That's the old saying. What's the sense of it? Well, when you leave things to other people, there's always a gap between what you expect to be done, and what actually gets done.
Sound familiar? Sounds like our relationship with the politicians of our party, with Washington in general. To some extent, it's inevitable. We will have to elect people to lead us. But do we have to wait for them to show some leadership for us to push issues to our fellow Americans?
More to the point, isn't most voter discontent founded nowadays on that gap? The people who properly exploit that, who form a movement that fuels itself off of that, will win the day. Those who fail to do it, who expect somebody to get off their dead ass and do it for them, are going to lose. There is no excuse to sit on the sidelines.
The Unfortunately Unmatched Momentum of the Right
There are plenty of reasons cited for why we ended up losing, presented in rhetorical, political, ideological, and even marketing terms. Most people focus on us, focus on the base. I think that's a mistake. I think the base came out pretty reliably. It was the independent, the average person who didn't show up.
Why? I've posed my belief of what happen so, I'll be brief about what I think happened. The Republicans used a two-prong approach to discredit the new Democratic resurgence. The first prong was to basically stonewall and vilify what we tried to get done in Congress. The second step was to step in with a "populist" message all their own, and that wave of Tea Party Propaganda. Republicans had to justify their opposition, and rolled out their typical criticisms, reviving the old saws about market solutions, about deficits being a big part of the problem, that whole rigamarole.
What was our response? That's the thing. We didn't respond to them, really, not until they had well established their campaign of disinformation and partisan hatred. We spent more time responding to ourselves, secure in the knowledge that the Tea Party candidates couldn't be taken seriously, that we didn't have a political problem. We let them build a full head of steam, while we fought amongst ourselves. The point is not that some liberals wanted too much, or some liberals were undercutting the others, the point is that the party as a whole was engaging in a power struggle over who would rule the party, right while that power was slipping out of our fingers. Nobody won in the end, though it should be pointed out that the least loyal Democrats won no mercy from the Republicans for their collaboration.
Our mistake was to fight over power we had not yet consolidated on our own, while ignoring a revived, re-moralized (if there is such a word ;-) ) right.
Putting An End To The Politics of Panic, Or, A New Sense of Liberalism and Progressive Politics
We assumed that Republicans would remain discredited in the eyes of the nation, that people wouldn't elect them for Dogcatcher. We assumed that they would finally let us govern. Then we made the mistake of focusing most of our rage at the fact that we weren't getting things done on ourselves, on fellow Democrats. It's one thing to fight against your rival for votes, when they're heaping scorn on your party, but how about getting re-elected when Democrats are attacking Democrats, and the American people don't feel splendid about us, either?
The Republicans won by cheating on this test. They didn't provide better policy, they simply kept better policy from coming up, Democrats from earning the trust of the nation through their actions. We can debate how much the Democrat's own weakness played into this, but what is undeniable is that without the Republicans cooperating with each other to enforce their blockade on the Senate, our political situation would have been much improved.
They took the air out of the emergency situation mentality that created our opportunities for inroads in 2008 into new territory. Over time, people cared less and less about what the Republicans did before, and more and more about what we were doing now. Crippled by the Republicans, we looked like we didn't give a damn.
Terrible, isn't it? Well, not so. The opportunity exists over the next two years to do something about our situation, to make our political appeal about something more than just what we deliver in a crisis situation, to wean our politics off this need to frame things in catastrophic terms. In essence, to normalize the appeal of a new resurgence of liberalism and progressive politics in America.
The key, I think, is to individualize the appeal of Democratic Party politics. The Republicans have a weakness, and it's that in many, if not most cases of their policy, the Republicans are asking Americans to serve their own self-interests by serving somebody else's.
They sell the Tax Cuts for the Rich by selling people on the notion that the rich will turn around and use that money to employ more people.
They sell getting in the way of environmental regulations by saying that serving the corporate interests here will make energy cheaper, and jobs more plentiful for us.
They sell not getting in the way of Wall Street's misbehavior by scaring us about slower economic growth, and by making believe that the markets will police themselves better.
Do you see a pattern here? Serve the agenda of the rich and powerful, and you will be rewarded. The Republicans push a political agenda that has us serve the interests of the powerful, wealthy few at the expense of our own immediate interests, with the promise that things will get better.
But they haven't. They've only gotten worse. There's been no real return on that investment, no real gain for the sacrifice. The folks who were supposed to keep jobs here let them go anyways.
It's time to suggest to people that if they want to get their interests seen to, that they should instead see to them themselves.
All Things Being Equal, All Things Are NOT Equal.
The problem, of course, is that the average American is forced by the system to rely upon the corporations for their paychecks, and their Senators, Representatives and president for the translation of their political will.
And you know how they are.
