I’m not privy to the pre-existing crap that One Pissed Off Liberal is responding to. I don’t know who accused him of racism, although I am certain that whoever did is a moron. I know OPOL. I’ve partied with him. He’s a stand-up guy. I love that guy.
But he’s an anti-Establishmentarian. There’s nothing wrong with that. But some responsible people have to be in the Establishment. This is especially true when a Democrat is in the Oval Office. This is especially true when the right in this country has mutated so far from historical norms that most of us would welcome Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger back as our political opponents. Someone has to keep these fuckers at bay while we figure out how to deal with this malignant pathogen in our political system.
We can disagree about both tactics and strategy, and we can agree that neither party is worth a damn on a host of important issues. But you have to ignore the peril our nation is currently in to say something like this:
If a black man in the oval office is all it took to take the revolution out of your soul, you were never much of a revolutionary to begin with.
Some of us weren’t politically active until the fuckers impeached Clinton. Others waited until they stole Florida in the 2000 election. Others waited until the decision to invade Iraq, or Terri Schiavo, or Hurricane Katrina, or the economic collapse. Maybe others waited until they saw that birth certificate bullshit. Whatever it was, a whole lot of us were never really revolutionaries in the sense that we wanted to uproot the entire system. It’s more like we saw the system we thought we had, which was less than optimal but certainly functional, going rapidly to shit. Then there were others who have been on the front lines working for civil rights, and workers’ rights, and women’s rights, and gay rights, and environmentalism, who could see incremental progress on most (not all) fronts until the right just went absolutely nuts.
People need to be able to hold two distinct thoughts in their heads simultaneously. First, that the Republicans must be kept out of the White House at almost any cost. Second, that we can still work to change the rot in the system while protecting the power that we have and desperately need to keep.
If you get to the point where you think you can risk a President Ryan or Palin or McCain or Romney, then you’ve let your love of revolution turn you into a reckless high stakes gambler, and the pot is the most lethal nuclear military arsenal ever built by mankind.
It goes both ways, though. Just as you can never leave off defending what we have, you can never use the desperate need to defend to create an all-encompassing excuse for unacceptable behavior. You can’t say critics of Obama are full of white privilege and think that is an adequate defense. That’s all bullshit.
You want people to believe in government? You need a government that works and that has support. You tear it down in the name of revolution, and you’ll get a right-wing counterrevolution. Again.
