We pride ourselves on being part of the reality-based community, but the way I see it, being the reality-based community does not mean your behavior has to be done in perpetual reaction to the last 24 hour's news cycle. Why? Because reality is complex, and not all events worth considering happen over such a short time span. Additionally, much in the way of recent information is unreliable or incomplete.
Take for instance the 4th Quarter GDP numbers from 2008. When first reported, the decline was pegged at 3.8. This was the number the Stimulus was aimed at. Then it became something more like 6.1%, considerably worse. And now? Now we know it was 8.9%.
This world has no shortage of information, no shortage of commentary and analysis, and we're all drowning in it as we're trying to react. The internet has the world at your fingertips sometimes, and other times the damn globe's rolling over you.
I regularly post at a place called Watchblog. It's a multiparty site, which means I've had to constantly defend the President against Republicans of all kinds, from moderates to folks so right-wing they consider taxes to be theft. Perhaps that's why I haven't fallen into the trap of turning against Obama for the shortfalls.
Because I know who and what we're having this fight against, and my daily debate with these people has never allowed me to forget it. I know first-hand the sheer obstinance and dogmatic beliefs of the Republicans. I've never stopped having to engage in rhetorical battles with the Right, so I know personally that even when I try my hardest, and punch back as good as I get, these people just come right on back, ignore the facts, and repeat their charges and innuendo.
They don't care how strong we think we are. The just want to beat us, and save the country. That is literally how many of them think. I have no doubt, if a Republican wins, they'll defend him to the hilt, they'll just keep on rationalizing each and every screw-up, because I personally have argued with them while they do, and their arguments have paralleled those made by the Republicans in the larger world.
Some folks complain I do too much meta. Me, I think we should be looking at things from more than just a reactive standpoint.
I think our main problem, as a movement, is that it's only just started. There's a lot of potential to it, but our main problem is that we've invested everything in our leaders, in a way that is not too smart if the footing of the movement isn't that good yet.
Look back at the history of the Conservative movement. It didn't win all of a sudden. It didn't get it's first real foothold until the Nixon Administration, and even then, Nixon ended up passing and creating a lot of policy today that would be seen by the Right as to the left of Lenin. What was it he said, we're all Keynesians now?
It's not that Nixon was necessarily liberal. No, he was pretty far right. But opinions and what you can get done are two different things. He might not have liked Medicare or Social Security, but could he have gotten them repealed with the Democrats in charge of both Houses? No. Nixon was constrained by the Congress he had, not to mention the generally liberal attitude of the people.
Nixon and the Conservatives, though, did not give up. They found their wedges and they started pounding them in. Race, the War in Vietnam, the Media, legislation at the state level, gay rights, guns- by 1980, they were in a much better position, and they elected Reagan.
But even with Reagan, things were not perfect, not in the least. Democrats lost the Senate when Reagan took power, and lost many seats in the House. Stung by the defeat, do you know what Democrats did? That's right, they swung somewhat to the right, as they would every time they got defeated by Republicans We're going to consider that later, but for now, let's keep going.
Reagan, for all his charm, could not hide the massive hole in revenues his tax cuts produced, so the Tax cuts were followed immediately by the largest tax hikes in history, which mysteriously didn't damper the recovery that the Republicans all credited to the Tax Cuts. I'd advise people to look at the employment numbers for 1981 to 1984, if they want an idea of how cracked that notion is. Reagan helped save, rather than end Medicare and Social Security. Reagan agreed to a lot of Democratic ideas.
Again, it wasn't that Reagan was personally that much of a leftist liberal, but given the ongoing control of the House by the Democrats, there was only so much he could actually get carried out, and his policy had to pass through Congress as congress was.
His successor was even more constrained, because by 1986, the Democrats had regained the Senate, so there wasn't going to be a Right-Wing Bonanza there, for sure. Bush in this case was a moderate Republican, so it wasn't as if he even wanted to go that far on behalf of the Conservatives.
I have the feeling that all these years of moderated GOP politics was what people were thinking of when Bush 43 presented himself as a candidate.
But getting back to the first Bush era, we ought to note a couple events when it comes to the effects of political dissatisfaction. The first event we can speak of is Bush's lack of support among the Republicans. The GOP power brokers wanted somebody who was more red meat right, and they added their dissatisfaction to that of the rest of the country, and were shocked, horrified and outraged to discover that Bill Clinton had gotten elected! (we would be shocked, horrified and outraged ourselves later. I wonder why?)
Then what happened with Clinton? Well, the Republicans assaulted the American public's senses with a flood of Republican propaganda, against a Reagan-primed audience. So, guess what happened? The Republicans won in 1994! it helped that the Democrats were a bit tired, demoralized and many of the legacy Democrats from the South and other states were retiring or getting defeated.
