Michael Tomasky writes a column in the Guardian that I largely agree with. I am a liberal. And I have come to know a lot of very politically active liberals in my lifetime. And I think a lot of them are way out on the fringe. I don’t think they’re out on the fringe because of the policies they support. Liberal policies poll very well. I think they’re out on the fringe because they hold political opinions and goals but they have no effing clue how to implement those opinions and reach those goals. People in Washington DC tend to know the limitations of the possible. When something desirable doesn’t get done, they know who to blame and they know what to blame them for. A lot of liberals rage against the wrong things. And Tomasky is right. History plays tricks on us.
Liberals in my country tend to have a deeply romantic view of political movements. When we think of the civil rights movement, we think of the highlights, the stirring moments. Memory tricks us, and the media, which speak in such shorthand, help perpetuate the trick. So we tend to think that Rosa Parks sat on a bus, Martin Luther King gave some great speeches, decent Americans recoiled at racist violence on the nightly news, and boom, change happened. The reality was that nine long years passed from Parks’s act of civil disobedience until Lyndon Johnson signed the civil rights bill – nine years of often mundane and inglorious work. And even then, the civil rights bill didn’t really fix the problem of African Americans being denied the vote, so Congress had to go back the next year and pass the voting rights act.
But it pays to learn from some real history. Progressive change has come in this country in short, distinct bursts. The most significant progressive change of the last century came during The New Deal and The Great Society, which were two shortly-lived high points in Democratic control of both Congress and the White House. FDR’s Democrats rolled into power in the wake of the onset of the Great Depression. LBJ’s Democrats rolled into power in the wake of a decade of hard work and the trauma of a presidential assassination. The Democrats spent their capital quickly while they had it, and then they fought to maintain what they had created.
The Democrats are wary of overreaching and losing their newfound power as quickly as they gained it. But we’re at a high point now. We have worked hard to get here. This is not the time to settle for incrementalism until we are strong enough to effect real change. This is the time to push through our most ambitious stuff. That’s why Tomasky is wrong about this:
So now, liberals have to fight hard for something they’re not terribly excited about. A health bill will likely have a very weak public option or it won’t have one at all. But liberals will have to battle for that bill as if it’s life and death (which in fact it will be for thousands of Americans), because its defeat would constitute a historic victory for the birthers and the gun-toters and the Hitler analogists. In the coming weeks, building toward a possible congressional vote in November, progressives will have to get out in force to show middle America that there’s support for reform as well as opposition, even though they may find the final bill disappointing.
This is what movements do – they do the hard, slow work of winning political battles and changing public opinion over time. It isn’t fun. It isn’t something Will.i.am is going to make a clever and moving video about, and it offers precious few moments for YouTube. It takes years, which is a bummer, in a political culture that measures success and failure by the hour. The end of euphoria should lead not to disillusionment, but to seriousness of purpose.
The problem is that we’ve done the hard, slow work of winning political battles and changing public opinion over time. We are already here. Now is the time for real health care reform. Half-ass shit made sense in the 1990’s. It makes no sense today.
