This is a matter of framing. They are trying to make this all about our impotence as a party. I have come to the conclusion that punishing our officials for this impotence is useless. It only serves their purpose.
Let's be smart about this. We can avenge ourselves on our own people and serve the Republican's purpose, or we can turn around, and use this years-long campaign of obstruction against them.
What we need are details. What we need are damning lists of things that the Republicans have not even allowed to come up for a vote. And those who have helped them, we target them to. They committed themselves totally to this, put their arm all the way down the lion's throat. Now's the time to close their mouths by closing our jaws.
These people are wrong. They are trying to push a status quo that has failed. If we don't point that out, we're just idiots. But our task is to point it out in such a way that the shame belongs to them.
We need to stop reacting to what they say, stop simply contradicting them. We need to assert a worldview of our own, a strong and bracing antidote to the WORLD of their own that the Republicans have brought us into.
But if our first response with setbacks like we've seen for the past year is quitting in disgust? Well, jeez, that's helpful.
You're not simply taking your ball and going home. You are allowing yourself to be defeated by the Right Wing. Whatever your intentions are, your conclusion should not be that the combined might of the American people in their anger is not enough to back down the special interests.
But we should not convince ourselves that it will work, or not work within the space of a single year! Pressure must be applied over time, or it will not work. This can't simply be a storm that these politician can wait out. We have to work to make the Democratic Ascendance in this country the prevailing climate of politics. We can't quit now, and simply expect it to happen on its own. If we do, the Republicans are going to twist the public's resentment right around on us. It's irrational, it's fucking stupid, but this kind of shit has happened before, here and and in other countries.
No, we need to have some guts, and stick with it, even if we don't get instant gratification.
Let's start pushing new ideas and new framings, new insights and new thinking. Let's give people eloquent words to repeat, and sensible truths to believe. Let's make this a real fight, and not a short one the Republicans can wait out with a few black eyes.
The time has come for the people to rise again in this country, not because they are lead to by some politician, but because they want to. Let's make the institutions of this country work for the people again, not because this is some soaring bit of rhetoric to say, but because we have seen what a jaded acceptance of subjugation comes to, and we have more spirit than to simply accept it.