We didn't get a whole lot of help out of the Senate Democrats or the Blue Dogs in the House concerning moving the party's agenda. As the months dragged on and the economy has remained crappy, the pressure has built against us.
How can we possibly sell liberalism based on such results? If we're playing by the textbook rules, we can't. If we're basing everything about the appeal of our politics on the notion that this congress, this President, that political organization is going to fix everything, if we're promising a unicorn in every lunch box and a pony under every shit-pile, of course we're going to lose, as people drop their support, as folks become disillusioned and throw their support to the folks who have absolutely no shame about their unrealistic policies
But if you follow those rules, you can never win, because when you really need broad, comprehensive, overwhelming amounts of change, it's always going to be difficult, and other party and its allied special interests are always going to confront you, once they've recovered from the shock that gave you that opportunity.
Think of it in terms of a curve, an inertial curve to be precise. For the last thirty or forty years, the momentum of the politics and policy in America has been against us. We have been fighting the decline of our party and losing. But nobody loses forever, and the Republicans, in their hubris at being at the crest of their wave, the top of their potential, really screwed things up. Make no mistake now: the Republicans are a party in decline. But they are a party in decline that has yet to fully crash and burn, and it's straining against its downward descent with all the power it's got.
It's got huge institutional advantages, and after Citizens United, the help that corporate America hasn't been able to give in decades. Let's make no mistake: That is what we're up against now.
Democracy Is Too Important A Job To Be Left To The Democrats In Washington
Folks shouldn't be satisfied with what the Obama Administration has achieved, but they shouldn't be jumping off the bridge about the shortfall. They shouldn't be saying, this much is good, but we need better.
Remember, we're pulling this country up from one of the lowest points in its history, from one of the lowest points for the Middle Class in decades. We're not merely confronting an incidental, ephemeral kind of opposition from the Republicans, but a bitter, stubborn institutional resistance from that party, and all of its arrayed allies, all of whom are deathly afraid of being made irrelevant, powerless. Whatever your opinion about Barack Obama and the Democrats, these people view them as a threat.
It's not simply because they might instantly reverse everything. What they fear is the slippery slope. They fear what would happen if we got real momentum on our policies, however compromised they are now. Why? Because we can offer people something they can't: the direct addressing of their needs through spending and policy. The Republicans have real ideological resistance to this kind of direct intervention. On so many levels, their answer to the question of whether the govern could help or should help is no.
With Republicans, you have to wait for your beneficent boss to deign to give you your rights in response to market forces, like your willingness to find another job if he doesn't give you what you want. With Republicans, you have to wait for the market to correct the bubble that just popped and took your 401k with it. With the Republicans, rather than directly fund jobs and directly push money into the economy, you have to wait for the rich, who tend to save their tax refunds, to pay for new employees to help them make more money.
With Republicans, you either see to your interests by doing nothing, and letting private social and financial backlashes do the job, or you back the corporate interests, and by doing so, serve your own. That is the essence of the system they've created: we remain loyal to the elite, and they grant the boon of jobs and pay and justice to the masses, with the invisible hand of the market and social pressures to serve in the place of active enforcement of civil rights.
If we succeed in making their lives better without having to go through all that rigamarole, they might just decide to follow our political party instead.
So they blockade the Senate, and move quickly to poison people against us.
That poses an obvious problem for us. They won't let us deliver our perfect progressive agenda unhindered. We have to make better political progress out of our imperfect policy progress, or else the Republicans will succeed in pushing back our agenda.
I believe if we rely on the Democratic Party in Washington to be the vanguard of our agenda, the vanguard of our change, we're going to lose a lot of elections. Their muddled middle politics, conditioned by decades of our party's decline, will be a poor motivator for people.
We, the rank and file out there in America have to raise the standard of our cause. Where we can, we have to put new challengers into the system to change the make up of the party, create a bolder, more charismatic generation of Democrats. Where we don't win such elections, we have to create organizations, both grassroots and otherwise, that push for certain agenda items regardless of whether the folks in Washington favor them. The job of leading the Democratic Party is too important to leave up to the Democrats in Washington. The face of our party has to be the man who gets interviewed who eloquently presents our case, eloquently and reasonably criticizes our opposition.
We need Democrats out there challenging the Republicans in their town halls, passionately bringing our perspective into places where its been locked out.
In short, our strategy must be to proactively, individually, and as groups, promote our liberal and progressive agenda above and beyond where the party in Washington is comfortable pushing it. We have to be the wall at their back, the folks who change public opinion so that folks in Washington have to respond. We have to actively, independently promote our political views through rallies, protests, primary challenges, campaigns for political office, and independent political advocacy.
The folks in Washington won't change Washington by themselves. They'll change Washington when the country's political attitudes change so much they're given no other choice.