Sigh. First, a disclaimer. I am on the down side of fifty, and have lived and seen American civic (and therefore, political) life since John F. Kennedy led us through the Cuban Missile Crisis. I admit to being optimistic about our prospects, if only because the US polity has managed to counter-balance it craziness so many times before. I was raised on stories of the 1929 crash and FDR's leadership that built a better society out of the ashes. My parents were quietly and strongly patriotic, as am I; all of us in the sense that we see great good in our country and experience great pain when it fails to live up to it's, well, it's great potential. My parents were democrats, as I have been. I am concerned about the many of our countrymen that fall off the bottom of the social and income scales.
More over the fold.
I have always identified with Jefferson as much as Hamilton; I've believed in progressivism, and support most of the things it accomplished. I participated in Johnson's push for a great society, I marched against the Viet Nam war, and I sat with baited breath as the presidents, then Congress, moved to force states to grant full equality to all races.
Finally, while I am aware of the dangers of labels, I use them as a shorthand when discussing broad trends and social or political alignments.
Having said that, I find myself currently wondering if I have no home in anyone's political house right now.
I can't stomach the fantasy-that-never-was of the Republican party, nor their apparent belief that corporations are the only real people. The Libertarians have some good ideas, but they just can't recognize the fact that we live in society and that what one does affects all. As always, they are often out reading Ayn Rand when the fabric of society is tearing.
The Tea Baggers are just out there, and they don't seem to me to be a real danger to our country. They are showing signs of insanity, and their guns make them dangerous to other citizens. But they don't seem to have the actual intelligence or grasp of reality to threaten the country.
It's the left that concerns me more, since that has been my home. The democrats in congress seem to have abandoned their traditional championship of the middle class and underclasses for the chimera of electability, often posing as GOP-light. Other democrats seem to have decided that corporations are really virtuous and misunderstood, and only need fewer regulations to do good to us. We have true leftists, who have lost faith (or never had it) in the American idea, and look more to Marx than Jefferson for their inspiration.
In the midst of all this, we have a loosely define group called "Progressives," who have lifted the term from those in the 1800's and 1900's who believed government should be used to make society better in some way.
But, as in the rest of American politics, there seems to be little willingness to entertain ideas that one disagrees with; an absence of the intellectual heft to actually discuss one's positions; little willingness to actually have one's mind changed by evidence. In an earlier time, it would be termed "Statesmanship". It was these characteristics that enabled the founders to craft a pretty damn good system of government that both restrained power and enabled good government.
I've been a participant on Daily Kos for about five years, so to many of you I am a newbie. But I came here because it seemed to be a place of intelligent debate, civil reflection and earnest statesmanship. It reflected the type of political expression I had grown to love and then miss, as the reigning GOP dragged us further to the right year after year.
But it's not like that now. I don't know a place that is. It seems that, as in the GOP thirty years ago, thoughtfulness has been outlawed, real debate dismissed, and opposing ideas quashed with partisan fervor. Questioning the assumptions will get one called names, instead of thoughtful answers. This has happened to me so many times in the past months that it seems futile to try to engage anymore.
Further, the significant, important things early day progressives fought and won are being cast aside as so much junk. Public education, for example, was a hard-fought win for progressives in the 19th century; yet today there are those who malign them as instruments of indoctrination. Other examples abound, as regulation of railroads, airlines, food and medicines have been spurned.
Apparently, I am closer to the center than the overwhelming majority of the democrat - progressive - leftist spectrum wishes to be. Those centrists who are left seem to have drunk the corporate kool-aid and forgotten us working people. And this, to me, is a very serious portent for our future, because the GOP - Libertarian - rightist side of our political family has strenuously rejected the center for the past decade.
If the center is fully de-legitimized on both sides, how can there every be consensus building, negotiation and compromise? Without those, there is only gridlock, in a country almost evenly divided between left and right. I know the right has rejected these things already. It disturbs me to see the left do so as well.
Please discuss, and see if we can find our way out of this misama of disaffection and hostility toward each other.