This weekend’s 200-person march down State Street was ostensibly designed to “Hold Change Accountable.” Similar demonstrations have taken place across the country. This is no surprise. After two years of resoundingly optimistic campaigning, the election of President Obama was always going to be the anticlimax. And the left’s response to its actual successes has always been to regroup and demand more.

I am not a cynic about protests, even relatively small ones. Good protest can be healthy and constructive. What I am cynical about is the capability of the Madison left to be effective moving forward. A popular botany professor on campus maligns Madison liberals and radicals as gutless, reactionary drones. He couldn’t be more correct.

Maybe it’s just the radical in me. I could do without the blind pacifism, which presently (and ahistorically) defines the term, but I have no qualms calling myself a democratic socialist. In private moments, I’m even sympathetic to the anarchist ideas of Noam Chomsky. (I point this out only to preemptively address angry message board accusations.)

The marchers on Saturday divided into two distinct groups: The participants, at least in Madison, were a motley crew of ideologies and temperaments, people who voted for Obama and want to hold him to his electoral promises (WISPIRG and most of Progressive Student Alliance), along with those who distrust him as a centrist hawk (Campus Antiwar Network, et al). The march was nominally devoted to economic issues, especially involving diversity and equity, and several multicultural student organizations were heavily represented.

Both sides miss the mark. Obama supporters should have remembered their progressivism before placing all their chips down on a centrist Democrat. And the generic anti-war, anti-Obama marchers fail to recognize the only realistic roadmap to an alternative society.

First, take the Obama supporters now calling for accountability. To its credit, the “Hold Change Accountable” march indeed focused on specific legislation Obama has promised to support: the DREAM Act, granting conditional citizenship to the children of illegal aliens, and the Employee Free Choice Act, facilitating easier unionization. But nobody doubts Obama will sign either of these laws. The elephant in the room, no doubt on marchers’ minds, is what Obama won’t do and never promised to do.

Obama never promised to be a Madison liberal, never indicated any predisposition towards demilitarization, never defended the welfare state as an economically reasonable permanent arrangement, never gave voters any reason to trust John McCain’s accusations of socialism and usually sought to downplay his support for affirmative action and other racially equitable policies. He ran as a centrist Democrat and made no affectations otherwise. The time to “hold change accountable,” in the most literal sense of the phrase, was Election Day. But when they catapulted their hero to a landslide victory (a gesture for which I take no responsibility), Obama supporters indicated they wanted a centrist. And a centrist they shall have.

This doesn’t vindicate the CAN and ISO crowd, though. If anything, it makes their pragmatic failures more disappointing. A real radical can smell a fake a mile away. Put generally, a “fake” will structure their activism to be as inefficient as possible, to guarantee no real progress is made, to postpone indefinitely any opportunity to assess the validity of the original aims.

In all fairness, CAN and ISO leadership is better read and better educated than most students on this campus. But they don’t understand what all revolutionaries throughout history have — that as imperfect as the current societal arrangement is, the tools for transitioning to a new society are embedded within that very framework.

In other words, you can’t just be an outsider selling Socialist Worker magazines on the corner, patronizing local underground bookstores and leading marches down State Street. All the signs and buttons in the world are no substitute for concentrated action. To create real change, you need to be serious about the best opportunities for achieving your goals. You need to engage with — and participate in — a system you hate.

For a brief moment in 2000, it seemed progressives in America were on the cusp of breaking open the two-party system. Had Ralph Nader obtained 5 percent of the national popular vote, the Green Party would have received federal funds in 2004, guaranteeing increased inclusion. It would have been the most important moment for progressives in American history. Have radicals forgotten the promise of that moment?

At some point, radicals on this campus — and elsewhere — need to once again organize around a third party with a serious chance of qualifying for federal funds. Anything less will be mere white noise. And liberal Democrats need to stop voting for centrists and acting surprised at the results. I would love to be part of a thriving, coherent, intellectually responsible Madison left. I just wish one existed.

Eric Schmidt ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in political science and legal studies.