Time, once again, to add my own bit of futile text to the bitstream here in Progressiveland, albeit with a little encouragement from a few other participants.
A recent diarist wrote of his frustration at the lack of direction and sustained motion in any direction but marginal gradual Rightward, even among the people taking part here in one of the larger and more popular Progressive web sites. http://www.dailykos.com/... I'd have to second the notion, and take off on an observation in the comments to that diary.
There are lots of diaries and comments bemoaning this "feature" of this part of the Imperial US polity. Posts by the hundreds, of individual avatars that find some reason to cyberparticipate, chatty, earnest, angry, supplicant, wise, perspicacious and insightful, all of us as individuals with hopes of drawing others to maybe coalition-ize with us to support our personal interests and preferences and lives. What it seems to me and to some others is that there's no POWER in what gets done here. People gain security and health and food and all that Maslow's-Hierarchy stuff by concentrating their forces. People also end up dominating the rest of us, taking 90% of all the wealth, suborning those now largely pretextual "constitutional" icons of political legitimacy that some of us still worship (Congress, the Imperial Unitary Executive, the "rule of law" courts), by ORGANIZING around their own totem and pressing, pressing, pressing, working the streets and lobbies year over year to cement their dominance. Where's the equivalent organization on "our" side? The DLC? the DSSC? who bombard me and most of us with urgent messages that if we don't give them money for their candidates, the Wrongs are going to TAKE OVER! But then they've mostly already done that.
People here celebrate diversity. Great thought, important too. But where's that central core of commitment, across all the diverse "issues" and demands, to a set of unalterable tenets like the ones that power the Wrongs, the oligarchs and their retinues, to dominance? Politics is a contact sport. Where's the invitation, direction, guidance on how to line up as a single team to effectively push back?
The people on the other side, the real Takers, are sort of diverse, too, but they have a huge advantage in how they pervert and co-opt the markers of political legitimacy, on the way to incrementally stealing all our wealth and highly productive labor, and peeping into all our life's details, and sucking us all into endless war and war preparation, and keeping us dependent on burning shit and filling the atmosphere with greenhouse gases, and sublimating what ought to be huge ANGER, rage even, about how our species is confronted with its own suicidal extinction while the few who really run the show live out their lives of extortionate and luxurious "style" and pleasure, immune to any of the consequences of their predation and vouchsafed an extremely comfortable old age and well-cared-for death. Sublimating that righteous sense into piddling with iCrap and idiotic and violent simulations and realities. Those folks are able to laugh uproariously at the ineffectual blathering and posturing and particularization of "the Left," able to "legitimize" their rule by buying the "votes" of the mopes, who then feel they have "democratically elected representatives and leaders" that just need to be followed because that's the best we can get, they can buy all that with simple infusions of money, money, BIG money that, as has always been the case, breeds itself ever bigger, until some kind of collapse or derangement, which they, marvelous to say, are also mostly insulated against.
They get to go out sweetly, surrounded by security and the best care and "love" that all that money can buy, able to sneer "Apres nous le deluge, suckers!", and, to each other, offer the comforting, snotty observation that after placing huge losing bets in the Wall Street Casino that have our names as obligors on the markers, and instituting and prosecuting (however incompetently, except the part about transferring huge amounts of wealth out of our almost-empty pockets) the Forever War, and in so many ways, like the price of milk and bread, sucking up all that wealth that us ordinary people have to work our un(der)paid asses off to re-create, to keep feeding the value of our lives into the Hoover hoses of vampire and vulture "economics," they can sneer "Fuck those muppets -- we'll get ours, and then I'll be gone, you'll be gone. What are they going to do? Piss on our graves? Scatter our ashes in the septic tank?" These are people who are happy to have as their motto that snotty bumper sticker that reads "We Are Spending Our Children's Inheritance (and their ain't a damn thing you can do about it, Keystone XL drone GMO etc.!")
