I want to be invisible. I do guerrilla warfare. I paint my face and travel at night. You don't know it's over until you're in a body bag. You don't know until election night. --Ralph Reed
The impassioned squabbles raging back and forth at DailyKos at the moment revolve around the degree to which the evident (although by no means foregone) capitulation of the Democratic party to the nomination of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court represents a betrayal of its supporters, and if so, what an appropriate response to such a betrayal should be. While these are interesting and necessary debates, what I see missing from the discussion is any mention of the fact that the Democratic party continues to negotiate and work in good faith with a Republican party that clearly represents a revolutionary movement out to smash the Constitution of the United States. This cannot continue and is rapidly approaching the point of absurdity.
More after the fold.
While researching his book,
The Great Unraveling, Paul Krugman notes that he came upon a relatively obscure doctoral dissertation he found shockingly relevant to what is going on in the United States at the moment:
Back in 1957, Henry Kissenger -- then a brilliant, iconoclastic young Harvard scholar, with his eventual career as cynical political manipulator and, later, as crony capitalist still far in the future -- published his doctoral dissertation, 'A World Restored'. One wouldn't think that a book about the diplomatic efforts of Metternich and Castlereagh is relevant to U.S. politics in the twenty-first century. But the first three pages of Kissinger's book sent chills down my spine, because they seem all too relevant to current events.
In those first few pages, Kissinger describes the problems confronting a heretofore stable diplomatic system when it is faced with a "revolutionary power" -- a power that does not accept that system's legitimacy. ... It seems clear to me that one should regard America's right-wing movement -- which now in effect controls the administration, both houses of Congress, much of the judiciary, and a good slice of the media -- as a revolutionary power in Kissinger's sense. That is, it is a movement whose leaders do not accept the legitimacy of our current political system.
Where this becomes directly relevant to the Alito nomination is that in Kissinger's analysis, what facilitates such revolutionary powers, is that members of the established order (read: the Democratic party):
find it nearly impossible to take at face value the assertion of the revolutionary power that it means to smash the existing framework. [They] therefore tend to begin by treating the revolutionary power as if its protestations were merely tactical; ...as if it were motivated by specific grievances to be assuaged by limited concessions. Those who warn against the danger in time are considered alarmists; those who counsel adaptation to circumstances are considered balanced and sane... But it is the essence of a revolutionary power... that it is willing, indeed eager, to push its principles to their ultimate conclusion.
While many at DailyKos and elsewhere these days are frantically sounding shrill klaxons that America is in mortal jeopardy, Democrats in Washington sanguinely go about business as usual. They apparently "find it nearly impossible" to acknowledge what the country is now facing: a revolutionary power that means to smash "the existing framework" (the rule of law based upon our Constitution and Bill of Rights) and replace it with something else entirely (a paranoid, messianic Christo-fascist oligarchy).
This disconnect is maddening, and is I believe what is leading so many here to threaten to leave the party in frustration. Many feel the rule of law is quite clearly collapsing in this country, and realize the vacuum such a collapse would create will be eagerly filled by the most brutal and totalitarian elements of the Republican right.
We need to come together and forge a consensus that America is facing a national emergency. It is long past time the Democrats in Washington awoke to this reality, accepted it as the new "facts on the ground", and started acting in all haste to confront and resoundingly defeat a revolutionary power that threatens us all.