I have no health insurance. I have no dental insurance. I receive SSI disability. I don't have much of a life per se. Can't eat things with wheat in them without paying a price. For some reason, half the time my haircuts turn out embarrassingly. But by some mysterious process I still manage to love the world, love humanity, and believe in the future, because I see it unfolding all around me in countless unpredictable ways. I know that every choice you make is a fulcrum, and every moment you choose to see the world with an open mind is a kaleidoscopic elaboration of an infinite cascade. I can't even conceive of being finished with the Democratic Party, the way the phrase is being thrown around, but it sure does sound like a boring way to rehearse being politically irrelevant. Personally, my testicles want to laugh at the Telemundo soap opera scripts being acted out by people who think they're at Dunkirk because of a tentative deal with a doomed Congress.
Honestly, I feel like my balls are laughing. It's like watching Charlton Heston's "damn you all to hell" speech at the end of Planet of the Apes only to find out he's reacting to the closing of an Arby's. Even if I believed America's core social programs were in danger - which, as I've noted, I would have a profound interest in addressing - given what people sacrificed to originally create those programs, is it seriously believed that anything we've done in the last few decades to preserve them comes even close to being adequate? Why was none of this fury employed in all the intervening years to expand them instead of waiting for them to come under notional threat?
All those long years were wasted because many of the people who could have made positive change happen had convinced themselves that Democrats and Republicans were the same, that the Democratic Party was a sellout to elite interests, and that the best way to maintain their own integrity (i.e., ego) was simply to retreat from politics into sullen dormancy and cede government to people who confirmed all their worst, most cynical assumptions. That was 1980. I think that's a long enough retreat, and all of us who ever had any intention of making this a better country can begin focusing on it right now for the 2012 elections - not merely to scrape the deranged teabagger crap off of Congress and out of Washington for good, and not merely to roll back the damage already done, but to expand programs beyond prior limits. Congress took radical swings twice in two consecutive elections, and it can continue the pattern again - this time with progressives moving ahead with eyes wide open instead of believing that Blue Dogs would go along with their agenda.
We can accomplish our goals without the President's support if necessary, but I don't think it will be necessary - if any doubt his politics are progressive, then prove it by sending him a progressive Congress that passes progressive legislation and see whether he carries the torch forward, merely yields, or resists. The course of action we're called upon to make with respect to Congress would be the same if the President were a Republican, a Democrat, a Libertarian, a Green, an Independent, or a Klingon, so there are no excuses for us and no exceptions. Citizens United, gerrymandering, voter disenfranchisement, poll-rigging, foreign interference, media propaganda, all of it is expected of the GOP and should be accounted for. It's on us, and always was.
Update: Quite a few people horribly misinterpreted the diary's original title, so I've changed it.
Update 2: In addition to the title, two sentences were altered to provide a clarified context. A resident conspiracy theorist has insisted because I didn't mention these specific clarifications in the first update that I'm trying to hide my nefarious intent to traumatize a cancer patient, so I'm now indulging this commenter's imaginative mind by adding this second update. Hopefully this will assuage any lingering concerns.