What they, the Few, have, that ordinary people do not have, is an organizing principle and central attractor for all their behaviors: MORE for them, more luxury, more power, more stuff, more Poor Smurfs to feel superior to. They also have people who are not afraid to be Oilgarchs and Kleptocrats to lead the charge. What have ordinary people got, as a way to gather and concentrate their diffuse power and take the battle to the opponent? Where is the "liberal" and "progressive" equivalent of the Koch-suckers' ALEC? We have dozens of little orgs and blogs that work at particular "issues," some with some success like 350.org, but do they all pull together to frame and man a fundamental, coordinated front? And how many of those orgs and blogs, fueled by righteous anger and maybe single-issue single-mindedness, draw a few people into their lists and contacts and Twits and FB pages, then fritter out when the HUGEness of the "conservative" Juggernaut becomes apparent, and the reality of what it costs and the near-futility of trying to herd the Liberal/Progressive cats becomes apparent, and there's no BIG MONEY to carry the fight to where those legitimizing "elections" get suborned by all the wealth-facilitated manipulative skulduggery of the Wrongs? (Please don't call them "the Right" any more...)
It's wonderful that First People and LGBT rights are expanding and getting protection under the legal system (which, of course, the Few get to suborn or just ignore, while we on the "sinister" Liberal Left continue our naive belief in the power of "the Constitution" and that touching need for a faith in some mythical "rule of law.") A large amount of the "liberal coalition's" energies has funneled into pressing those claims-of-rights. Maybe the truth that a lot of the (so-called "conservative") Few are also LGBT has something to do with that success, a "victory" there freeing those folks to live more open and marginally less hypocritical lives. Maybe the fact that a whole lot of the "conservative" Few smoke dope (and use other more insidious recreational chemicals, and like down here in Tampa, get delivered by Stealth Limousines from the very floor of the Republican National Convention to our local strip clubs and whore houses) has something to do with the declining resistance to pot use, along with the increasingly apparent commercial interest and tax revenues that ending that Prohibition will generate, though the whimsical "War on Drugs" thunders on.
There are a few other areas where people from the "liberal coalition" are "making gains." But we're on the point of extinction of "organized labor," the major source of "organizing principle" and power for past reactions to and rejections of prior Gilded Age-er excesses. The Planetary War Machine continues to grow, and part of our coalition is just fine with that (jobs, opportunity, "thank you for your service," and I'm a disabled Vietvet so I will cop to part of that notion and keep on cashing my disability checks, but with a prayer that there will be no more of us to get to such a point). One of the few employment growth areas is "homeland security," google the NSA's and CIA's web site employment pages and all the schools offering various degrees in "national security." Now THAT's a great index of the way the world is actually trending, a "poll" that actually means something.
A common thread in lots of comments and diaries is that "neoliberals," a sneaky and manipulative and Fifth Column bunch, have "ruined this Party," and that "principled people need not apply." We kos-quality Progressives ARE a weak bunch, unfortunately, with all our differing "interests," that allow the Wedgie-masters to crack our facade -- like all those younger poor people who are convinced older poor people are stealing their futures by collecting Social Security earned benefits. Or a couple of recent diaries by some subtle Grima Wormtongue, encouraging us mopes to savage our fellow mopes who are "in the service" and supposedly "getting overpaid," COMPARED TO CIVILIANS who the diarist conveniently obscures are also grossly underpaid. http://www.dailykos.com/...
Anyone ever watched barracudas and other aquatic predators going after little fishies that form up into "bait balls," in the forlorn hope that maybe they won't be the ones to get eaten? http://video.nationalgeographic.com/... resonances with current mass behaviors? How about how it feels (since we squishy progressive types work so much off of "feelings," rather than the DRIVES that move more forceful creatures) to be an aphid being chemically subdued and manipulated and milked and then eaten by those masterful ANTS that we so want to believe are "in a symbiotic relationship" rather than the reality of closely controlled predation and parasitism? http://www.sciencedaily.com/.... At least the ants seem to know enough not to destroy the aphid herd and the ecology on which they all ultimately feed...
