I am a lifelong progressive, born in the late sixties and raised by two baby boomers who would have been called "hippies" at the time. I come from the heartland Midwest: blue collar, beef and corn fed on one side, activist Protestant intellectuals on the other.
My family tree traces to the Mayflower, mostly immigrants from the British empire. On one side, my relatives fought in WW2 and Korea, always voting Republican. On the other, they were democratic socialists, conscientious objectors who refused to fight and worked in civil and labor rights. You might say my bloodline runs equal parts blue and red. My skin is white.
My parents taught me that working for justice was one of the most important occupations one could have. Refusing to limit others via the artificial lens of class or race or religion or sex was not enough, one had a moral obligation to challenge the powerful forces that enforced these false divisions. The only enemy in my house was the rich Republican. My parents taught me to fight bullies and fight them hard, without personal concern for myself. That, I was taught, is a responsibility of those who have historically been granted advantage and opportunity. To fight on behalf of and in partnership with those who have not.
I make a decent living working in technology. I love what I do and I feel extraordinarily lucky: happily married, two healthy children, a home. We manage to pay the bills each month but there's nothing left over for retirement or health care emergencies or college. We always owe a big tax bill.
My wife and I both have masters degrees. A large chunk of our paychecks go to paying off school loans that we will be with us our entire lives. My wife works in the public schools. Her work is much more difficult than mine, she works countless unpaid hours dealing with - literally - life or death issues with kids and their families. She makes tens of thousands dollars less than me. Each year more and more of her benefits are shifted onto our balance sheet. A higher % of a pension she will never see. A higher % of healthcare costs that in any given year threaten to put us permanently in the red. Cuts to school funding, traded in for top bracket income and capital gains cuts.
I follow politics fairly closely, in comparison to our friends and neighbors. I follow my state politics, I follow national political news. We get out and go to rallies occasionally, contribute to causes where we can, sign petitions, etc. I volunteered for Obama.
I read Kos daily. I am not as informed, as smart, or as active as the majority of the people here. I don't blog here. But I have been following the Obama Pro v Obama Con fight and have been encouraged by the persistent and urgent alarms and evidence provided here on the class war that Americans are losing.
I am deeply angry. Deeply frustrated. At the Democratic party. At progressives. I love us, I believe in us, but I feel like a child of an alcoholic who has for years been making excuses and enabling the destruction of my other loved ones. Because I don't want to risk confrontation. Because in some deep sense I am more worried about what I have to lose today versus what we all are losing tomorrow.
I realize this is a democratic blog for Democrats so maybe I shouldn't even be writing this here. But I've never much cared for orthodoxy.
The Democratic party - the national party - today is a lie. Collectively, they are scammers and liars and cheats. Collectively, they are not on our team. They sabotage our beliefs again and again and cover it up as incompetence or internal disagreement. They vote to send our kids to die in Iraq, they vote for bailouts for Wall Street, they vote for tax cuts for the rich, and cuts in services. They allow corporations to decide our health care system. They enable our fossil fuel addiction. They lose negotiation after negotiation, they play their politics on the right side of the fence, refusing to educate the public on the facts. And each year they scoop up our votes because they know we have nowhere else to go. In the same way the rich play the Tea Party, the Democrats play progressives. They are complicit in the ongoing destruction of democracy and the American dream. They should be treated as such.
We, as progressives, are also complicit. We are weak. We are scared. We rationalize and intellectualize and pontificate. We are constantly pleading with our leaders to listen to us. We fight with each other over the irrelevant and the obscure while the house burns down. Many of us work tirelessly on behalf of our causes, I don't diminish that work, several of my loved ones are among that group. It is valuable and important and we need the people that do it to continue to work with and in the system. I am not speaking to that group, you have done and are doing your part. I am speaking about people like me.
I am not a pacifist. I don't bring flowers for gun barrels. I don't feel obligated to obey laws made for and by lawbreakers. I don't accept punishment from bullies and do not hesitate to move swiftly from defense to offense. These are not traits I am proud of but they are how I am wired. I generally try to move in the world idealistically, while viewing it realistically. I do not believe people with bad intentions can be loved into being nice to me and mine.
People like me need something else, another faction, an alternative. A movement that is less concerned with safety. A movement of people willing to take some risks. A movement that openly declares war on the forces that have declared war on us. We need the youth to be leading it and we need elders to provide logistics, support and strategy.
During the sixties, there were alternative and competing visions on the left. There was Malcolm X and there was MLK Jr. There was nonviolent protest and violent protest. There was unlawful subversion and peaceful activism. I am not glorifying the 60s, people died and were imprisoned, people were assassinated, it was an ugly and dangerous era. Yet the country was moved forward because of the stakes. Because civil war was possible. Because the country saw itself in the mirror and a future it didn't want and was forced to make changes.
Today the stakes are as grave. But there is no fighting left. The choices presented are on the right. The threat of rebellion comes from the Tea Party and the radical, armed right. They bring guns to rallies, they vandalize property, they seek to physically intimidate their enemies. Largely our response on the left has been rhetorical.
There are exceptions. The citizens in Wisconsin have challenged the void, stepping into the shoes of nonviolent protestors before them. The activist hacker group Anonymous and the whistleblower Wikileaks are confronting the authorities in ways that risk their physical safety. But they are mostly alone, while the rest of us watch and wait, blogging away, risking very little on our behalves, passing defeat forward to our children, unlike the generations before us. That is not acceptable.
To my mind our Democratic leadership has become the problem, a more dangerous problem than the GOP. We know what the GOP is but we still believe we can change the Democrats. I am done with them and looking for what is next. And getting ready for when the willing decide to join the fight.