You probably didn't misunderstand my earlier proposal about a General Strike among progressives. My last post dealt more with the idea of a strike among consulting firm employees because it was a response to a question about handlers. But I don't think a consultant strike would be possible without a larger, more general strike among progressives.

Progressives have more power than they know. Any party depends on volunteer labor and most of the people who do that volunteer work for the Democrats are part of the party's progressive base. Moreover, progressives donate a lot of money and a lot of votes. We have potential leverage if we can overcome the problems of collective action.

Likewise, the consulting business is parasitic on the idealism of a lot of progressives who staff their offices. Few people would be willing to put up with the unbelievable hours if they were motivated only by their often meager salaries. A lot of the consultants' employees are more progressive than the consultants themselves -- and those employees are not the ones whose views are being biased by the prospect of making millions of dollars in the business.

That said, without a larger movement it would be very hard to get enough of the consultants' employees on board. But if Al Gore and Howard Dean teamed up they could start such a movement. (By the way, think about what a dream ticket that would be. If they got started in January 2008, by July there would even be a chance they could engineer a convention draft.)

With their stature, Gore and Dean could recruit key members of the party elite. Wary potential recruits to the movement would be much more likely to sign a Progressive Contract anonymously and have enough confidence in the integrity of Dean and Gore to reveal their identities to them confidentially, which would make it easier to recruit even more members of the elite. As I said earlier, the whole thing could snowball.

Dean and Gore could ask people to make anonymous commitments that they could then use to recruit others. For example, if you told Al Gore that you would hypothetically join a general strike against consulting firms and he were able to tell you that he already had the commitment of x number of other members of your firm, you would be far more likely to commit to going public with your commitment than you would be otherwise. You could commit on a contigency basis -- as long as some minimum percentage of your firm was on board you would be on board too. But you would be able to know this before sticking your neck out.

Likewise with officeholders. They could tell Dean and Gore in confidence that they would tentatively join their movement and wait until they knew there was a critical mass of their colleagues before they too went public, putting their own Leadership on notice.

Obviously this is a lot of talking out of my ass. I haven't thought it through and I don't know if it could really work. But it might work. I didn't intend to sit down today and write a manifesto on Glenn Greenwald's blog. But this is an idea I had, and I thought it would be worth raising in this forum.

I found your description of political handlers to be fascinating. Thank you for taking the time to write that out. Your description will prove useful, I think, in several of my classes. When I try to explain the sophists in the Platonic dialogues, who taught folks how to debate and win at debates, I always have pointed to political handlers as the modern equivalent. Your little report makes that so clear. I find it marvelous in a dreadful sort of way to see that there are about ten major sophists current in our modern political life, like so many a modern Gorgias, Protagoras, and so forth. And then just like with the ancients, you have a whole little industry springing up about them (for the sophists charged a lot of money for their valuable input, then as now).

How strange and sad.

My best wishes to you as you try to make your way through your work environment. It makes my hair stand on end to think of having to endure it.

When I said wrong I meant unjust i.e. not in accord with reality. I am that rarest of modern birds, a Platonist. I pledge intellectual fidelity to the good.

And shooter: arguments are a hard thing to have correctly (I define "argument" as a joint attempt to arrive at the truth of the situation, no matter which side of the exchange is validated; thus an argument is not a debate, etc). In that sense it is darn hard to have an argument in a medium where we have to by necessity state a lot of conclusions while only telegraphing the premises. Your statement that you are a relativist on justice highlights our central disagreement and enables us to at least be clear on why we think the other mistaken. If I were to give you my full argument for justice, I would ask you to take a class with me that I regularly teach. In it we spend the whole fourteen weeks reading the Plato's Republic, talking through it, writing about it (me reading their writing and responding) and talking and talking and talking. At the end of that course I tell them: now you are in a position to know who you are, what you think, and to give reasons for it. If you think justice is a relative notion, then now you know what that means. I tell them I am not certain (for Socrates himself was not certain, even about life after death right before he drank the hemlock), but that it seemed to me not improbable that justice is a constituent of reality, and so I would bet my life on that; because the alternative, that it is relative, would lead to a kind of hell--and since it has not been proven or shown certain, I would not go to hell before I was certain I needed to (thus I am not saying that we cannot believe it is relative because it would lead to hell, because if you could show me clearly that it was relative then I would go to hell: I am not giving an argument from disastrous consequences, natch?). For those who are convinced it is relative, I recommend unto them Sartre, who seems to me in Being and Nothingness to give a kind of guide to life in Hell: but I'm not so sure I have to go there yet.

So ends our interchange. It seems pointless to go back and forth in such a limited medium when our basic starting points are so divergent and there is no real context to develop it into a real argument. But I wish you well. I wish you could take my class so we could really talk (not so you would come to agree with me but so that you could come to understand what you are really saying and what I am really saying. Know yourself, shooter242. Good luck.