So what did Democrats, including Clinton do? They got more conservative, that's right! Just like Obama's policy got more Conservative in the wake of 2010. Coincidence? No. Just as with Nixon and Reagan, the real question was, "what could they pass?", not "What did they believe?". In general, you can practically write this as a rule, a party forced to compromise will moderate it's politics towards the other side. That is, if they're interested in passing anything.
It bears reminding that so far, not much has passed from the nutty GOP majority. It's the most absolute case of gridlock I have ever seen, and Obama doesn't look like he's in any hurry to solve the Republican's problem there.
Which brings me to another subject: Bush 43. He's one of those sorts that one could say was born on third base, and thinks he hit a home run. Well, unfortunately, too many people here think he did, too, and are sorely disappointed that our leaders didn't imitate him. Theoretically it was possible, but Bush started out with some advantages.
First, the Republican Party he inherited had finished the job of purging its moderates a long time ago. Even today, the party is about 69% self-identified conservative, in contrast to our 38% liberal party. He came into office with the Republican Media machine at it's full power, with Democrats really lacking any counterpart media operation.
And most importantly, though the Senate is almoste evenly divided, Bush has an essentially conservative Congress, with demoralized Democrats as his opponents. After 2002, until 2006, he enjoys a heavily Republican Congress with a power-hungry leadership unwilling to concede anything.
Plus, the guy was a heedless moron, and his party had the heedless morons necessary to just push things through.
Even so, though, early on, Bush had to run on being a compassionate conservative, and was promising a new entitlement in the drug benefit. The Republican will point this out when they claim he wasn't a true conservative. That, after having pushed him as THE true conservative in 2004, knowing full well he'd gone back into deficit spending, that he'd added a whole new costly bureaucracy to Medicare, etc.
Which brings us around to Obama.
Obama's majority was built mostly of old Democrats, folks who honed their political instincts during the era from Reagan to the latter days of the Bush Administration. If you understood this, then you would know where to set your expectations. Once it was clear that the Democrats were only so emboldened, I knew progress would be limited.
Then the Republicans failed to cooperate by lying down and accepting the loss, and that's where I think many of us have fallen short in registering what's going on, failed to see the forest for the trees. The leadership decided that what they were going to do was to simply stonewall everything. This meant one of two things: if Democrats didn't have 60 votes, for whatever reason, the law wasn't going to get passed. This became especially true after Scott Brown got elected. After that, the only things that got passed were the things you could get a Republican to vote with you on.
Yeah, we know how well that worked. We didn't pass the ACA through reconciliation for our health. Now we've lost the house, and people are suggesting that the President go and kick the Republican's asses.
Oh, and no pretty speeches, we need action!
Except real action requires a cooperative House of Representatives, and a Senate minority that won't filibuster the majority. And both Republican delegations have pretty much signalled the intention to just keep on pulling this bullshit until it no longer profits them to do so.
Which basically means, forever, or until their asses land on the street.
In a sense (and only a sense, mind you), there is no point in debating each of the issues we bring up on the rec list every day, for the singular fact that we don't really have the power to get much of anything done, except to the extent that our President can order it to be done.
I want you to consider that for a moment, folks, when you bash Obama. It's not merely about whether the criticism is right, for it may well be. The question is, is it helpful? Demoralizing support for Obama might provide short-term satisfaction to those who feel betrayed by his compromises, but let's get real folks, we already tried the Democratic Congress and Republican President thing, and it left us feeling that we needed a Democrat in the White House so we'd be able to get something done.
That's why I think there's no point to it: it doesn't get you a better alternative. I don't like wasting time with the greater of two evils, just to avoid the injury to my pride that comes from supporting the lesser of the two. It just seems a fucked-up way to do politics.
Ah, but the facts are the facts, and the results are the results, of course. Well, let me tell you a little secret here, that the history I recounted might have already told you: sometimes you have to look beyond the inadequacies of the candidate, if you want to get your way politically. Republicans could always turn to focus on the movement as a whole, on their cause as a whole, when it became clear that their hopes and dreams were falling short of ideal. When their disappointments became greater, they could reflect on their cause, and then re-energize their voters. They could sell candidates and form a backstop that would prevent their people from backsliding.
More to the point, the results that came of such strategies, while not always robust in the face of real world concerns kept the Republicans competitive.
Personally, I think the Conservative movement's running on fumes, so this is the perfect time to do the movement building, but we got to realize something here that might not sit well with some: Movements, by their nature, are deliberate projects aimed at future results, and aimed at getting people to align themselves with us ideologically
By it's nature, a meta sort of matter. Not merely about politics, but about the way we deal with politics, not merely about what we say, but indeed about how we say it.
