Why We Have Been Turned On By Our Own
Thu Sep 27, 2007 at 04:09:33 PM PDT
It is a powerful shot across the bow of the establishment, when all nine presidential candidates attend a netroots convention rather than attend the storied DLC meet-up.
It signaled the onset of a time of changes. Consider the world we are heralding.
There is instant multimedia communications, so long as the lines remain free.
There is realtime gathering of information, so long as people can speak.
There is analysis and messaging of political information, so long as we can assemble.
There is rapid, sustained ad hoc and long-term targeting of funds to causes and candidates that the netroots nation supports, so long as we are citizens and sovereign over our own land.
And every last one of those items is under attack right now.
And at the fore are our own leaders in the Congress of the United States.
Why?
I think I know now.
They fear us. The Netroots, and the far vaster People Powered Movement.
They fear us more than the Republicans. We are cyber-populists, rabble-rousers, and (God save us!) union organizers! Trouble!!!! (Hands in air, hat tip to Occams Hatchet for the visual.)
And they are of a sudden flying into the arms of the Republicans, inexplicable behavior, so long as you remain of the belief that they see you, the commanding, unassailable majority of the American people, as less of a threat than Iran or Al Qaida.
Why?
Because those enemies cannot touch them, cannot hurt their old-fashioned notion of the Republic, the one where all is bipartisan and collegial and everyone fights a common foe and Democrats run Congress and Republicans own the White House, because that opium dream no longer exists save in their fantasies. ("In Xanadu, bipartisanship did Kublai Reid decree...")
Only their friends -- the ones who worked, sacrificed time and funds, gave their --- this is the word -- faith to the Democrats to honor and fulfill their burgeoning promise to change how politics is done in America.
All we wanted was our Constitution back.
All we wanted was the purification of our institutions of law and justice.
All we wanted was a lawful, gradual, peaceful transformation of How Things Get Done.
Not to upend the order of our society, but to reaffirm it, by the simple code of the Preamble:
To form a more perfect union
To establish domestic tranquility
To provide for the common defense
To promote the general welfare
To secure the blessing of liberty
For ourselves and our posterity
To begin, on behalf of everyone most especially the Republicans who had so utterly lost their way to reestablish and affirm these United States of America.
What horrible, horrible creatures we are become to the trustees of our own values.
It really gives one pause.
We have been turned on. We stepped too far.
We dared presume that we can ask for and receive an audience with the most powerful and important persons in our country.
We dared insist that the institutions of law and justice in our great Republic honor their very own laws.
We dared take issue with matters of state, when it became clear to so many that the wars and other adventures of the Bush Administration and its now-dutiful servants, sitting in places of trust that rightfully belong to free leaders, were a disaster for all of the power, the principle, the prosperity and prestige of this great land.
Not one vocation in the Preamble of the Constitution is unthreatened by this war.
And our own leadership in Congress has decided -- They want the war, and the embrace of all who support it, more than they want to represent the will of the people.
They'd rather hand the Republic to the Reaper, and the keys of perpetual power to the Republicans, than give up their desperate hope for a return to an old-fashioned bipartisanship that is now impossible.
Not because we disregard the right of persons to disagree with us, but beacause, as my colleague Gooserock points out, we are a nation of institutions.
And the institution known as the Republican Party has gone mad, and embarked on a course, using the same tools that we use to offer freedom to America and the world, to use them instead to synthesize the illusion of consent and debate and impose from above their will on the people, rather than honor the will of the people.
And that dedication has been ongoing for thirty years, and near bears it vast overwhelming harvest of bitter fruit, ready to be force-fed on the other 200 million of us who even think to refuse it.
And our leaders in Congress have decided -- it is better to feast, and force others to do so, than allow the future of freedom to come now.
Those who rule America have come to fear the will of the American people.
This would in most ages be the proper response, leading up to an election year.
What has happened, however, has been that those who fear have shut the gates, and begun to shut the American people out of the places of public speech, assembly, communication, commerce and authority.
And with the rejection of the will of the people, and that embrace of the will to dominate, a shroud is now falling over us all.
Will the Republic remember itself in time, before its own burial shroud completes its descent?
The time is short: To choose to awaken, and move to action on behalf of all, our brethren on the right as well, or to take the seemly cup of consociation with a totalitarian movement, and drink the hemlock, and settle down into an endless fitful mindless slumber, where any thought or passion that we require, will be delivered to us when a vague group-think assigns it.
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