I think many of you are acting like wimps. Sorry to say that, and I don't mean it in a mean way, it just seems like you give up too easily, too quickly, against people who are not so yielding, just because they're able to force concessions from those who represent you. What have you decided? You're not going to vote for a Democrat until you get what you want?
Be prepared for a long wait. What are you, peasants in some fairytale land? They wait, because they don't have any power. I sure hope that's not how you think of yourself. It's not how I think of myself. I think of myself as an equal. And I demand that I be treated as such.
Yes, we've been knocked on our ass the last year or too. Yes, Obama's compromising more than we would like, and the final deal we reach with the Republicans will be terrible. The present sucks. The present, though, is not forever. Things change. The question is whether we tune out, drop out, and run off, or whether we make the deliberate decision to seek our political goals continuously, regardless of whether life grants us success all at once.
There's a benefit to being familiar with American history, of knowing that all the rights and privileges and entitlements that we so value didn't come to us all at once. For one thing, you understand what a struggle getting these rights, these programs and everything was. For another thing, you don't take for granted that these things will stick around without a fight.
But you have to show up to a fight.
Whatever reason you give not to show up is irrelevant. You still lose if you don't show up. The cold, hard fact is that Democrats have leaned to the right because the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party doesn't show up to elections with any regularity. The cold, hard fact is, most of the time when Democrats aren't elected, Republicans are instead. The cold, hard fact is that the more the Republicans are elected, the more we have to deal with shit sandwiches like this.
And unfortunately, hit with those bitter compromises, Democrats give up. They say, if you're going to compromise, I'm going to go into my corner and sulk, take my ball and go home. Yet the politicians aren't going to look at that and say "Oh, darn, I'm not getting elected again, am I?"
And in the process, we waste great opportunities.
What opportunities? Don't you see how terrible things are? How many spending cuts? How much the Republicans have been able to reward their contributors and corporate sponsors? Don't you understand, Stephen, that we've lost, that we've been defeated, that everything's going to hell in a handbasket, and that on top of it all, Keynesian economics is dead?
Well, folks, I see all of that, especially since I hang around here, and it's so fashionable to reiterate all this over and over again.
I remember the bleakness of things after 2004, too. After 2000. After 1994.
It's easy to remember what's gone wrong. But we're forgetting that for every high the Republicans have had, they've had their lows, too, especially given the hubris that saturates the party, the tendency to believe that when the American public turns to them on one issue, or they succeed, that this means they can do whatever they want.
Republicans, I feel, have strained the goodwill of the American people once again. Once again, they've gone too far. Now, some Democrats talk about problems with the Obama Administration and the Democrats about the message. Well, let me spell this out: it will be a failure of our message if we accept blame for this debt ceiling deal that was forced on us in any way, shape or form. If we get into paranoid fits about what the Democrats are doing, we only hinder the dynamics of the message we should be sending: That the Republicans forced this on the American people, and they will force even more ruinous things on them, if they're allowed to keep power. Let this debt ceiling hostage situation and the policy that results hang around the Republican's neck, now and forever.
There is only one correct response when we're challenged on medicare and entitlements as a result of this deal: I voted to save the economy of this country from an even worse fate, a fate that Republicans would have willingly inflicted on this country otherwise.
Rather than get ensnared in the quibbling hair-splitting of rhetoric, and let ourselves follow context-free logic into paralysis, we should tell people the truth about what's happened, that a party has put its fortunes and its ideology above the good of the country, and that if they are allowed to keep their power, they will surely take us hostage once again, and demand another ransom of entitlement cuts and program cuts, even as the economy suffers and the average person groans under the weight of the burden.
I know some liberal activists will find this stupid, or think it nonsense. Well, I say to them, what has doubt and self-mutilation gotten us? We, as a party, have lashed ourselves over the back like that monk in The Da Vinci Code, and it's only served to give us further pain. No party that goes to Washington will come back with all the trophies it's promised to deliver. Sometimes, if the opposition is harsh enough, as it is now, if the opposition is fervent enough, and the wrong people control the wrong processes, we'll find it difficult to even defend that which should be held sacrosanct.
But if we balk and withdraw when such things happen, if the confrontations and frustrations are allowed to send us off into our little corner, to make us stay home on election day, give up on the Democrats, and so on and so forth, two things will happen: true liberals will make up less of a proportion of the major party that represents the left in America, and Republicans, with their reflexive, stubborn wilingness to impose themselves on the country, will get more powerful, as they have over decades worth of Democrats deciding to go off into corner and sulk.
And it will be at the wrong time, because now is the time where people have come to realize just how harsh and unlovely the Republican vision of government is, and how callous they are to the needs of the American people.
But what is my plan, that we sweep in like a Prince Charming and tell them that we'll save them, after all that's happened?
No. Democrats shouldn't be there to save the day after people make the mistake of voting Republican. The Democrats of America have better things to do, than be the people in the circus who follow the elephants with straw and a broom.
And we ought to tell people that. We ought to tell people that we cannot undo, or even stop the committed ranks of the Republican Party, and the policies they've wrought over forty years until people finally stand up for themselves, and commit to a more liberal political order. It's that simple. People must commit if they want something good and lasting to come out of our political system. The kinds of redemptive and restorative changes we need cannot simply be pieced together in a happy couple of years, where everything goes right, and the Republcians give up, and the Democrats after decades of capitulation, suddenly just make it their habit to stand up to the GOP.
It has to be fought for, now, and for decades to come. We shouldn't be recruiting people by saying that if they vote for us, they can expect the skies to open up, flowers to grow in an instant, and the roses all to shed their thorns. We shouldn't be telling them that they can just flirt with us for an election or two, then go back to the Republicans, and expect things to improve.
And really, we shouldn't be putting ourselves through the torture of believing that we can save the world in the same manner. We might get lucky, but in my opinion, we're fighting the momentum of the Age of Reagan, just as Reagan fought, and often conceded and lost to the momentum of FDR's legacy.
Time has a tendency to wear away the rough edges of our memory. Republicans today remember little of the uncertainties and contrary results that struck them near the beginning of their ascendence. Even poor Rush can't believe that Reagan raised taxes. They have a mythology, a legend which time has dissolved away the inconvenient details of, leaving the bare bones of ideology and principle.
So do we. To us, the folks who were often born with these rights and these entitlements, their presence in our lives was an instant gratification, an instant promise. We don't remember the fights, we don't remember how the Liberals of yesteryear had to fight against the conservatives. We remember the results, not the harsh practical measures it took to get them.
What we need now is not more navel gazing, self-hatred, and dropping out. That's been our plan for the last thirty years, and it's not produced results. We need to be committed to seeing our agenda realized, one way or another, for the long term, sticking with it until we get what we want.