ShareThisMEXICO CITY - A video from the Daily Beast news website shows how good journalism, turned into commentary, goes bad. It poses a dilemma, perhaps a conundrum, when it turns the corner instead of just plodding straight ahead.
A Jan. 17 op-video by Michelle Goldberg for Beast News, an online service merged with Newsweek, offers progressives advice about why they should not despair. In particular, Goldberg singles out those activists participating in the Occupy Wall Street movement. Many of them feel let down after having such high hopes with Barack Obama's election in 2008, she alleges.
It's a nice video presentation, with Goldberg commenting amid some animation. The script's historical interpretations all seem plausible, and the message is positive: Liberals should persist and persevere, just as the conservatives did.
As with most movies, it is not documentary history. It is like reading the comic-book version of "Hamlet." It might catch some of the story, but not its meaning and essence.
U.S. politics is about democracy. It is about the system not getting kidnapped or captured. When parties are themselves captured, there goes the election. Elections are a social check-and-balance on public life, not about awarding ribbons to ideologies. They are about pragmatic faith in solutions.
Put another way, the next election is about who is the most likely to respond to broad national urgings. It is as much about citizens persuading each other as it is about the main figures going at each other.
My book, "The Rise of Hispanic Political Power," set out to show how presidential politics motivated voters. It also showed how issues and concerns could be ignored or addressed with an incremental vengeance. In elections since 1960, Latinos have been reinvented, re-ideologized, re-partisanized, re-regionalized, re-districted and re-gerrymandered, racialized and mostly mischaracterized, because politics is a manipulative activity, even in a democracy under the best of circumstances.
Despite it all, hundreds of organizations and groups, partisan and not, got their message across about participating, not about winning or losing.
In the 2008 presidential election, everyone -- except maybe someone just released from a sleep study -- unquestionably, unimpeachably could see that Hispanics in the United States no longer could be marginalized. The U.S. electorate's beliefs come from its inclusion.
Recent, mainly Republican, efforts to build obstructive identification barriers are among the ruses to get their gang into the voting booth and exclude others.
Glib commentators like Goldberg make U.S. politics all about certain beliefs and not about people. She believes that ideologies, religions and other faiths are blocs that substitute for citizens standing up.
Goldberg stuffs activists, liberals and worthy causes into a cabbage and calls it the left. She calls the despair over Obama's shortcomings -- such as failing to act decisively on Guantanamo Bay -- a "pathology," as if holding onto a job by a thread is about ideology. It is not. Politically expressed, it is about trying to remain a functioning, contributing member of society. Society and democracy go together. Ideology and election rhetoric are the comic-book version of that match.
So, beware of commentators who try to disembody justified gripes. Don't believe those who insist you have to be a philosopher or a policy analyst to know what you are voting on.
Goldberg and others of her persuasion should be called out for characterizing the Occupy demonstrators as this generation's yippies. They are not. They are doing what so many others would do if only they lived closer to Wall Street and demonstrating weren't so tiring.
(Jose de la Isla writes a weekly commentary for Hispanic Link News Service. Email him at joseisla3(at)yahoo.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)
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