This kind of front page entry ticks me off. It seems clear to me that all too many people front paging this blog have decided that it's somehow motivational and useful to fill the front page with cynicism and circular firing squad-style blaming of the victims.
Folks, The Republicans are forcing this not because we were weak, but because they can. These people were fanatics beforehand. They were talking about this before hand. What is it that makes you think that these people would behave more reasonably in the face of a more aggressive Democratic Party?
Which isn't to say that being more aggressive wouldn't have been more welcome. I just don't think we'd have gotten better results. I don't think we could have avoided negotiating with them. Why? Because like it or not, this was an important matter, and it's importance outweighed our desire for political victory, and the Republicans had no reason to back down from using it to get their way.
For Republicans, this is about imprisoning any Liberal movement in a box before it can get off the ground. But the real question will be, in this upcoming election, is will we imprison ourselves in a losing political position in reaction to all this?
I've published five diaries in the last two days, most basically sketching my way around a post-debt deal strategy. I've been very active in doing this, because I think the worst thing to do in times like this is to settle into learned helplessness.
Criticism has become the basic political unit of Daily Kos, for all too many articles. It's got a problem. Criticism, for the most part, is passive. Somebody else has to come through in order to fulfill your wish. Somebody else has to do something.
Even worse is this notion of fashionable absence and abstinence. That takes passiveness and makes it even worse. And really, after you've removed yourself, what more can you do, besides voting for folks who will never hold office, or should never hold office?
Where has punishing the Democrats gotten us? Did it get us better Democrats? No, fewer and worse. How? The intentions were pure! Well, your intentions don't control anybody else's actions. What people forget here is that we are in the business of influencing other people's actions. What doesn't succeed at doing that fails at being good politics.
Really, folks, after a dramatic defeat of Liberals and Democrats, what do you think happens to our influence, what do you think happens to our political agenda?
Why do we do this to ourselves? Well, the plain answer, I think, is that we want to be like the Republicans. We want to be as solid in our party discipline, as ruthless in our tactics, as hardheaded in our negotiations, and so on and so forth. We think that will gain us success.
I think it would be a disaster if we succeeded like this. The Republicans have put themselves on an exhaustive, self-destructive course, and copying it would be the death of our party, too. Besides, has it occured to any of you that these Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich reactions are exactly what the Republicans want from us? Do you think they put such strain and infuriating pressure on us just for kicks?
The Republicans are scared. You think you've got it bad, with Republicans pushing policies you don't like? It's worse for the Republicans. After years of being in control, of holding all the chips, they failed to get what they wanted. It wasn't just two years of reasonable control they had, they've had the opportunity to change things, change the paradigm of government for the last thirty years.
And they've failed. And their voters are supremely pissed, especially after the Bush Administration. All the fantasies of what the Republican Party was supposed to be just collapsed in a heap. Meanwhile, all the consequences of their policies seem to have stacked up on them like the floors of a collapsed office building. If they were really honest with themselves about all that happened... well, they wouldn't be Republicans anymore, not with these leaders.
That is, if they were completely honest with themselves. Many, though, have something worse to fear: us.
When they call us Socialists, when they call us collaborators with our enemies, very often, they're serious. They see us as this commie fifth column, out to get them, out to take their guns, outlaw their God, and stick them in camps.
So, when they see us mount this nation's engines of power in triumph, they went out of their minds, quite simply. They're burning with fear, burning with anger, burning with all kinds of passion. But where were these people in 2006, 2008? Well, they were likely in the position we are now, or were in 2010, at least.
Except, we took just two years to get there. How?
Well, we were in that demoralized state, and have been in that demoralized state for quite awhile. We've adopted that as our standard sensibility. When things turn south for us, we seem to say, oh well, it was good while it lasted, or Oh, I knew we couldn't depend on our leaders, and we walk right back out the door. We dress this up in the clothes of being independent of an unworthy party, but we shouldn't be so deluded about it: what we are doing is quitting in disgust.
But after just two and a half years? The Republican's movements, their ALEC's, AEIs, Heritage Foundations, Religious right have been changing laws, minds, and whatever for the last four decades, and reshaping our politics in a concerted, elected official manner for the last thirty. I have lived my entire lifetime under the ascendence of the modern Conservative movement and Republican Party.
Which means, essentially, there's is an overwhelming shitload of work to do, and just two years was not a realistic timeframe to expect the whole world to change. If you thought we could rest on our laurels, sit around on our fat asses and play defense, if you didn't think that the Republicans would beat you silly for every concession, you were a moron. Even the best, strongest initial movement like ours will face a backlash brewing from the other side, especially when that side is as paranoid and power-hungry as the GOP. This is the way things work. Now, if we had been lucky the TEA Party revival would have broke against the electorate, only a few additional seats falling into Republican hands, the majority ours.
We weren't lucky. And there's not a damn thing we can do about that now, right? The 2010 election is decided, and not in our favor.
