I've been saying ever since the so-called "Clintonista" vs. "Obamabot" wars broke out during the last election (with only a barely-maintained cease-fire in place to this day) that everyone... and I mean everyone... to the left of Lincoln Chafee needs to quit acting like a bunch of testosterone-filled alley cats and work together on issues that we can agree on. Instead, we continue to splinter further and further over minute details while the right-wing gets more and more consolidated and of one voice.
So when we hare off into diffuse groups with narrow agendas and spend our time fuming at all of the other groups, calling them "ignorant" or saying "they just don't get it", it's not they that don't get it.
It's all of us. And we no longer have the luxury of squabbling.
(More after the fold...)
We have GOT to try to remember that poll after poll shows that when asked to self-identify according to ideology, 40% of Americans call themselves "conservative", only 21% call themselves "liberal", and the rest are in that huge gray area called "moderates" or "independents". That 39% has been growing more and more "leaning-conservative" since Vietnam, the failure of the Great Society, 9/11, and now the Great Recession. We all know that despite self-identification, many independents tend to vote for Democrats even when they think of themselves as conservatives, but things are changing rapidly in recent years and more and more these folks are leaning RIGHT. This is very, very bad news for liberals. Especially when liberals are left looking like a bunch of confused and ineffectual dreamers and the conservatives are largely on-message and more importantly, on the news.
Look. I've said this till I'm purple in the face and my fingers bleed from typing it, but this is the bottom line, folks: The Right Is Organized, Energized, and Religionized. We are none of the above.
Not to over-generalize, but to a much-greater extent than anyone on the Left, those on the Right march in lock-step. We on the Left see this as a horrible thing, and it is, but reality shows us that lock-stepping groups tend to get things done... often with no compunction as to who they hurt or any hint of compromise. Witness the obstructionistic GOP in Congress over the last 20 years and tell me this isn't so throughout the Right?
They're pumped up because they're deathly afraid of a horror-movie version of "liberalism", harkening back to McCarthyite days if not earlier. We tend to forget that conservatives, no matter how intelligent and well-educated they are, are CONSERVATIVE. They don't like radical change, and they are more likely to follow authority figures and respect orderliness than liberals. People on the Right have been inculcated for years with a message that liberals are out to steal away their hard-won freedoms (forget the illogic of the fact that they see "freedom" and "strong authority figure" as being synonymous). Because they see liberalism in this light, they see it as a threat to their very existence and the existence of the country. Thus, they're fired up and ready to fight.
Finally, the Right is by and large made up of people who are heavily religious. There may be plenty of atheists and agnostics in the bunch, but there's a driving force of Christian fundamentalism behind much of the Right. Here is one of our greatest threats: these folks see the battle between liberals and conservatives as a Holy War (if you think that's hyperbole, read some of Frank Schaeffer's stuff sometime). As we all know, nothing motivates some people more than believing you're fighting on God's side.
So as I see it, liberals have a choice. We can either all work together in common cause for the core values and issues we want our government to address, or we can continue breaking up our message into hundreds of tiny bits and fight amongst each other while the Right keeps on turning this country into an Ayn Randian / Bircherite dystopia (just before they declare war on the rest of the planet to bring about the Second Coming).
As for myself, I am vehemently opposed to some of what the Obama administration has done; I am happy about some of the other things they've done. I'm realistic enough to know that much of the supertanker-sized "ship of state" is just now starting to turn, and we can't expect 30 years of right-wing "drown it in a bathtub" anti-government destructiveness to be changed in a single year, or even four years. I'll continue to fight for the changes I believe need to be addressed, and I'll chin up and accept that some things aren't going to be changed at all or may even go far afield from the way I want them. But until Obama & Crew up and announce that they're converting over to the GOP, they're the best chance we have had since Clinton, if not Kennedy & LBJ, of enacting drastically-needed changes in society and reforming our global presence, and I'll support this administration and the Democratic Party because frankly, it's all we've got right now.
But that last comes with an asterisk:
IF, and I mean a really big IF, we can somehow enact changes to the elections laws that allow proportional representation in Congress (which will mostly require changes in ballot qualifications at the state level), then third parties will finally have a real chance of getting national leaders elected. If that's the case, then with enough third parties in Congress forcing both the Dems and the Reps to form coalitions (like you'd find in any parliamentary system), we would be able to start shifting the "majority" parties away from their corporatist platforms and towards something that better serves the wide range of people in this country.
But that's a huge IF and it will take the efforts of election reformers in all fifty states to see it come to fruition. However, if we can do that, we have a chance to get this country back on a track that allows progress to be made once again, instead of the constant state of stalemate, sloth, and trainwreck we've experienced in the last few decades.