The internet make political expression incredibly easy. Too easy, in fact. We gather in our nice, safe little neighborhoods of political expression, and we rarely have to venture out. Every time we hit publish on an entry, we feel like we've done something.
What all this is really about, though, is the political process. At the end of the day, though it's easier to say something about what's going on in Washington and have thousands, even millions read it, our political process is still ruled by votes, first ours in who we elect, then those of our Senators and Representatives as they pass or kill legislation.
Of course, it makes a big difference who the President is, and who's on those courts. Your votes make that difference. What difference do you want them to make?
I get the frustration, but I still find what some people say about protest votes to be counterproductive. They can talk all they want to, but at the end of the day, policy is not written by our protest, but by those who get voted into office.
If our strategy takes votes from where they elect Democrats, and seats from where they help make majorities in Congress, and throws them away, then I can't confess much love for that strategy.
I have a basic notion here: political presence makes power. You cannot abstain from the process, keep your hands clean, and expect to have influence. Politics always involves compromise, if you want to extend your influence beyond your immediate circle. Politics demands involvement.
And not just in voting. I mean, really, what gets me is that people expect the folks whose first instinct after winning 2010 is to move right to treat their absence as a punishment. I'd say that's not going to happen. These people move according to political habits formed under decades of Republican Presidents and Republican Congresses, when it seemed like Right Wing policies were the popular ones, and liberalism was an ideology whose time had passed.
So, in my mind, you won't get anywhere staying home or voting for some third party candidate, because they'll likely take the opportunity to do the opposite of what you want.
Really, we won't get nearly as much change from the GOP's policies so long as the old guard Democrats are either in charge, or believing that the right is resurgent. It used to be a basic expectation that Republicans would win, that their policies would triumph, and that this was the reality people had to conform to.
Changing that is key. See, many here essentially want the deference the Republicans once had, and still enjoy to a certain extent. They're puzzled as to why all their major wins in the last few years didn't translate to overwhelming power like the Republcians had. My theory is that while the Republicans have been badly weakened, they've still got some struggle left in them. They got more than that, though: they've got a party just descending from the point at which it commanded so much deference.
If you look for the signs of it, you'll find that despite a penchant for the bold, cracks are showing up in the veneer of Republican certainty of its hold on power. Meanwhile, though, Democrats aren't used to being so disciplined, and many grew up as politicians believing that deference to the Republicans is the best political move. The default power of the GOP is breaking down, but it's still there.
The legacy of Republican power will not go away overnight. There's too much bullshit to shovel. If you want progress, well then progress starts from 2006, and all the crap that came before it. There's a lot to undo, and it's not going to get undone as long as Republicans win elections. They're not stupid. If you want to know why they hate Obama so much, it isn't because he's black, or because he's the perfect liberal, they hate him because his very election (and re-election) represents a break from their domination of Washington politics. He represents the beginning of the end for that, and so they have to hit him and the Congress that came with him harder, in the hopes that they can forestall their slide from power.
They're not wrong in that regard, though it's a fool's hope for them to think they can stall the change forever. Obama makes what they call big government cool again. It's big government to the rescue! The very extremity of their opposition doesn't change the fact that people have changed their mind about things enough to where that Obama's policies poll well.
Sooner or later, Washington policy catches up.
To do so quicker, though, we need Obama re-elected. We need Democrats back in charge in Congress. The sooner the Republicans lose heart that they can stop what's coming, the sooner many will stop and realize that what we're building isn't that bad.
But that will take votes, and your involvement in the political process. We have to essentially replace the leadership over time, replace the Republican's default control with our own. We have to be motivated on our own terms to change our own party's politics, and the Country's as well.
You can't win if all your vote means to you is the means to make a protest against a party not yet built to your specifications. Democrats must have power for liberals to increase theirs.