I've had a little insight here that I'd like to share with you. It came to me as I was entertaining questions on my last posting. For all too long, the way most people have modelled how we go about the business of changing our party has simply fallen along the lines of what we do in the voting both, rewarding or punishing the candidates from our party.
Only problem is, of course, when we punish them, guess who comes running back into power? The Republicans, who mess everything up that we try to do, and at best stall our progressive legislation, when they're not threatening economic armageddon in order to get their way on fiscal matters. This is not a matter to take lightly, as the whole Bush Administration can be taken as evidence of. People thought it wouldn't matter who was President for that next few years, and we got Two wars, a deficit, the Enron Debacle... Fuck it, We got a shitload of awful things done to this country, and lets leave it at that. Who we hand political power to matters.
But that, of course, goes for our own side, too. What a dilemma! That is, if you only see it from the inside of a voting booth, and the choices you make there. We haven't been thinking laterally here. Instead we've seen things along the lines of a frontal assault on the choices, reacting, rather than understanding that if we want to change who we have to choose as Democrats, we have to change who's doing the choosing.
The simple fact is, we get the choices we get because the people doing the choosing, setting our party's policies are an old guard of Democrats adapted to fighting a rearguard action against the Republicans. They're defense-minded, at best. To them, really taking it to the Republicans is something novel, something scary which they're rarely willing to take the risk to do.
So, they'll pick the people who think that way, too.
If we want change, we can't charge into it just thinking that folks have to listen to the majority. Republicans and Democrats in Washington both have their deaf-ears when it comes to listening to what people want.
We need to change those who compose the party structure, make the decisions of what risks to take, what rhetorical approaches will work. We need to get on the inside, and make changes from in there as well as from outside. We don't wait for the environment to make its unlikely adaptation to us, we adapt it, even as we adapt to it.
So, if you're complaining about who we have to elect as Democrats, my suggestion is that you work with other Democrats to start replacing the more docile breed of Democrats in charge with those who are willing and able to get more aggressive Democrats elected.