(from mlw)
Kos writes on John Cole’s disillusionment… John still thinks of himself as a Republican in some nominal sense, and hates turning on “his party”… Kos sympathizes, having hit a similar transition around 1993, leaving his days as devout Republican youth behind, sort of.
Cole will obviously have to figure out for himself where he goes from here. He can decide to fight for his party and hopefully restore some sense of sanity in those quarters. He can join us. He speaks approvingly of Jim Webb. He can help us find more Jim Webbs (who has admitted, quite openly, that he would not exist as a candidate if it wasn’t for the netroots). They are out there. He can tune out. Or become a dispassionate, “independent” observer of the political process.
I’m sorry, I know of no other way to read that. More Jim Webbs. More Jim Webbs? Are out there? Come on in, the Jim Webbs are in here? The way I read, this is an admission that kos is part of a conservative wave we are seeing not only come to the Democrats for refuge, but coming also to turn it into the party they need refuge from. They want us to be the party the Republicans should have been! They don’t understand the Republican illness is the failure of conservativism itself. Conservativism will lead to the same problem in any party endorsing it. Stupid wars, a poisoned economy, environment.
Conservativism is not as it claims! It is a self contradictory lie… “low tax me-ism” leads to what you see in the Republian Party. Respect for authority leads to abuses like this!
Question Authority! That’s not a conservative ideal, my man, but it’s what we need.
That is a goal that will fail, again, know why? Because the problem is people like Webb… the problem is conservative ideas themselves. They suck. They are not good for the nation. They claim to be about XYZ, but are really about death, self-destruction, and potholes. It wasn’t really just that Stalin didn’t get a chance to really try his ideas, Stalinism was bad! It isn’t that the Republicans have fallen off the golden path illuminated by the glowing footsteps of Reagan, it’s that it FOLLOWED that path, and it leads to ruin, emotional and material.
The paragraph quoted above is followed by this:
I could be flip and say, “come on in, the water’s fine on our side!” But first of all, it’s not like our party doesn’t have its own problems. And more importantly, partisan fealty (especially for us political junkies), like religion, goes much deeper than the intellect. It cuts to the very core of who we are, of how we define ourselves. That’s why for many of the disillusioned, it’s simply easier to tune out or become “independent” than it is to jump in bed with the other party.
WRONG, right here, this is conservative thinking if you adopt my personal definition of conservative by which dogma is a conservative ideal. I speak of “partisan fealty”… that does not RUN deep, it may FEEL deep, it may have you emotionally by the small hairs, but it’s shallow as hell. Partisan fealty in politics is like enjoying politics the way you enjoy NFL football. Team loyalty in sports may feel deep, but it’s not, it’s circus. I love circus and crappy movies, but they are not “deep”.
Listen, the Raiders are my team… when they lose, I want them to win, but it doesn’t matter. I don’t chose another team to feel like a winner, because I want THEM to win, that’s that, the whole shallow point of the game. In politics, honestly, I want fucking national healthcare, I don’t ACTUALLY care who wins. Unlike in sports, where I care who wins and it’s not important, in politics, I don’t actually care who wins, and it IS important. What I care about is getting Nationalized Healthcare (et cetera)… and winning is in the service of that depending only on the actual individuals that win. For the Raiders, they win whomever the team is. For me, I only win if the team does something “after they win” because the point is not “winning an election” and “scoring well in the election”… it’s what you do, not with the “victory” but with the POWER.
50 states worth of Jim Webbs (they are in every state, I assure you) is therefore not something that sounds great to me. A democratic party with a lot of Jim Webbs is the opposite of victory.
Kos’ introspection notable here, I hope he sees what he’s said… though frankly I doubt it, this politics-as-sports thing cuts away the intellect, as kos said… but he should also realize that as a result it makes us stupid and shallow in our thinking about politics… if we let it.
A bunch of people that have not thought through the consequences of their conservativism want to try to draw those consequences on the Democratic Party as well. They cannot face the consequences of the failure as shown them in the Republican party failure, which reaches back decades at least, they can see with their own eyes if they would look, but instead they think they just need a new team… the same old conservative pipe dreams, sometimes called “libertarianism” inaccurately, and with them they plan to bring the old game plan, and insist on it.
This new team is supposed to play the Reagan/Webb play book, just do it much better. That’s not the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party.
What a crock! And only those with eyes can see, what injustice. The blind must see!
The sad thing is people that believe trying “competent conservativism” on for size suits those that hold real power in the Democratic Party… and they also do not see that it is an oxymoron, it cannot ever be realized. Instead, what happens, Democrats do not use the progressive policies they need to succeed, and the voters go back to the actual conservatives to see if THEY have gotten “competent” yet.
Conservatives want to feel at home in both parties, and then wonder why progressives are unimpressed.
