First, have you voted yet? No? What are you waiting for? Do it.
Second, do you share my reaction to this, which is a cautious optimism in the short-term combined with a vague sense of dread over the long-term?
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BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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Reminds me of when Fritz Thyssen threw his financial support to the Nazis. The old brand of conservative isn’t working. The dread should come from the fact that the old brand of liberal isn’t working.
What was the old brand of liberal? Was that FDR’s base of segregationists? Or was it LBJ’s working majority of liberal Democrats and Republicans?
I think the past has been romanticized. We currently have the most enlightened Congress in our history on issues of race, reproductive freedom, and gay rights. On economic matters, we’ve seen better days. But I wouldn’t trade today’s Democratic Party for FDR’s or LBJ’s.
What I would trade is today’s Republican Party for Eisenhower’s, Nixon’s, or even Reagan’s.
If you look at the far right, which is now evidently going for a complete takeover of the GOP, yes, they are very well organized, well financed, and very determined. But frankly, they have been all of these things for the last 30 years. At this point they will solidify their control of their ever-shrinking party by driving moderate republicans out. NY-23 will be an important clue.
If you look only at the far right itself, it might look like Germany in 1932. The economy’s not too great either. But everything else looks quite different. Over the long term it depends more on whether the Democrats have their act together. If you take the long view, you should go back to 2004, which in my opinion is the year in which the Democratic Party, under the leadership of Howard Dean, started getting its act together. That is also an ongoing process. But the nomination and election of Obama were pretty big steps toward that goal.
I thought Russ Baker’s piece yesterday was really excellent.
http://www.truthout.org/11020910
To me his message is not so much pessimistic, as realistic. Namely, stop blaming Obama and try to understand what he’s up against and how he is handling it.
Where does this attitude of helpless passivity on the Left come from? Intellectual laziness? The drama of self-pity? Reading too much Noam Chomsky?
my reaction is full-throated laughter for now.
what worries me is that, given the democrats’ demonstrated ability to drop the ball at crucial moments, is losing the house or senate to these maniacs.
Well, frankly, I don’t currently see a route to a post-conservative landscape that doesn’t involve actual armed conflict somewhere along the way. Whether that ends up being a full-blown civil war or a bunch of riots and survivalists holed up in their compounds remains to be seen.
My suspicion is that the further radicalization of the conservative rump will make it easier to stamp them out once and for all when the time comes. That, however, presumes that we pull a renewed, energized and actually progressive mass movement out of our collective behinds.
The Dems should be doing the same thing: purging the ideologically weak in order to regain ‘outsider’ status and once again pose as liberators of an oppressed electorate. aka sticking with ‘Change We Can Beleive In’.
In a few years, when the shit really hits the fan deficit-wise, we’ll have the same old shitheads in power (aka ‘The Man’), but they will be all teabaggy and bloody well correct on the “quit spending money you don’t gots” thing. Starve the Beast hasn’t placed out yet, not by a long shot. I worry that Obama’s approach may just make monuments to an ideal America no longer possible once the bills all get paid – beautiful plans that no one can afford to execute for long..
So.. Yes, I share your reaction..