This past Monday my colleague Zach Schuster wrote a column (“Madison leftists should take cue from moderates”) arguing Madison‘s leftists, and Progressive Dane in particular, need to take a cue from the pragmatism espoused by the Obama campaign. Schuster argued they needed to tone down the rhetoric, cut the agitation and put ideological differences aside to get things done.

And in many respects, he is entirely correct.

However, my good colleague neglects a troubling facet of the Madison left that has gone largely unnoticed by the vast majority of students and city residents. It will be this impediment, more than anything, which will sink the bloated, incompetent ship of radical leftism in Madison.

And this impediment is no one really listens to them anymore.

Take the recent ASM elections. Seven out of 27 seats on Student Council were filled by members of the For Accountability Community and Empowerment of Students slate, while the rest were filled by all eight members of the opposing Responsibility Slate or unaffiliated candidates. Consider this. FACES did win a substantial number of seats in Student Council. However, all of the candidates from the opposing slate won. It seems as though the Vote No Coalition, the ideological predecessor to FACES, could only assemble large constituencies for as long as its own foundational absurdities were not made obvious; as soon as the veil was lifted, this triumph proved entirely ephemeral. Fear-mongering masquerading as “grassroots organizing” can only take one so far, it seems.

Additionally, there is Progressive Dane’s recent collapse in Madison‘s Common Council, where one PD alder decided not to run and another lost in one of the closest elections in the city. Admittedly the organization has the opportunity to recover these positions, but when the Progressive Dane candidate can’t even make it out of the student-centered District 8 primary, it seems, as Schuster made clear, the group fell woefully short of its objectives this election season.

What Schuster misses is the larger trend within the Madison left as it trudges on in its irrevocable march to irrelevancy. Not only have factional struggles — including the rather shady and distinctly un-progressive squelching of talented organizer Chynna Haas — racked leftist groups, but their efforts at expansion, whether in Common Council or student government, have proved disastrous. Even the not-so-furtive takeover of the Campus Antiwar Network by a ragged coterie of campus leftists was a failure; by any objective standard the group is now more a front for the arbitrary and impracticable whims of socialists than a core of true idealists dedicated to the prevention of war.

But beyond the ridiculous tactical blunders made by the campus and city left’s incendiary leadership, what has become apparent since the election of Eli Judge is the proletariat’s self-appointed clan of representatives has descended into a more endemic form of irrelevance than a few isolated electoral defeats would imply. This cannot be attributed to infighting alone.

The fact of the matter is students are becoming aware that the promise of radical leftism as manifested here is little more than a fool’s errand. Tuition should not, nor will it, be frozen. Student Services Finance Committee members should not, nor will they, be forced to undergo diversity training. These people are grown adults capable of understanding a group’s merit regardless of what amounts to little more than blatant political brainwashing. Grassroots organizing on the level of ASM will succeed only insofar as people care. Homeless people should not have any more of a right to urinate in public areas than anyone else, which is to say, no one has a right to do this. And contrary to the beliefs of the increasingly frustrated campus and — to a more limited extent — city left, refusal to entertain their shrill, condescending agenda does not imply ignorance. It does not indicate the student body is in the grip of a reactionary elite intent on crushing democracy. It means they’ve figured things out on their own. And what could be more grassroots than that?

Sam Clegg ([email protected]) is a sophomore majoring in economics.