Author: Madman in the Marketplace

It seems pretty obvious that the current administration is a coalition of bullies. They have made this entire country a bully among nations. They run roughshod over political opponents. They try to crush critics and political opponents. They have used the modern machinery of war to attack and destroy weaker nations. Domestically, they have launched a cultural war based on racism, chauvinism and religious bigotry against the poor, women, minorities and gays.

However, this isn’t really going to be about them. There is a funny thing about bullies. They are often surrounded by large numbers of syncophants, enablers, mobs of weaker people who enjoy the protection of the bully, often swarming in to get in a few licks once the bully has knocked the chosen victim down. Fearful, not possessed of their own strength, their own power and their own conviction, these people will operate in the bully’s shadow, yet insist that they are their own.

Sadly, many of the people acting as the enablers, the mob-like supporters of the Republican bullies, are in the Democratic Party; against leftists, against the poor, against gays and especially lately against women and activists for women’s health. I’m not just talking about the Vichy Dems in Congress. I’m talking about people who call themselves liberal while blaming members of the left for the losses of the Democratic Party over the last few decades.

crossposted at Liberal Street Fight
This trend has been bothering me for some time. Like anxious grade schoolers, many in the Democratic coalition have blamed Nader, gays, the poor and lately women for the continued ineffectiveness of the Democratic Party’s recent candidates. Here’s an example I found thanks to the Daou Report on Salon. At a blog called Norwegianity, one finds:

Republican moderates should just switch parties and move to the left. They’ll never get any respect from the knuckledraggers who have as big a hold on the GOP as radical feminists had on consensus-driven women’s groups.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but NOW and Emily’s List and other women’s groups gave up on politics by consensus ages ago. Taken literally, that approach allows even very small minority factions to paralyze entire organizations.

That’s where the Republicans are. Much as they try to be top down, they still have to work their way through public meetings and party events where the lowest political denominator prevails. They pick their speakers carefully, but you wouldn’t have to look very far at a GOP convention to find folks with interesting opinions of liberals, Jews, Freemasons, etc.

It’s a veritable cesspool of hate movements, and the only ones they love to hate more than liberals/socialists/communists/jews are turncoat moderates.

So, and this is an opinion we’ve seen in so-called center-left magazines and especially lately at leading Democratic Party blogs like Daily Kos, we see the assertion that women’s groups are THE SAME as right-wing fundamentalists. The Democratic Party only loses because it is held hostage to such groups. Perhaps if only such groups, crazed activists representing women’s health for example, could be purged or cowed into line, the Democratic Party might do better, or at least not get beat up so badly. Perhaps if they adopt the language and attitudes of the bullies toward certain elements of the Democratic Party/left coalition, things won’t be so bad. Passive aggressive and weak, that is the voice we too often hear form certain elements on the “center-left”.

Of course, many see in the Dean candidacy, in the principled stand of real leaders like Rep Conyers, Sen. Boxer, Sen. Feingold and Sen. Durbin, one can see the TRUE way to fight bullies. Stand up to them. Don’t follow their tactics. Don’t attack others in some pathetic attempt to protect yourself. Stand up, go toe-to-toe. The way to fight a bully is to stand up to them.

That is how the Democratic Party will become a fighting, viable party again, by standing BESIDE the very groups the Republicans attack.

No more bully nation. A progressive nation, a nation that recognizes our commonalities. That path leads to a winning future for the Democratic Party, and for our country.

There is a conceit in much of the discourse over politics today: that politics is antithetical to idealism. Idealists, especially on the left, are written off as being “single issue voters”, “special interest voters”, “shrill”, “naive” … pick an epithet.

My question is this: can there BE politics without ideals?

Would we be a country without ideals? Without idealists? Are there many more idealistic political documents than the Declaration of Independence?

I would submit that the answer to both questions is no. Why, then, is the Democratic Party so terribly afraid of people with strong ideals? What kind of party STARTS a campaign with some fuzzy belief that one candidate or another is more electable? Isn’t that what elections are for? After all, we all found out just how “electable” our last “safe” choice was. Would we have been better served by a contest fought out over ideals, not simple money and clout and insider pressure on the media? Will we make the same mistake again?

crossposted at Liberal Street Fight
So, can idealists find a place anymore in American politics? Would Thomas Jefferson have a place in the Democratic Party today? Despite his ideals, his words:

were belied by his ownership of slaves. Despite his his words, he himself fell woefully short of the hope he espoused. Does that make his ideals less sincere, less powerful? Does the institution of slavery and the disenfrancisement of women make those ideals moot? Worthless? Would the American Revolution have happened without them? Were pragmatists like Hamilton and Madison enough without Jefferson and Franklin?

