Any liberal, progressive, or Democrat who is spending the last week before Election Day discussing the merits of a third party, or actually trying to make a case that a Romney presidency will do more to advance progressive causes, should probably be euthanized purely out of mercy. If you are a liberal who wants to sell books or gain page views or higher ratings for your television or radio program, a Romney presidency will help you out. Otherwise, everything you believe in and fight for will be set back, put at risk, or utterly destroyed.
If you don’t understand what is at stake at the Supreme Court, you probably don’t understand much else about American politics, either. But the entire premise of this argument is that the Democrats will learn certain lessons from defeat and that this will lead to a reinvigorated defense of civil liberties and an assertion of economic populism that is sorely lacking on the present-day left.
There is no precedent for believing this will actually happen. The whole New Democrat/Blue Dog phenomenon arose out of the ashes of the Mondale and Dukakis defeats. The only time the Democrats responded to defeat by moving left was in 1972, and we know how that turned out.
A Romney administration would roll back the expansion of Medicaid and access to health care for 30 million people. It would result in a rightward shift in the courts that would make voting much harder and would do severe damage to women’s rights. But even if that were all somehow worth it, we have foreign policy to consider. We have competency to consider, the importance of which the current operations of FEMA compared to their performance under Bush should highlight. And, ultimately, we’d have to win the argument within the Democratic Party about why Obama lost. It couldn’t be because of the weak economy or because of the Citizens United ruling, or because Republican governors and secretaries of state and legislatures suppressed the vote, or because of racism, or because Romney got away with a campaign of lies. No, it would have to be agreed that the president lost because he was too aggressive in the pursuit of terrorists and he didn’t do enough to alleviate the foreclosure crisis, and some other combination of populist and anti-militarist reasoning.
The chances of winning that argument would be hampered by the fact that there is absolutely no evidence to support it. It would be further hampered by the fact that the Democrats would be more finance-challenged than ever and therefore less inclined to embrace economic populism.
If progressives want to change the Democratic Party, they should look across the aisle at the Tea Party. Obviously, the Tea Party should not be emulated in full. But their decision to fight in the primaries is the correct one. You do not further your cause by empowering your enemies.
