--hate to be the one to break it to you. I want to prove him wrong, too.
As askew pointed out, Rahm's infamous "don't worry about the left" comment wasn't about we the netroots. It was about Senators. But for immediate purposes it might as well be about us, cause it sure seems to illustrate Emanuel's gratitude to those who elect him and his. And why should he be grateful or afraid?
You have given the party machine no reason to worry about the left.
The other day I dissected the process part of progressive history and revealed its very ugly underpinnings. Many criticized that diary. Some rightfully criticized me, for excluding the secular history of the meek and many. But any way of mentioning the 20th century's incredible social movements without excessive length escaped me. My diary was about the process of arm-twisting and triangulation and compromises we forget to our own detriment. So the desire rose to write a supplemental diary about MLK, Jr. and Pete Seeger and the NAACP and [correction here] voting rights activists (including Meteor Blades) but I felt unsure how to proceed.
Politics is War.
Fear is the main thing that motivates politicians. Without real fear, they resort to the path of least resistance. (Even greed is a form of fear.) Consequently legislation tends to suck: surprise!
The most progressive presidents showed up when society was a lot more fed up with the centre-left than now or the late 90s. You know, FDR was not merely "our guy". I'll give you that his wife (whose ideas he increasingly despised) was a do-gooder bleeding heart. I'll give you that Roosevelt did good things and became steadily more progressive until his second term as president. What Roosevelt was interested in was power. What we shouldn't joke ourselves about is that their movement pushed with greater frenetic energy then than it does in 2009. Even after the New Deal, Roosevelt began caving to the demands of conservatives and cut spending in 1937. This short-sightedness caused the Depression to linger on until WWII spending finally put it to bed.
Roosevelt shouldn't have caved from a progressive and even a technical POV but he did, and he did because of pressure.
Politics is war, and our presidents don't befriend us. Always has been that way. In my last diary I pointed out before that Roosevelt betrayed much of his coalition. They were going to keep voting for him anyway. By Johnson's time Roosevelt's work had largely shifted African-Americans to the Democrats, however, and even then Johnson sold them out for almost a decade during the wildfire expansion of the Civil Rights Movement.
People today ignore these lessons, and think the problem is that we didn't get Ron Paul, or Dennis Kucinich, or John Edwards into office.
Roosevelt was not only put into office with a whopping mandate on a scale that's never existed in most of our lives. He knew deeply what would happen if he sold the left out or gave the para-Republican right an opportunity. It wasn't a few Naderites or PUMAs go split off and give the Republicans a win this round. Relatively few voters leaving the two-party system doesn't upset the status quo at all. The system even has a name for that--"spoiler". What the country flirted with in the early 20th century goes by the name revolution because it would make the two-party system irrelevent. Does legislative procedure stand against guns and pitchforks?
A radicalized population
We like to flatter ourselves and pretend that the revolutions of 1920s and 30's Europe, even the evils of Nazism couldn't have happened here--well, it could have. When people starve, they're capable of a lot for good and ill. There's no American exception. And by the 1930s, anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism (note: Italians, Poles, Irish) had been going strong in the U.S. for 80 years, Along with anti-communism these views led the KKK's 1 million members in the 1920s.
On the left end, there had already been 30 years of anarchism, communism and socialism in this country. The left did more than light a few SUVs on fire in Eugene. They bombed the public. They got in armed fights with people. Frequently. They were hanged. We of course have our proud and non-violent moral superiority as a convenient reason for our being alive, today. But the bodies of progressives and radicals littered the Gilded and Progressive Age.
Teddy Roosevelt almost succeeded in destroying the Republican Party in 1912, when he created his own third-party movement against Wm. Howard Taft, his former Vice President. Unfortunately, the Bull Moose were an early one-two cycle Reform Party, but had things turned out a bit differently TR would have changed the two-party system.
The point is, the chaos of teens and 30s meant anything could happen. As a result, FDR didn't mess around with Huey Long on the scene.
Populism
Long controlled the state politics of Louisiana up until the New Deal, including as its Governor , and he meddled with Arkansas' political machine too. He wasn't made famous as a protest vote from a token liberal Congressional district, (although his Senate career was pretty futile) for he began creating a movement. You could argue with a straight face that Roosevelt created the New Deal to stop Long's "Share Our Wealth", the anti-socialist, socialist income redistribution plan.
What Long forces Obama's hand today? You think it's Dennis Kucinich and Ralph Nader--they're impotent. I know Kucinich says the right things for a progressive and sometimes grills, sometimes introduces legislation. Ultimately he's no more exceptional than the odd Democrat for all the party's history. But Long knew war in his heart. Actually, Long wasn't really enamored of the real democratic process. He used democracy in wrong ways to accomplish his goals, which happened to be mostly good or better goals. He and the movement he courted had enough power so that Roosevelt knew fear. Btw, FDR didn't just shift the goal-posts, his administration harassed and sicked the law on Long's political career.
Angry phone calls or petitions don't instill the "fear of the Lord." We're going to have to find a way to make Barack Obama act. It's not about hating him, being disappointed in him, calling him names or protecting him. During the campaign, Obama told us to force his hand. At some point he must have read his history.
Politics is war.
Kossack LivingInReality was good enough to post this "prophetic" Naomi Klein speech from last year. I'm not really a fan of Klein's, but sometimes she hits all the right notes. When she talks about history and movements, it's dead on. Especially starting @ about 6:00 in: