Sure, the last 5 years have hurt our country. It's hurt our economy, our educations, our military. It's unknown if America will ever recover, but I sure as hell will be trying to put the pieces back together. However, there's a way in which the Right has helped us on the Left. They've brought us together.
When Bush said "You're either with us or against us", we heard the real message of it. Sign on for the big win, or be left out in the cold. Dissent will not be tolerated. Stop bitching and get in line. The Republicans have achieved unprecedented success by drawing a line in the sand and saying "Either be on our team or be our enemy". What has this done?
Well, way back when, politics was like a big party. Everyone had a cause, and all these causes were milling around in the same room. Then, somebody took a big loudspeaker and said "Hey! Everyone who agrees with me, over here!", and his people all went over to his side of the room. The rest of the partygoers didn't pay him a lot of attention, and kept chatting and eating those little cocktail wieners. Then the guy with a loudspeaker yelled out "Hey! All those people over there, on the opposite side of the room from us? They hate America!" Well, this got the attention of everyone who'd just been kind of ignoring him. They found that all of the sudden things had split down the middle, and everyone on the other side of the divide was attacking them.
Well, this has had a unifying effect. I think a lot of people, people who were once libertarians or moderates or even Republicans, have come over to our side because whenever they disagreed with the party line, they were labeled a liberal and a Democrat. I know I was one of those, I used to be a registered Republican. Now I'm a card-carrying Democrat. I think that the Right has done a pretty good job also of unifying the Democratic Party. I think that the opposition from the Right, in our private lives and online and in the news, has shown us who our enemies are and who our allies are. We've seen that we can't be divided, we can't sweat the little stuff, because the more unified we are, the stronger face we can present in opposition to the Right. And I think we've seen recently with the Gonzales issue that there remain fundamental(ist) divisions within the Republican party, and if we present a unified front the Republicans will shatter from division within.
I also think that, despite all the resulting problems, the Right gaining control of so much of our government has created an ideal opportunity for the Left, and an opportunity for the Right to destroy itself. Now that they've come together and gotten themselves in power, every group with an agenda wants that agenda pushed. We've already seen that they're having trouble because of it, and as Lincoln said, "A house divided against itself cannot stand.
In short, The Left has been unified by the Right gaining control of the White House and Congress, and the Right has been weakened and fragmented by it. The Right has helped the Left.
Now, this isn't to say that a whole hell of a lot of Very Bad Stuff has happened as a result of the Right taking power. But if we get bummed out and isolated and depressed and focused on the bad stuff, we may just miss the prime opportunity that has been handed to us.