This started out as a response to stormwarning's Abortion diary, but it got long, and I realized I was writing my first Kos diary.
For some time, the below has been brewing. I started to write parts of it in response to the pie upset, and to the gay marriage brouhaha. There is a larger pattern here that I have seen in progressive circles again and again, and I just can't stay quiet any more.
Fundamentally, my question is this: to those who argue that abortion on demand, or gay marriage, or whatever is a "non-negotiable issue" which must be supported by our candidates or by the Democratic Party in order for said candidates or party to "earn our support"
...what if that insistence guarantees that said candidates or Party will lose, and Republicans will win? Just stipulating, for a moment, that that's the case: do you stand by your insistence?
More on the flip.
In other words, is it more important to you to go down with your principled ship and achieve NONE of your policy goals, or are you willing to achieve SOME of your policy goals, even if some of those which are dear to you have to be sacrificed?
Because that's where we are, friends. That is the question that confronts progressives in an increasingly conservative country.
Now, to start with: I support abortion rights. I support them very strongly. Also gay rights, and gay marriage.
But I also recognize that there are a lot of extremely important issues on the table in this country at the moment, and the wolves are at the door. If we don't want to turn into the world's largest Third World police state, we are going to have to be strategic and smart: to pick our battles and make sure they're the ones we can win. Because the alternative is that we'll lose EVERYTHING.
The subtext of diaries like stormwarning's (and similar ones insisting that the Democratic Party should adopt a policy plank supporting gay marriage) is the idea that there are some policy positions we must absolutely support, even if it's politically suicidal. To which I say, "bunk".
I'll say it straight out: I would consider it a human and public policy disaster if Roe were overturned and states were allowed to ban abortion. But if that's were the price for taking back over Congress and the White House, so we can then go back and work to reestablish universal abortion rights from a position of power, I'd say it was well worth it. Because if we remain in the position of being able to do nothing but try to retreat as slowly as possible, it isn't just abortion rights that are going in the can. It's everything that makes this country even recognizable to us.
I don't know how many of you have spent time in a true dictatorship. I have. Much as we lefties like to proclaim that we have one now, we aren't in one, yet. But we're getting there. And when it arrives, abortion rights are the last thing you'll be thinking about. You'll be thinking about where they're going to attach the electrodes tomorrow, because they've read over your old Daily Kos posts from back in the days when people were allowed to be on the Internet.
Here's where I'm going to say something that some here are going to find infuriating:
There are no such things as inherent rights.
That's right. You don't have ANY RIGHTS AT ALL except those that the society around you decides to afford you. The Declaration of Independence got this flat wrong. Jefferson, et all, may have wanted to believe that there are "unalienable rights", but there aren't. If your society won't legally stipulate that you have a right to free speech, you don't. Likewise any other right we take for granted. Which is why the Bill of Rights and the explicit extension of legally enforceable rights that are enjoyed (at least on paper) by citizens of this country are so marvelous.
But where those rights come from is not from the sky. It's not from God. It's not from some inherent law of the Universe. It's from POLITICS. It's from the society, through its decision-making process, deciding to extend these rights to us. And that is empirically provable, because all over this planet are people every bit as human as we are, and they do not enjoy these rights. If rights were inherent for every human, those people would have them, too. But they don't, and that means that rights are a product of the political process.
Which means that you get new rights (and keep old ones) by being politically strategic. We have a leg up in this country, in that the Bill of Rights lays out a very liberal set of rights entitlements for American citizens, and court rulings have derived further penumbral rights from these explicitly stated rights. But that doesn't mean that insisting on "principled" positions that don't have a prayer of being accepted by the majority in this country is anything other than suicidal behavior.
We will never achieve a perfect state--even we on DailyKos could never agree on what that would look like. So whatever our future looks like, it will always be a partial loaf. Our job as activists is to advocate as intelligently and effectively as possible to make sure that the progressive loaf is as large as possible.
That means picking our battles. It means--regretfully--not leading with positions that are wildly unpopular with the mainstream swing voters we HAVE to convince to support our candidates. It's all very well to feel good about your lily-pure principles, but if "standing by them" means asserting them such that they end up flushed down the toilet, just how much did you REALLY support them?
My position is plain, and I think I'm with Kos on this--we have to get the Democratic Party back into competitive shape in this country. That means picking our battles and reestablishing Democratic causes as populist issues with broad appeal.
Having Dems in power WILL protect abortion rights, because a majority of Dems will always be pro-choice (gay rights is a different issue--I believe we're not going to see significant progress there until the generation which is now in its teens and 20s is the voting majority). Harry Reid may be pro-life, but he hasn't lifted a finger to undermine choice--it's a personal value for him, not a crusade. He's the kind of Dem that Nevada can elect, and so I say, he's the kind of Dem we want there.
We don't have the luxury of slapping the voting public in the face with positions they don't support. We have to lead with our strengths: health care, economics, education, environment, sane foreign policy, Social Security...issues that cut across party lines and undermine the Rethug juggernaut.
In my estimation, the split that has arrived here recently is between those who are willing to let politics be the muddy, compromising process it is, and those who insist that the world be a different place than it really is: a place where just standing your ground in the face of overwhelming resistance doesn't get you mowed down like crabgrass.