This article was written by Richard (RJ) Eskow, Consultant, Writer, Senior Fellow with The Campaign for America's Future and posted on HuffingtonPost. He says what I've been feeling and trying to articulate for years. I encourage you to read the whole article, particularly the vision thingy because there is merit in his claim that we just aren't left enough.
Congratulations! The "grand compromise" will cut nearly thirty nine billion dollars in needed government spending, which proves how "serious" everyone is about reducing the deficit. The grand compromisers could have cancelled the next ten years of tax subsidies for oil companies and cut the deficit by forty billion, but apparently that's not how serious people do things.
If the Republican Party were singing to its base today, the song would be the theme from Friends, "I'll Be There For You." And the Democrats would be singing "You Always Hurt the One You Love." We're being told we should celebrate a "compromise" in which Democrats gave up $38.5 billion in spending cuts, when the original Republican demand was for $32 billion. That means the Democrats only gave the Republicans 20% more (20.2135%, to be precise) than they originally demanded.
Okay, guys. You get an extra 20% -- and not a penny more!
Just like the author, I didn't vote for Ross Perot or Ralph Nader. I wanted to, but I didn't. It was that "OMG, the Republican is bat shit crazy; I have to vote for the D or we will all die" thing. Progressives followed the President and pledged fealty to Democrats who had devoted themselves to undermining causes supported by progressives and Americans across the political spectrum.
The progressive inclination toward "premature exhilaration" over flawed Democratic bills is often matched with a flawed sense of what's politically possible... and politically popular.
The Tea Party did a very smart thing. They kicked out a few incumbents who didn't support them politically.
Once when I was on The Young Turks, a liberal writer said "If it's such a bad bill, why does Bernie Sanders support it?" I explained that Sanders held out for a long time and only signed on after he was given billions of dollars in additional funding for community health clinics. My answer then (and now) was this: "Bernie Sanders got billions of dollars for clinics in return for supporting this bill. What did you get?"
Tea Partiers instinctively understand that a movement that places its goals over a political party's success can get results that are disproportionate to the popularity of those goals.
What is it exactly that progressives instinctively understand? If we don't vote for the Democrat, the ______ (a. Supreme Court b. abortion c. jobs d. Medicare e. kids) will be in grave danger.
What's our vision? What's our strategy? Why are we moving right instead of pulling left? Are we just going to keep on voting against our own self-interests?