I don't have any remedies for this fractionation, this dissipation of the energies that might otherwise be used to be sure that the effing dudes in $5,000 suits and heavily gold-encrusted uniforms, the barracudas and Army ants of our human population, are forced to pass the platters of available and sufficient sustenance all the way around the table, instead of hogging everything for themselves and then using their undeniable sneaky-pete skills to get us ordinary mopes to fight each other over the remaining scraps: "If I'm only getting $8.50 an hour and can somehow muddle by on that, if I have to pay a lot for medical insurance, then so should everybody else even if a national system would be a whole lot better because that's Socialized Medicine or 'politically impossible,' and what the hell is with the idea of a $10.10 minimum wage, there's a huge and growing deficit you know, and the Job Creators won't create any jobs at that rate, public employees are worthless grossly overpaid drones, Social Security is a PWNzi scam, why should I have to pay for unemployment and food stamps for Takers and Welfare Queens, 'Free Trade' makes us all Better Off," on and on. And, at their pleasure, the barracudas and Army ants will be eating us too, until the huddled mass of us, even the ones who think they can survive comfortably and secure in the "middle," is "all gone."
The seductions of schism and particularization and disparatism and ego and self-interest among us ordinary people, and the control by the Predators over the flow of pertinent information from schools and media and even in places like dKos with its sub-sets and distractions and trolls and bristly and prickly sensitivities and ChurchLadyisms, those seductions are pretty potent, and obviously effective at keeping ordinary people from ORGANIZING around some simplifying and common principles of comity and community. (Dare one assert that dKos is hard to honestly describe as a "community," rather than a "congeries," and saying that will garner me some earnest and critical responses from people who either benefit from the way it works or want and need to believe they are part of a "movement," even though the "motions" of the "movement" are largely Brownian, http://www.youtube.com/....)
"Our strength lies in our diversity:" Really? Maybe in the sense that people with particularized interests can line up support, can "coalitionize," for their mutual benefit. And sometimes that even gets reciprocated, but where is the COMMON voice for the COMMON interest, the "general welfare?" How clear does it have to be that the predators move fast, herd us up and eat us, while we are hoping for little marginal electoral "victories" for "less unProgressive" nominal Democrats to somehow, gradually, slowly, eventually, undo decades of packing of all FOUR Estates of "the government" with idiot-savant reactionaries, who dominate the discourse because they are not afraid to USE language and images (Who's Willy Horton?) and the other tools of manipulation to gain their goals, never letting the levers of power ratchet back a micrometer from every gain they take for THEIR side?
There are voices here that have some power and some real ideas and understanding. They tend to get nitpicked and marginalized and shouted down, or lost in the general noise of the flood of "content," or ignored. And of course there is the fundamental problem that people of decency tend to be activated and motivated and moved by EMOTION, usually empathy or pity or personal pain or identification. Whereas the people who run the "conservative" side, the WRONGs, run on largely fiscal incentives, which are so very much more trenchant and durable and even common.
One huge problem with herding the Progressive cats is that there's a huge supply of dilettantes and wanderers and easily distractible people who want attention to THEIR "issues," if they have the residual energies after just trying to survive and do their work well, rather than focusing on a fundamental central message, something like the reality that there's enough of everything to go around if we can keep the Suits from stealing it all and suckering us into killing each other over the scraps, and that observing the Golden Rule is actually a very enlightened and effective way of serving one's self-interest over the long haul.
I have to empathize with Bloodaxe's frustration -- it's hard to confront this "reality-based" polity with some actual reality, and those who do sometimes get buried up to the neck in put-downs and STFUs and challenges to their kosrulescorrectness. Without some functional, central common purpose, which does not seem very likely to be served by "electing more and better Democrats" in a structure where the game is totally rigged and no one can articulate how to un-rig it especially by placing a few marginally-less-bad players in the lineup, to be seduced by the Imperial Court's blandishments and emoluments, how do ordinary people ever manage to "secure the blessings of liberty" for themselves and their posterity? On a planet where they have been seduced into being mostly willing co-conspirators in burning down the house they live in, after crapping in all its rooms?
Good luck, of course, finding the tendrils and leashes and lianas that could get all us ordinary people pulled together and pulling in the same direction on the same end of the same rope... Not to say that for the sake of our grandkids, and theirs, anyone with a bit of conscience is not called upon to try. It would be nice if us nice people could maybe not just discuss what we want and the worthiness of our particular claims, but do like the early labor movement people did, ORGANIZE and make it happen.