Idealists set the horizon. Idealists point out the top of the mountain, giving a political movement, a political party a goal to aim for. Without them, all you’re left with is a bunch of maps without destinations.

The Republicans nurture, promote and celebrate their idealists. In many ways, their idealists are more purely “idealistic” than many leftists. They aim for “ideals” in the Platonic sense. Beliefs that are set by some external. Most ideals on the left are messier, set by human beings, yet in many ways more vital. The ideals of the left grow and adapt and celebrate humanity as good in and of itself.

I am a humanist. My ideals, as well as the ideals of many people I admire, aren’t supported by some cozy “external” validation. Increasingly, folks like me are being told by the so-called “centrists” in the Democratic Party that we have to “be realistic”. Only those on the left who have more “firm” ideals are apparently welcome. The ongoing litany from the center is that we need kinder, gentler platonists. We seek to ape the right, not move away from it.

This is a recipe for continued losses. We either have a goal to aim for as a party, an America where ALL of our citizens have equal opportunity before the law, where people come before profit, where we actually treat women as fully autonomous equal citizens, or our party will continue to enable the encroaching theocracy. If this party does not welcome and harness its idealists, it will continue down the path toward mere collaboration.

The idealists on the left had abandoned politics for many years as the party ran away from them, frightened by the success of Nixon’s “Southern strategy” and Reagan’s “Morning in America”. We fought in court. We fought on the local level. We dropped out and joined third parties. It was made plain that we were a problem to be “Sister Souljah’d”.

Thanks to the campaigns of Howard Dean, Dennis Kucinich, Al Sharpton and Carol Moseley Braun, the left has rejoined the political fray. Either the party will integrate us, utilize us and even follow us, or the party will lose. To do otherwise is to offer the public nothing to vote for than less of the same: less scary, less oppressive and less proactive. A small and spineless parking brake until the next loss. If the party doesn’t do so, there will be a movement building to either take over the party or destroy the party.

Change and grow or continue to be irrelevant. Those are the choices.

I’m not usually one to do this, but please check out and support this diary by stormcoming at dKos.

Abortion is about autonomy. Autonomy is a core value.
Sorry Markos, but “abortion” IS the whole ball of wax. It is, for those of you who’ve read their “Art of War” our “dying ground” it is one of the ‘must defends’ if we’re going to survive. Why? Because far from some cute little women’s issue deserving lip service and to be refiled under some more palatable heading, abortion is autonomy. We loose abortion, and we’ve lost the most basic ownership of our own bodies and lives- no matter what gender you happen to be.

Perhaps no one has ever concretely, and theoretically explained strategically, why abortion, and abortion providers, and women who have abortions must be stood beside and actively supported if you have any intention of living anywhere other than a fascist snitch culture of State-ist and vigilante control.

I am a woman ‘of childbearing age’. Essentially, what that means, for those of you who do not happen to own a cunt of their very own, is that unless- and sometimes even if, women like myself take drastic measures EVERY single time we have sex there’s a pretty high likelihood of becoming pregnant at least once at some point during those fertile years. Without effort, and sometimes even with efforts to prevent pregnancy we women find ourselves pregnant- often against our consent. We become hostages in our own bodies, to a process we for the most part, are unable to end all by ourselves should we want to.

Some portion of women, will find themselves in an unintended pregnancy at some point during those ‘childbearing years’. And further, some of those women, who find themselves unintentionally pregnant, are going to have an abortion (regardless of legality).

I hope that tossing this up doesn’t offend. I will delete if booman or the communtity asks, but it’s a well-written defense of women’s autonomy, and deserves wide desemination.

It never seems to end. The endless calls for the left to fall in line  from certain elements of the institutional Democratic Party (always eager to give a quote “off the record”), “liberal” magazines, pundits and the “liberal” blogosphere. Various special interest groups (aka VOTERS) are chided to all but sign loyalty oaths with the party, with promises that their issues will be “dealt with” at some point in the future.