What's more, and this is where the people complaining about appeasing hostage-takers have failed to understand the situation, they were going to take hostages this year regardless of what we did. These people were never interested in being reasonable, of coming back and then making peace. This was always going to be the second act in this political war. This was always going to be this brutal.
The question we need to ask ourselves is: What do we do now?
Now. Not what should we have done before. An obsession with past failures is only going to be the source of new ones, as we remain timid and fickle in our ability to unite and push the political balance where it needs to go. I know some of you are seeking alternatives at this point, and I've got advice for you: don't. You need a majority to get what you want, and get it any time in the next twenty or thirty years.
Our best alternative long term is to remake the Democratic Party, replace leaders whose default mode was deference to the Republicans. But that will take time. In the short and long term, what's need is a movement. But movements take motivation, and here's where I find what gets posted on the front page to be idiocy.
First, We're blaming Democrats. We call that holding our own accountable, but really, folks, We're just Daily Kos. Obama isn't going to faint in horror at the prospect of having Kossacks abandon him. Yes, he's playing for the center, because we of the Left are too small a part of the voting population to be a sure thing. The fact that we often threaten to take our ball and go home doesn't help. The fact that we often first blame a Democrat for what happens also make things more difficult.
This isn't the Corsican Brothers. Hurting ourselves won't hurt them. We can't really force that right at the moment anyway. What we can do, though, is make the debt ceiling a toxic legacy for the Republicans.
The front pagers aren't going to be able to do that. They're too busy bashing the administration for how awful the deal is, blaming them. What message would any potential new Democrat get, bringing up that front page?
Everybody's at fault. In fact, that's the message in the media, too. True as it may be, it's not helpful, because it's not true enough. It's missing some major context.
Like the fact that the Republicans actions were necessary in every case to make this possible. Even if Democrats had fought these people tooth and nail with every inch of their being, the Republicans would have done this. This is not our fault. We didn't invite this reaction from the Republicans, except perhaps by taking power from them. That's what's got them forcing these horrible deals. The matter of whether we're willing to negotiate is largely secondary. Plenty of Republicans said they weren't going to negotiate, yet they ended up doing so anyways. Why? Because there was no room for error, no room to let things go to hell.
The real reason we're in this situation is the 2010 election, and our only real way out is to destroy the Republican's ability to hold the House or gain the Senate.
Our message and actions should be based on the goal of winning that election. So it is a foolish thing to be putting forward messages out there that essentially say we've lost, we've been sold out, we're betray, yada yada yada. That's what you do to kill a majority, and that hasn't worked out well for us. If you don't care, you don't care, but not caring, let me remind you, has been a losing strategy for decades on end. Care. Motivate yourself. Quit neutralizing yourself in your own fight to gain power. Quit doing the other side's job for it.
You know what my reaction to what Boehner and McConnell have set as their doctrine on debt ceilings? HELL NO. That's my reaction. And you know what? I don't think I'm the only person who thinks this way. I think many Americans, many investors and Wall Street types look at this with a jaundiced eye.
Folks, I think we can build a lot of support for Democrats taking back the House, and improving our total in the Senate on this. Rather than accept that this is the deal going forward, or even accepting that we have to live with this deal forever more, we ought to be getting people rioting at town halls for them even suggesting that this should be the normal state of affairs.
Long ago, it seems, we lost the passion to confront these people head-on, decided it would be best simply to play a defensive game among our own, a defensive game protecting the advances of the New Deal and the Great Society. But it means we can be held hostage, as the Republicans chip away at that edifice. We're always backing away on things like this, because we never let the momentume build on our side to rock them back on their heels.
But this is a great opportunity to do just that. The Republicans have over extended themselves severely. We're not even a day off the signing of this debt deal, and already Wall Street and the other financial centers are becoming concerned about the price of all this austerity. Folks, we can take advantage of that, if we're not too busy beating up on and blaming ourselves.
The Republican's approach has offended and alienated many people. Their disregard and contempt for the safety of America's full faith and credit has done much of the job of scaring and angering voters, who might otherwise have voted for them, or stayed home. We can sit here sulking, mourning the recovery, or we can go out there and we can start leading people to act, to protest, to identify, for very good reasons, the sagging of the recovery with the Republican's rise to power and their abuse of that power throughout this economic downturn.
We can get justice, folks. We can quit chasing the collaborators and the negotiators and the appeasers, and we can take the fight to our real adversaries, and take back concrete power from their grasp.
That is, unless we want to sit here, muddy the waters, encourage pessimism, pronounce Keynesian economic dead, etc. If we want to continue to be the pity party, the party that asks why things went so wrong instead of getting out there and bending the trajectory back in the right direction, then we can just sit on our asses.
If we want to be the party that wins in 2012, though, then we got work to do. Let's quit sulking and start fighting for what we believe in.