When I came here in 2003, I already knew I was well to the left of most active community members. I just read for quite a while, enjoying news links and the occasional righteous rant, but in the wake of the disastrous Kerry campaign, I decided to join the conversation here a few days after election day 2004. I offered no apologies for the fact that I was a registered Green - and this was, of course, before the FAQ was updated to include the language of a 'Democratic Party' blog [at that point the FAQ was still in its infancy]. My underlying motivation was to try to engage mainstream liberals from the left. Sometimes I succeeded, sometimes I failed miserably. I went to meetups, I actively engaged in the community beyond just politics as well. I even met Markos once in New York and thanked him for starting a place like this where people could gather to discuss politics and activism.
I ended up taking a break for a while largely due to the IP debates that I couldn't keep myself away from - and a general distaste for the state of the blog around 2007. I got terribly discouraged when I would see certain front pagers and very prominent voices completely mischaracterize the history of the left in this country, from the Communist Party to the Black Panthers to the Suffragist Movement. It displayed a blind ignorance of history and how real change has happened. And though I tried, I was woefully unable to correct the record.
You see, I'm a cynic. For most of my adult life, I've had no faith in the democratic process. I think within the current socio-economic milieu the democratic process has failed. At this late date in the era of financialized capitalism, our institutions have become so degraded that not only has government itself failed, but the means by which we choose that government offers no choice but the continuation of failed governance. And it is structural, and by design.
Yes, I always vote and I've generally voted for a combination of Democrats and Greens, but I haven't invested any interest or time in party machinery or party politics throughout my adult life. For my entire adult life, the Democratic Party has been largely bankrupt - it has sought to undo all of the modest gains it enacted from FDR to LBJ, largely due to the money stream that has flowed from corporate America since the '70's. The net result of that undoing has been the fracturing of the Democratic coalition. Where once the party made appeals to how economic issues and issues of identity politics were inextricably linked, the modern party abandoned the economic side of the coin and created a space for the party of the plutocrats to divide and conquer based on the exploitation of identity politics.
I've long argued that if the Democratic Party was really listening to the electorate, it would once again bind together the great issues of the day and opine the analogy of our various struggles. The conquering of economic, racial, gender and sexual inequality is ultimately rooted in a single idea - we are all equal and deserve equal protection under the law, equality of opportunity and equality of ends. It is a very simple, moral pronouncement. The policies that flow from the idea are equally simple. The explanation and drumming of support for those policies is also equally simple. But the party apparachiks, in their infinite wisdom, have declined this simplicity - and hence 45% of the country doesn't even vote in Presidential elections and a huge proportion of the 55% that do, vote against their own interests.
And now we have a moment in our history when all of this coincidentally collides. We have widespread anger over income inequality; we have a huge crisis, particularly among Latino immigrants, because of our completely failed immigration policy; we finally have increasing social consciousness of the terrible underbelly of racism in this country that has persisted unabated since slavery; we're staring down the rollback of almost every socio-economic gain women have made since the 19th amendment; we face an overwhelming global environmental crisis not only because of the structure of our economy but because everyone who could do anything about it has been bought off by the very economic interests driving the crisis. A moment like this should not be wasted - cannot be wasted.
And into this colloquy steps a political candidate for the highest office of our land who speaks clearly to all of these issues; who has an unimpeachable record on all of them; who refuses to play the game with the economic powers that rig the system for failure. Certainly, he's not perfect. Who is? But he is the first candidate in over 50 years that could actually transform the political apathy of this country into profound civic change.
All of the Common Wisdom is out the door. The pundits, the polls, the prognosticators, they all try to set a ceiling, but that ceiling relies on past voting models. It relies on the assumption that almost half of eligible voters won't actually participate. It relies on apathy. It is inherently cynical.
I said to Markos tonight in his diary that I think we will prove him wrong. If, in this moment, someone like Bernie Sanders can bring a terrible cynic like me back into party politics, back to work, back to real civic engagement, the ceiling is much higher than the insiders are willing to admit.
Remember, we're not after the 'middle', we're after the 45% of the people who have dropped out. We're after the people who will vote again for a simple message of equality, fair treatment, fair wages, fair opportunity, and the basic recognition that we should all have autonomy over our own lives - and that means racial justice, gender justice, economic justice, and as my hero Harvey Milk would say, justice for all of the 'us-es'.