First "We Suck, but they are Worse" and today "Winning by Default for Not Being Republicans". Nikola Tesla wasn't as brilliantly inventive as Democrats are with avoiding making an argument. The best Democratic Senator isn't even a Democrat, but an independent Socialist from Vermont who caucuses with the party (and thank Tip O'Neil's ghost that he does so because God knows he lends more credibility to the brand than many of his card-carrying Democratic Party Senate collegues do).
In the last 24 hours, some really troublesome information was floated about possible cuts in the Social Safety net being on the table. The answer to that news is not to despair, but to gather yourself up and bombard your Senators and Representatives offices with concerned phone calls and not let up for a minute in that regard because nothing has actually happened yet.
It's not too late to make voting on such things too painful an outcome for the Democrats to politically endure for it to happen. You don't owe anyone in DC the benefit of the doubt when it comes to Social Security or Medicare cuts.
Right now, all you have to do is suggest that the Party is about to sell out Social Security and run half of Medicare down the river to make some lousy deal and a lot of Democratic voters are quick to bite. That's a tell. It says all you need to know about how much faith and trust that a non-trivial number of partisan Democratic voters have in the Democratic Party based largely on prior performance and past results, and it's damning. An indictment. This is what you get when you refuse to make an argument. When you have institutionally bought into the notion that the worst thing in the world that you can be is a partisan Democrat during the most partisan era in Rightwing politics since the Gilded Age. Working in a bubble where being a boldfaced liar is less offensive than being somebody who plainly and bluntly calls a boldfaced liar a liar will do that to you I guess. When you are so infamous for self-screwjobs that both false alarm freak-outs and well-deserved alarm bells going off alike happen at the drop of a hat, it's time to stop looking at the voters for your ills and for the Party to check itself.
I've been a member of the Democratic Party, and a straight ticket party line (D) voter, for more than twenty years. I've donated more time and money to get Democratic candidates elected in that span of time than I care to think about these days. I have had doors slammed in my face, been hung up on, walked around until my feet felt like they were going to fall off, and was back to do it all over again when silly season came around again. I've had good times and bad times. Made and lost friends. I've been in massive hotel conference rooms mobbed with madly cheering masses of people all covered in falling confetti, and I have been in those same cavernous rooms when they were filled with dejected crowds suffering together in the odd semi-silence of losing. All to help the Democratic Party get more and better Democrats elected into office, at all levels of government. Town, City, State, and Federal. I don't miss voting, or skip elections, because most every single election has something at stake in it that is important to somebody. If I don't show up, then I have no right to bitch and moan about the country going right straight to Hell because I opted out of my right to it.
In short, I haven't done anything that many others here haven't done too, but I feel that I've paid my dues enough to get something off of my chest.
Basically, I'm as 'good' a Democrat as any, and I can't help but notice something really awful as somebody who has been fighting the good fight for Democrats for more than half my lifetime.
It's no longer just that I believe in the policies and principles of my party far more than my own party does, I have known that for quite a long time, it's that we have reached the point where the GOP would already be claiming almost total victory right now if 'almost total victory' wasn't the same thing as 'total failure' to the Jacobin House Republican caucus.
Movement Conservatism has taken us to the brink of ruin, has failed to work out as advertised in every way a political philosophy can fail to live up to its own hype... and, with all of that monumental baggage of epic fail, it's still as viable a political philosophy and ideological school of thought as it ever has been in the past before it was a known quantity.
'Vote Democratic... We appear reasonable when comparied to crazy people' is not an argument. Worse, who negotiates with crazy people as if they are not crazy, up to and including handing the crazy people major ideological victories without much of a fight, with the expectation that they will get rewarded by the most screwed members of their electorate for agreeing to do it?
I cannot recall the last time the Democratic Party made this argument to the American people: Movement Conservatism, and, more specifically, its overwhelming history of producing terrible policy, poor governance, wretched economic results, and abysmal record with oversight is not only destroying the American middle class, but it is steadily damaging everything in public life that it touches. Ideologically, it is such an enormous failure that it doesn't just produce poor results that land with one dull thud that the nation can then endure and eventually overcome, but impacts in crippling waves of debt and dysfunction that echo painfully for years or decades afterwards. Cutting Social Security and Medicare to get Republicans to even entertain the very notion of doing the right thing on their end is like first responders dropping redhot fiery napalm on scores of burn victims just to get the Arsonists who set the fires that caused their injuries to merely think about not starting any more fires. Just for right now.
