu­ra­tion, Huff­in­g­ton wrote, ​“Now, more than ever, we must mine the most under­uti­lized resource avail­able to us: our­selves… It is not just the Bush Years that should be over on Jan­u­ary 20, but also the expec­ta­tion that a knight in shin­ing armor will ride into town and save us while we cheer from the side­lines. Even if the knight is bril­liant, charis­mat­ic and inspir­ing. It’s up to us – We the People.”

Yet that’s exact­ly what so many did – they invest­ed their hopes and aspi­ra­tions, their pas­sion, activism and mon­ey, in a shin­ing knight for whom there was scant evi­dence of his pro­gres­sivism or leg­isla­tive accom­plish­ments. Was it their des­per­a­tion to see the GOP run out of town and the Bush lega­cy over­turned? And the Clin­tons too? Was it their desire to see an African Amer­i­can elect­ed pres­i­dent? Kut­tner, author of Obama’s Chal­lenge: America’s Eco­nom­ic Cri­sis and the Pow­er of a Trans­for­ma­tive Pres­i­den­cy and co-founder of The Amer­i­can Prospect, wrote about a friend who said, ​“I so want­ed to be sup­port­ive of a great pro­gres­sive pres­i­dent this time instead of being back in opposition.”

So does the despon­den­cy of the strug­gle explain pro­gres­sives’ mas­sive mis­cal­cu­la­tion? How do they account for the stun­ning fail­ure of their lead­er­ship? It is time for some major self-crit­i­cism with­in the pro­gres­sive move­ment, espe­cial­ly among its lead­er­ship. At the very least, we should note how the ​“net­roots” fail­ure to keep its knight gal­lop­ing in the right direc­tion shows the stark lim­i­ta­tions of a move­ment that does not have a strong enough ground component.

New rules

Yet a pro­gres­sive future is not only con­tin­gent on a gen­uine grass­roots move­ment. Struc­tur­al polit­i­cal reforms are need­ed for that move­ment to trans­mit change through gov­ern­ment at all lev­els. We would nev­er have had this lat­est melt­down of our eco­nom­ic sys­tem if our polit­i­cal sys­tem had not melt­ed down first. The two-par­ty sys­tem is scle­rot­ic. As Obama’s pres­i­den­cy shows, more than ever, there is no room for pro­gres­sives at the table of high­est polit­i­cal pow­er. The rea­son for this is that the rules of the game that elect our rep­re­sen­ta­tives actu­al­ly hurt progressives.

A tru­ly demo­c­ra­t­ic elec­toral (and thus polit­i­cal) sys­tem would include:

Pub­lic financ­ing of campaigns.

Free media time for campaigns.

Universal/​automatic vot­er registration.

Direct elec­tion of the pres­i­dent (abo­li­tion of the elec­toral college).

Instant runoff vot­ing to allow vot­ers to express their true pref­er­ences and pre­vent spoilers.

Pro­por­tion­al rep­re­sen­ta­tion (allow­ing more than two parties).

Togeth­er these mea­sures would serve to both expand the elec­torate and broad­en rep­re­sen­ta­tion in our legislatures.

What pro­gres­sives should learn from the last three years is that the cur­rent elec­toral rules don’t allow them to earn and own their place at the table; instead pro­gres­sives have to wait to be invit­ed there by their Demo­c­ra­t­ic gate­keep­ers. And those gate­keep­ers are plain­ly hap­py to accept your votes and mon­ey – but that’s all.

The Euro­pean Greens are the best exam­ple of what pro­gres­sives could accom­plish with a real democ­ra­cy. With pro­por­tion­al rep­re­sen­ta­tion, pub­lic financ­ing of cam­paigns, free media time for cam­paigns and uni­ver­sal vot­er reg­is­tra­tion, the Greens are able to con­sis­tent­ly win their own rep­re­sen­ta­tion in the leg­is­la­tures even though they often don’t break 10 per­cent of the pop­u­lar vote. Nev­er­the­less, they get their fair share of seats, and are present in the leg­is­la­ture and in the media and in the impor­tant debates of their time.

Through this very pres­ence, the Greens have man­aged to push the polit­i­cal spec­trum in their direc­tion to the point where even the con­ser­v­a­tive par­ties in Europe today are ​“green­er” than the U.S. Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty. Despite some alarm­ing right-wing swings in the U.K. and France, the Euro­pean polit­i­cal spec­trum is where Amer­i­can pro­gres­sives would love to be. That’s because Euro­peans have real and func­tion­ing democ­ra­cies, and not the half-baked ver­sion that Amer­i­cans suf­fer with today.

At the very least, we can thank Oba­ma for draw­ing the lines in the sand so clear­ly and stark­ly. At this point, any pro­gres­sive leader who does not pur­sue polit­i­cal reform relent­less­ly is a faux leader, and she or he should get off the stage and hand over the micro­phone to some­one else. It’s time for a change of lead­er­ship in the pro­gres­sive move­ment to those who under­stand these harsh real­i­ties. Because the only thing worse than the steep upward climb ahead is when cer­tain lead­ers take us up the wrong dead-end trail. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, that’s what just happened.

If pro­gres­sives can’t fig­ure this out and get start­ed on the tough hard slog of polit­i­cal reform, I can only con­clude that, tru­ly, Rahm Emanuel was right.