Just found a great article at Democracy Now that speaks to the contention emerging on many (most?) comment posts lately. I would commend it to those who are relatively pleased with our president's progress to date, as well as those who have given up hope.
Excerpt and link below the fold
Michael Tomasky's article is here.
A bit long, but it reminds us that Rome wasn't built in a day and that we need to consider what has (or hasn't) occurred during the past 18 months with a bit more context than liberal tradition sometimes brings to bear.
Today, as we watch Obama struggle against a unified Republican opposition; as we contemplate a Supreme Court rendering decisions like the one in Citizens United v. FEC; as we witness the rise of the Tea Party movement; as we bear in mind that the financiers of the conservative movement spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year on political advocacy of many sorts, several times more than George Soros and his ideological confederates spend on direct political activity; we see that we inhabit a political culture very far removed from those of the 1930s and 1960s. The misery prevalent during the former era allowed for vast experimentation. The prosperity of the latter, and a faith in government that still existed then, provided a basis for collective action. And our time? Think of this: We’ve experienced the greatest economic crisis since the 1930s, and the only mass movement to emerge from that reality is a right-wing populist one. Progressives must believe in and work toward a politics of the common good, but we must also be clear about why that is harder today than it once was.
I commend this work to anyone on the site. I hope that it reminds us that we are in complex times and that we need to strive for more civil discourse.
I think I'm better informed for having read it.
The problems we face are complex. The answers aren't simple.