Movement Conservatism is a huge failed experiment that is not only not being rolled back, it is not even being held in any kind of real check. The awful truth is that Movement Conservatism, a school of thought that has proven itself, on so many occasions, to be the great catalyst of bad results and bad results only is slowly and steadily crippling any alternative options to it via infection via adoption of it as policy. Becoming the creeping baseline standard for how you can and cannot govern in this great nation of ours, and it's happening because it's not truly being ideologically argued against. With each and every new wave of Movement Conservatism that hits, the federal government is less and less fiscally and politically able to even attempt to try any significant departure from a Center-Right to Hard-Right way of running the ship of state.
Attacking individual posterchild Republicans, even attacking the entire GOP as extremist, is not a substitute for discrediting the ideas that keep escaping unscathed through trainwreck after trainwreck, and neither is hunkering down, enduring the fetid hurricane of nonstop stupidity and corrosiveness, and then winning, temporarily, not becuase you convinced the American people to support your vision for the future but because you appear to be reasonable, or not insane, by comparison. Winning by default is not winning an argument.
Every damned day that the Democratic Party in DC spends not tearing down Movement Conservatism and making it's case that Movement Conservative policy is why things are bad in America today, and making a case for itself and defending its core policy values is a day wasted and ground lost, and every day that we spend as Democratic voters blaming ourselves, or Jets Vs Sharking each other online over petty bullshit as a substitute for blaming our party for its own institutional failures is an even bigger waste of our fleeting and precious time.
Looking reasonable by comparison to lunatics until you (hopefully) win simply by being seen as the non-lunatics may provide some short-term gain or benefit, but, at it's very core, it's not an ideological argument. Not a case against conservatism, and certainly not a case for any better alternative to it. It means the Right loses seats when they screw everything up, but the damage remains unrepaired, the damaged sites are ripe for more, and the GOP is free to round up a new cast of zealots to sell the same junk.
Movement Conservatism gave us the insane concept of replacing actual governing with theatre. Pretending that somebody competent and engaged was at the wheels of state keeping an eye on things. A great social confidence trick to keep all the unwashed rubes from getting nervous or asking too many questions instead of actual governance. Right now, as we wonder how bad the debt ceiling end game is going to be when it goes down, millions and millions of Americans in dire peril still think that somebody responsible is in charge of the House and that the rank and file under his leadership are people who care about governing. This is why so many people fall for the false equivalency they see on basic cable news. "IF that were true, if, then, at the very least, the entire Democratic Party would all be collectively up in arms about it and they would be raising a ruckus every-damned-time they were in front of a camera or microphone."
The Democratic Party isn't making an argument, any argument, against Movement Conservatism or for itself, with the American people. What it's doing is pretty much functionally offering itself up to the country, and to the very people getting creamed the worst by the Right and its toxic policies in the process, as an implimentation buffer. An adoption scheduling moderator. Delaying or breaking into chunks the installation of Movement Conservatism as the political policy default for overseeing American public life. The Democrats are calmer, the Democrats are the seemingly more reasonable people, the Democrats are more than willing to calmly and rationally sit down and give up half to three fourths of whatever it is that is insanely demanded they give up 100% entirely on, as a starting off point by the Right, to seem like the grown-ups in the room. The Democrats do look reasonable. The GOP does look very unreasonable. While all that is going on, the Movement Conservative Rightwing is winning the argument because the Democratic Party isn't making one. Its losing precious ground on decades and decades of policy gains that may take decades and decades longer to restore, if ever, for no good reason except to pander to people who don't care if a Democrat wins another election ever again.
