If you want to stop seeing Democratic Party policies on the Chopping block, even as proposals (which this crowd sees as the end of the world, even without them being enacted) You need Democrats in charge.
They're not perfect? Too bad. It's not about how pure these guys are, because impure as they were, they weren't proposing ANY cuts to Social Security Benefits then, much less trying to push austerity on us.
Democrats were doing just fine. We were getting budgets passed, we were pushing through the necessary debt ceiling increases. But then the Republicans came back. The Republicans came back, and rather than just sit down, be quiet, and teach our Democrats a lesson, saying they should be more liberal, they hijacked the system to make it more conservative. Who the hell could have guess that would happen?
It's not brain surgery, folks. Conservatives aren't in the business of being our little lesson givers. The only lessons they want to give are the ones that suit them. That includes the notion that this nation is center right. And the media's going to cooperate with them on that. You know why? Habit.
Habit is the primary reason why it was a terrible idea to let these bastards back into power. Too many people are used to doing things a certain way, not just Republicans, but Democrats and media figures.
We need to realize that running for the hills has been a fucked-up, unsuccessful plan every time it's been carried out. We are not elected Democrats because they have some sort of noble spirit among them that makes them automatically better, we are electing them because every time we let the Republicans gain more power, it ends the same: they pull things more towards their side.
This isn't about some abstract formulation of accountability, like we see in the text books. The Republicans are not acting as individuals, who could be brought to shame one by one, they are acting like a group that wants to seize power, even if it's only to keep it away from us.
We are being aggressively competed with, not simply left to our own devices to do what we please. We cannot afford to behave like we are the only competitors out there, and that we're simply entitled to win things because we're so virtuous. We aren't entitled to shit we don't work for.
We have to be more robust against set backs, less built on short term bursts of anger and fury. It gets old, it gets us pigeonholed as mindless radicals. We need to be the folks who can insist in a calm voice on things, and be heard because we keep on getting our message out, and keeping our presence solid. We will not get the Republican's enjoyment of default status on the national stage until our message is repeated so far and so often that the other side has to push to get anything through. The good news is that their power is faltering, dwindling in the long term. The bad news is that this long-term outcome isn't here yet, and we need to work to make it so.
It shouldn't be a matter of whether you feel inspired to do this, whether you're in the mood, whether this, that, or the other figure in our party has actually stayed true to what we wanted. This should be a matter of working towards a political goal, which you want to reach whatever the setbacks that occur. This is your choice.
Republicans, however fractious and hare-brained they've gotten, still understand that if they quit and go home, we win. So they're not quitting. And if they're not quitting, as should be hugely, abundantly clear by now, then we shouldn't be quitting either.
Quitting is what let 2010 happen. We got too dismayed at the results of two years of trying to push through the filibusters and the mixed loyalties in our own party, and we let the pendulum swing back too fast. The result is, we're now saddled with probably a decade more before we have a chance to undo much of what they did.
But I'll tell you what: it isn't getting done by itself. And guess what? For all it's flaws, the Democratic Party is still the nearest and most effective available agent for carrying out our agenda. There is a lot of work to do, and pessimists who dismiss the worth of their efforts before they have even been attempted aren't going to be able to do that work.
As our party declined from the late sixties onwards, we set one bad precedent after another as a society in deciding that politics was too much of a mess, and that the best choice was "none of the above," like in Brewster's Million. What seemed like a perfectly sensible rejection of the system in fact made it worse. As Americans have gotten less politically engaged, have cultivated their political lives with less care, the crazies have gotten more control, with their conspiracy theory politics, and the sane and responsible people have been shoved to the side as running a more ruthless campaign became more acceptable.
Cynicism helped feed the problem.
It feeds it now. We're too wimpy at this point to demand, insist on what we want. For all our fierce talk about corpocracy, when it shows signs that they're winning, we end up whining about their financial conspiracies and insisting that they've taken over, so nothing matters.
Thing is, we are not the first set of generations to deal with corruption, nor will we be the last. The question is, do we have the courage and the determination to face that down? Or will we be one of those generations that attempts the ill-fated feat of trying to keep their heads down, in hopes that some knight in shining armor will come save us, out of nowhere?
If you want change for the better, there can't be a point where you are OFF. Of course, you should be obnoxious about it. No, you have to be an advocate for change that people can respect, that people in, out and between the parties can talk with.
Let's stop imagining that fighting every little battle as if its apocalyptic will work. We set ourselves up to fail, if we tell ourselves that if we lose this battle, all is lost. If they chain the CPI, we can unchain it, so to speak. If we win first, it's a policy victory. If they win first, we can come back and call what we want reform.
But the point is, what we need is commitment in total. What we need is an opportunistic, hardcharging attitude towards getting what we not, not further whining about how horrible it is that so-and-so supported this. By all means, blow their hair back. And once you're doing, instead of stewing about betrayal, put their back against the wall on it. Don't simply haul ass and lament the loss. Being a loser doesn't get you much respect, but being a quitter gets you even less.