And I feel, it's the way we got to go. It's easy to push agendas when you have power, when you've got the apparatus behind you to exercise that power. Liberals had their share of power Pre-1994, and we remember how they use to exercise it. But our party isn't that party anymore, it's a party moved on by almost a generation. It's a party that's been beaten, fragmented, given a massive inferiority complex, and corrupted in many places. That's not going to change with the snap of a finger, anymore than the GOP will suddenly be redeemed by its insurgency. While the political leadership can fall pretty quickly, as 2006 demonstrated, that doesn't mean the institutions and those who supported them will go that quickly.
We have two things we need to do, in order to better exercise political power. You've already heard of it: more and better Democrats. Now it might seem sometimes that I'm saying that more needs to be prioritized over better, and to a certain extent that's right, but what I would most especiall emphasize is that better without more is pointless. If we're a better party, but we're a minority and don't have the White House, nothing's getting done anytime soon. We have to juggle the different efforts as we go.
If we're constantly getting sucked into maelstroms of pessimism and apathy, though, none of this is going to get done. We need an attitude of defiance against the powers that be which would suppress our movement. We need to have a certain measure of calm we can put on over whatever emotions are going through us that allows us to problem solve, and not merely vent and self-mutilate our party in frustration
I write what some call "Meta" diaries, because I have seen where attitudes like ours have led before, and I have no interest in ending up there now.
My interest is seeing politics improve in this country, particularly our own, so my aim is to broaden our focus and steer us towards a more strategic sensibility. I have no interest in seeing a President other than Obama for the next five years, and when I see the next president, I want that President to be a Democrat. When I look at Congress next year, I want to see more Democrats in both chambers, enough in the House to take it back, and I don't want to see that majority unseated anytime soon.
I want the next few Supreme Court Justices to be selected by a Democrat, perhaps even give us the opportunity to overturn some of the lousy ass decisions, like Citizens United, which have blighted our legal landscapes.
These are the things I wish to see, and I have committed myself on a deliberate basis to seeing them done. This is not something I adhere to because I think Obama is dreamy, this is something I adhere to because I have no stomach for further Republican leadership, and no patience to wait for the next political knight in shining armor to come and rescue us. I'm not waiting on anybody else to agree with me to decide this for myself.
And you shouldn't either. If you really believe in the ideals of this party, then you should not let any corrupt bastard inside or outside of the party discourage you from seeking what you want. You should be weighing what to do with them instead. Me? I think Obama's more useful to us in office than out of it. The Republicans need another two term Democratic President to show them how futile all their obstruction and all their efforts at trashing him and dragging him down have been. We need four more years of a break from their bullshit, and a President much more willing to sign into law progressive and liberal bills.
We need to get him the Congress that will work with him, which means kicking out as many Republicans as possible. I am not concerned with what people think is possible at this point, because with human factors-rich situations like this, very often the act of pushing forward with such a movement, such an initiative rewrites the rules of what is possible. Hell, that's what attracted me to Obama's candidacy in the first place: his ability to rewrite political rules that seemed set in stone. Well, becoming the incumbent might have reduced that flexibility, as it always does, but that doesn't means that we are less flexible ourselves. We can rewrite the rules for Obama and for the Republicans, rewrite the rules for Washington.
But we can't do that from the pits of despair and sloughs of despond. We have to make the deliberate decision that we will forward the progress of the progressive movement, that we will take the difficulties and hazards of putting ourselves on the line like this in stride, and that we will pick ourselves back up and keep on moving.
The last time, if you did it for Obama and the Democrats, and you're disappointed now, don't do it for them, do it for yourself, and the future that all of you so eloquently speak for. Do it for yourself, see to your own interests as you would have other people out there see to their interests. This is a political battle here, against political adversaries that've adopted a take-no-prisoners, pushed to the extreme approach to politics. You start a fight with these people, and they will hit back, and you must be prepared for that.
I don't feel this is an optional fight for me, if at the very least because I don't want to see those election results, good or bad, without knowing I did something to make them the best I could get them. When I fought this past election season, and saw our terrible loss, I wasn't crushed. I wasn't left angry. I felt fulfilled. As much as I had lost, I had not lost from a position of despair or apathy. I had gone down fighting, dignified in my struggle, rather than shrinking away from things. I knew it was bad, and I was disappointed, but I hadn't lost heart, and I still haven't.
Our movement needs more than its brains, it needs its hearts, it needs it's will to survive and come back from defeat. If we aren't robust or resiliant, the Republicans will, in their zealotry, simply wear us down, no matter how many lucky breaks or good candidates we bring to the table.
We need to have that staying power, so we can keep moving our cause forward until the work is done. We cannot quit half way because the results we want don't come quick or easy. We need to set our will to this cause, and not be dissuaded.