If we win in 2012, we will win almost entirely because of the fallout from the GOPs overreaches, and not because the American people have more faith or trust in the competence, capabilities, and, most importantly, the policies and principles of the Democratic Party. That's not just a big embarassment, it's a damning indictment. It may work, within a brief window of opportunity, but it also sets us all up again for another great big Rightwing comeback. It doesn't do anything to diminish the gains of Movement Conservatism, nor does it undermine its credibility and viability.
Winning by default. Winning by not being Republicans. Looking sane by comparison. By knocking out hated conservative pols instead of making the conservatism behind the cons the thing that makes them radioactive, is not really winning at all. We will never have the time we will need to clean up all of the vast Movement Conservatives' messes they make before they're right back in vogue with the fickle fingered and the conned without winning an argument.
I have been a proud active member of the Democratic Party for many years now, and its been about time for it to be as proud of itself and everything that it stands for as its supporters are. I've never been a walking and talking wallet that occasionally pulls a (D) lever, and I will never accept that the best case scenario for what the Democratic Party can accomplish is to be the far Rightwing's policy implimentation traffic cop.
So, the GOP looks so crazy, and you look so sane, that you win by non-crazy default. You haven't got a big mandate to change the course of the country, because you haven't won any argument, and the nation doesn't know just how bad the Right is, because you are went out of your way to talk to the crazies like they were sane and acting in good will, and, since the American people don't learn how bad the threat that Movement Conservatism presents to the nation is, the national debate moves further to the Right than it was before because it's not being pushed in the other direction.
Millions of Americans conclude, pretty logically, that if the GOP, and the "bad" policies of Movement Conservatism were really all that bad, you would have attacked it and them. Fiercely. As well as championed yourself as the solution to fixing the mess with a change in ideological direction. Because you didn't, they fall even harder for the 'both sides are equally to blame'-ism of the Village. Bonus misery in addition to everything else giving you fits because your majorities national suppport is as shallow as you can get and still have it, and pass Movement Conservative bar lowerings limit the ground you can walk on ideologically without a specific mandate even more strictly.
No partisan argument means that zombie fairy tale notions of bipartisan magic unity ponies are as alive and well and still as absolutely total bullshit as they ever were. Everything that absolutely sucked about trying to get things that aren't war and tax cuts done before, sucks and sucks hard even worse now.
You need a lot of time to fix the messes you are faced with, but you have even less time and less room to maneuver politically than you should have because you haven't won an argument, you won by default. Since your ranks have policy saboteurs in them, because they loathe liberals enough that they will enhance the already serious handicaps built-in to a Democratic Party that sees making a case as akin to tossing up the double middle fingers to their law-making peers in chamber. Now, you have less time and less room to work with. Hello, Citizen's United. The Teahad. Disrupted town halls.
Liberal policies that pass and become successful become... U.S. policy. You cannot ever assume that arguments get made by themselves, ever, or that laypeople know their recent or past U.S. history, process specifics, or policy details from things that happened two weeks ago let alone years and years ago.
Right now, without even the policy end result of the debt ceiling negotiations in place, the amount of institutional Democratic acceptance for both deficit hysteria and the notion that the Social Safety Net should be pared, even if it doesn't contribute to the deficit, because there is the opportunity to do it is a huge victory for the Movement Conservative Right.
It makes it that much harder for future Democrats to govern once they win.
It's not too late. Until the Oligarchy Express crowd, the Big Corporations, Wall Street, and their minions in the Movement Conservative Rightwing actually implodes the nation into chaos, there is always hope. But the only way to break this wretched cycle is (gasp!) partisanship. (No! Not that! Then we will get covered unfairly by the Village and constantly attacked by Fox News and the GOP!) You can't win an argument by refusing to make one. You win an argument by making a good one. Taking a Republican position and making it yours just tells the voters to vote GOP.
Unrestrained, untempered, and absolutely fearless Democratic Partisanship.
Otherwise, all you are doing as a Democrat is making things harder and harder for yourself, and simply moderating the complete implementation of Movement Conservatism. Something that will never stop eating at you like you are just twiddling your thumbs wishing things had turned out better and waiting for the world to start trumbling down all around you.
Get to the phones and start taking back your Democratic Party by making sure that everyone in DC understands that cutting the Social Safety net will come at a terrible cost. If they won't make an argument on their own, make them do it.