The change to Daily Kos 4 seems to have gone smoothly.
Now it's time to look at changing the site's commitment to the Democratic Party.
I realize there aren't many Republicans worth voting for on their own merits and I doubt that a third party can be effective in this country any time soon.
Still, events from the 2006 elections through now show that blindly supporting Democrats, regardless of their positions, has been ineffective at getting liberal policies implemented.
The only thing most politicians care about is getting elected. The amount of money we can raise to help them do that doesn't compete with the amount of money they can get from the elites who dictate policy, not only in this country, but in the world.
That leaves us with one weapon: Withholding our votes.
I realize the risk — if the Naderites had voted for Gore in 2000, the country would be in much better shape than it is now — but I don't see what other choices we have. Events in Wisconsin have shown that we're better off with a Democratic minority if the Democrats in that minority are willing to fight for Democratic principles than we are with a Democratic majority ruled by CorporaDems.
Right now, the only question about the direction of the country's governance is how fast it will continue to move to the right. The pace would be faster under Republicans, but all that means is that the country would deteriorate faster, not that it would stop deteriorating or begin to improve under Dems.
To put it more dramatically, if we can't change the direction the elites are moving the country, we're going off the cliff anyway, it's just a question of when.
Unless some of us have mind-control rays we haven't yet revealed to the world, we can't affect the Republican Party. The only thing we can change is the Democratic Party. And to do that, we have to get the CorporaDems out of it.
We have tried to do that by supporting liberal, or the most liberal, candidates in primary elections, but when those candidates lose, we support their CorporaDem opponents in general elections because they are less evil than the Republicans they face.
It's time to stop doing that. The only way to get CorporaDems out of the Democratic Party is to cause them to lose elections.
If we implement this strategy and succeed, the initial result will likely be a Democratic Party that is in the minority in both houses of Congress and doesn't hold the presidency either.
But as the current Democratic Party showed us after Scott Brown was elected, all you need to wield power at the federal level of government is to hold 40 seats in the Senate.
Economist James Galbraith made a speech last year that spurred some discussion on this site. Here's the money quote from it:
It seems to me that we as progressives need — this is my personal position — we need to draw a line and decide that we would be better off with an under-funded, fighting progressive minority party than a party marked by obvious duplicity and constant losses on every policy front as a result of the reversals in our own leadership.
Of course, by trying this strategy, we run the risk that we'll initially wind up with a Democratic Party that is in the minority and still doesn't fight Republican extremism.
But at least we won't have to hold our noses and vote for turds like Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey.
Then again, if you want to win the War on Women, you probably don't want to continue arming the opponent.