In my experience, one of the most effective and pernicious aspects of the Republican's political agenda are the things they do to convince the rest of us to just sit down, shut up, and take it. They do this by bringing such overwhelming force, such overwhelming hatred and contempt for reasons and standards of civil behavior, and by forcing such ugly compromises that we give up in disgust.
But worse yet, you get political hacks like this, and like some on our site who hold both sides to be equivalent This usually happens after the hacks have finished beating our morale and our attempts to change policy down. First they frustrate us, then they let us tell ourselves that there's no difference, no dynamic, between having a Republican in power, and a Democrat.
Which means we sit down and shut up, because what's the point of speaking up, if it's all going to be in vain. Well, look at the debt ceiling vote. Nobody can tell me with any credibility that we'd be seeing this bullshit if the Congress had stayed in our hands. But here we are anyways, trying to convince ourselves because of the shit sandwich bargain being forced on Obama, that our side and theirs is no different.
I want you folks to look at gay rights here. Yes, it was frustrating, yes it was a bad deal at times. Hell, if we remember our political history, Don't Ask Don't Tell was itself a terrible deal, the notion being that soldiers would keep their sexuality private, and the military wouldn't go prying into their business. It obviously didn't work out that way. In fact, DADT ended up becoming an emblem of anti-homosexual bigotry in the military, ironically enough.
But now it's more or less dead, and DOMA will follow in short order. Yes, it took some uncomfortable attention, and a lot of activism. I give credit to those among us who applied that attention, and engaged in that activism. In fact, I'll tell you that you folks are doing exactly what you should be doing: fighting for what you believe in, no matter what the obstacles. You're not committing the sin of silence. You're not simply letting the course of things take the path they would on their own.
That's how you get political change. Not by sitting down, shutting up, and saying there's no hope. Now many of you worked to get a Democratic President and a Democratic Congress back in 2006 and 2008. Some may think, because of all the frustrations, disappointments, and perceived betrayals that this was in vain.
But look where we are now. And why? Because we got more receptive people in charge. We got people we could push far enough to get them over the threshold.
Those Republicans in Congress, the majority now? Those are the idiots who make it difficult to get anything done. At least we got a Senate and a President who stand in their way. If we had the Congress we had back before 2006 in charge, the cuts would have come, and it would be back to the days of Hoover for this country, and not just as a matter of political exaggeration. We would have seen a real depression, unemployment quite a few points higher, and we would have seen this until we changed out the people involved.
Yes, Social Security and Medicare should not be touched. But we wouldn't be in this situation, if Republicans hadn't won the Congress. Even the most frustrating of blue dogs would have been preferable to what we have now, if simply for the fact that it would have kept the Republicans in check, and kept them from screwing things up and stalling real progress on getting things done. We would at least be able to set the agenda, and keep certain ridiculous, stupid, and harmful ideas off the table. That's the privilege of a majority, privileges some folks unfortunately count too cheaply.
Now, we wouldn't have gotten everything we wanted or needed, but we would have gotten a hell of a lot more, and we wouldn't be facing a sovereign default that threatens to sink our economy for the next few decades.
Elections have consequences, and on the balance, a person who might listen to you is better than somebody who surely won't, and even that person is better than somebody who will hear what you want, and commit themselves to defeating you over it.
There's something of a point to not wanting Democrats who are false in their loyalties to our causes, of course. And I will admit they don't help us keep the majority. But let's not buy into the notion that they're somehow equivalent to Republicans. Regaining the majority will make a difference, if we achieve that in 2012. Republicans want us to think differently, because if there's no point to defeating them, nobody's going to try, and they're going to keep on doing what they're doing.
America's ready for change. The potential energy is there for a political shift, even against the power of big business. Americans did it once before. We have no business saying that we can't do it these days. That kind of talk helps keep our silent majority silent, helps keep Republicans in power, helps keep the ALECs, the Kochs, the Murdochs and all the rest setting the agenda. If we sap ourselves of the will to oppose them, if we let their victories and their corruption of our party, the compromises they force on us tell us that there's no good to fighting, well, they'll win.
It's time to realize that the other side is quite adamant about keeping what they've got, and whatever we try, they're going to try and force us to quit, to surrender. They will frustrate us, force bad deals on our representatives, draw false equivalencies, and do everything they can to make the political process so miserable that we abandon it. But they are as intent on doing that as they are because they are truly afraid, for reason both justified and simply paranoid, that we have enough of the country on our side on issues to defeat them.
All that Tea Party rigamarole, all the red-baiting and gay baiting, all the vile vitriol they've spewed has had one purpose and one purpose alone, in all its intensity: to beat back the popular movement they know we can bring about.
Our problem, really, is that we haven't learned to be as stubborn and committed as they are. In our years in the minority, in our years in decline, we've gotten very comfortable with reacting emotionally, rather than strategically to the Republican's politics. We can respond to our problems by freezing up, by choking when the pressure's on, we can respond by despair, but the only truly useful response will be to decide what we want, and figure out how to get it.
We should be goal-oriented, not acting like it's all about customer satisfaction. We're not customers, we're people involved in the business of self-government. We should be deciding how we want our government to act, and what we want it to do, rather than simply lament the status quo and attack our own for not instantly changing everything. We should not be leaving change and improving America's lot up to the politicians. We should not be responding to the political attacks of the right and their corporate masters by quitting. They have something we want, and we should be committed to getting it.