We saw it during the suffrage movement (starting with Abigail Adams after chiding her husband not to forget “the ladies”). We saw it during the civil rights movement. We heard plenty of it last year regarding the gay rights movement. This year, after gays were pushed back in the closet (“gay marriage cost us the election!”), after all of the promises to African American voters were betrayed ONE DAY after the election, it’s time to go after the feminists again.

crossposted at Liberal Street Fight

Just who, exactly, is the party supposed to be fighting for? It’s an important question, and there seems to be a battle going on for the answer to that question. In fact, the attacks aren’t just aimed at women, gays and minority voters, but also at the party Chairman, Dr. Howard Dean. Which “healers” should we follow in the difficult years ahead?

A person has to ask how many times this ideological snake oil will be sold by the faux “healers” that have run the Democratic Party into its current sorry state. They stand before their wares, thumbs hooked self-importantly into the pockets of their waistcoats, while they lecture the gathered masses that the solution to ALL of the problems of life are at hand, if only the rubes would continue to swallow the proferred bitter and ineffective medicine.  

Their advice is especially stomach churning after so many groups fought long and hard for the party’s nominee in the last Presidential election. Women’s groups were very active, fighting hard on the ground, raising money and getting the word out. They, like their other allies, worked hard to “stay on message” (those patent salesmen speak with such purty words) so as to not derail the nominee’s campaign. A campaign that was as ineffective as many patent medicines. Like any snake oil salesman, the “leaders” of the Democratic Party went on to blame the “patients” for not taking the medicine properly.

Some on the left still hope that the chairmanship of Howard Dean can save this party from it’s own ineffective nostrums. As befitting his training, the Doctor actually tries to listen to the people he serves. He speaks plainly, offering his diagnosis of the problem, and his course of treatment. In fact, in Seattle on Sunday, Dr. Dean said:

So what are leftists to do? The fact that Dr. Dean has come under very public and dismissive attack from such “leaders” as Senator Biden and failed Vice-Presidential candidate John Edwards might encourage some that they should stay and fight for the soul of the Democratic Party. That so-many beltway insiders are chiding Dean in the press, after only 100 days in his office, could very well demonstrate that he is building too much of a base amongst “outsiders” (again, aka VOTERS) for their comfort. Staying and working with Dean for the future of the party may very well prove to be a worthy endeavor. It is a risky course, however, given the party’s history with “outsiders” (see the Carter administration).

Some consider joining, or forming, a third party. That may be a road that has to be considered. After all, it was the Green  and the Libertarian Parties that went to court to protect the right for EVERY American’s vote to be counted in Ohio. That, too, would be risky, given the built-in barriers to third party success in the electoral system.

Perhaps idealogical alliances can be struck, voting blocs to mirror those adopted by our more like-minded leaders in Congress. Perhaps the leaders in the Progressive Caucus itelf should consider splitting the party, joining Jim Jeffords in the Senate and Bernie Saunders in the House as a separate and united bloc independent of the two woefully corrupt “mainstream” political parties. That might sound to some as extreme, but as the “centrist” tide rolls along, it might be worth considering.

It is time for leftists to keep their options open. It is time for those on the left commit to each other, and our shared ideals of fairness, equal opportunity and our faith in a shared humanity. It is time to raise our voices, and make it very clear that vague promises will not be accepted from a party of corporate insiders that has shown itself repeatedly willing to sell out those most at risk in our society. We must form alliances, a progressive, liberal bloc to put pressure on the Democratic Party, ready to back up Dr. Dean as he makes progress toward a truly effective party, but ready to step back if the Vichy Dems continue to undermine his efforts.

It is especially important that we fight for the civil and privacy rights of ALL Americans, not just those who make pundits, DC insiders and the mythical “centrist” voter feel unchallenged.

Maybe in the next two elections we can finish the title above with the word “Democrat”, but it seems plain that the time is not now. It is time to make the party earn the left’s vote, or for the left to launch insurgent campaigns in primary races and in the general elections, if the party continues to undermine or lock out liberals.

image from Farm Security Administration Photographs of Florida

also diaried at dailykos