It's not that people are so stupid as to actually like the policies that seem to blend satire with fact. What I think is that they either think they have no alternative, or will give no alternative.
You look at the polls, and people are opposed to much of the policy. But you don't see political resistance like you might expect.
We have to understand that Republicans don't just win political fights when they can gain support for their policies. They can win if you, I, or others decide that our efforts are in vain, and quit trying to change things.
How? Well, their policies are already in place, the status quo. They don't have to make any big legislative victories for their policies to dominate; they already do.
We're the ones who have to change things. We're the only ones who lose when we stop trying to change things for whatever reason. I don't think people really buy the Republican's rhetoric the way they once did. I think people are just emotionally confused, or cynically unconvinced that those who promise change can bring it.
We have to realize something here: people already think things are bad. However, for years, the Republicans have told them a number of things, and demonstrated others by simple force of political resistance against accountability.
For years, the Republicans have bashed big government. Doing that hasn't simply been a matter of populism. It's been a matter of prying the motivation to use that government out of people's hands. It also explains how government get used for corporate ends, but not the average citizen's. Republicans are fully willing to use government to push their special interests. For them, in those situations, big government is A-OK. It's government coming to our aid that people are supposed to be inhibited about. The more inhibited, the better. And the more the Government's helping the rich and powerful, the less it's helping us.
For years, Republicans have pushed a narrative of people helping themselves by supporting the government's helping of the rich and powerful. This is not an accident. This is an intentional twisting of a rather elitist proposition into populist terms. Save jobs! Come to the aid of the big companies polluting! Save jobs! Allow companies to skimp on worker safety! Save jobs! Break the unions!
Notice that when the Republicans talk about tax cuts, they either talk about job creators, or they talk about putting money back into people's pockets. Government, additionally, is also talked about in terms of invading the average person's life, even though most of the regulations are concerned with what their employers, the big companies, and everybody else but them.
The question, the inhibition is there for many: can we risk more government?
That, instead of asking "How can government help us?" or "How can we bend government to our interests?"
America's attitude towards its government has become passive, and soaked through with learned helplessness. Folks don't have much courage to change things until their backs are to the wall, and when the immediate crises recede, it's easy for the Republicans to get them to lose their nerve.
Hell, it's easy for the Republicans to get us to lose our nerve, to collapse into back-biting and internal strife. And why not? We're starting out, essentially, from a defeat that was decades in the making. Like most people, when our backs were to the wall, we summoned the courage and the unity to fight back. But when we got enough power, disgusted with how much power and influence the Republicans had built up, and envious of their unity and organization, we demanded that the Democratic Party essentially undo Bush's agenda the same way that he executed it.
The Democratic Party wasn't up to that. If you really think about it, you'll understand why. The Bush Republican Party was the product of thirty years of Republican ascendance. These weren't folks who were just coming off of their party's worst defeat in decades. These were folks who had been on the ascendance, strangling the moderate wing of their party for years to concentrate their ideological power. It may be understandable that you expected equal ideological force out of the Democrats, in order to change this country for the better, but it wasn't realistic. We will need a new generation of Democrats, I think, to see anywhere near that kind of unity in our party.
But it won't come overnight. It didn't come overnight for the Republicans. They had to stomach any number of bitter compromises at the start, under Reagan. They passed their big tax cuts with Reagan, only to end up having to do the biggest tax hike in history right on its heels. They were met with a shitload of resistance on just about everything, and it took another 14 years for them to take control for Congress and get things done like they wanted. Even then, they were stuck fighting Clinton for another six years. It's only when they got Bush and the Republican Congress together that they were able to really screw things up the way they wanted to.
We didn't lose the battle with the Republicans all at once, and they didn't win it all at once. So, logically, we won't win the battle with them all at once, and nor will they lose it all at once.
Or, put another way, this is going to be a political struggle for some time to come. The Demographics alone will ensure that things change, but they don't tell us how fast they will change, and in my opinion, they will change faster if people become convinced that it is possible to change government for the better.
Forget the politicians for the moment. They're the sail, and we're the wind. We get strong enough, and they'll move simply because they have to. But we have to move first, build the critical mass in the country, and we'll have to do this despite the fact that the political inertia is on the side of the Republicans.
It's time to stop being shocked that the Republicans are putting up a fight, and forcing morale-sapping compromises. It's time to stop being shocked that, left to themselves, the Democrats of today aren't the equal of the Republicans of the Bush Administration in unity or the Tea partiers of today in sheer, destructive partisanship. These are our initial conditions, and they're not pleasant.
In times like this, simply coasting on our feelings is a mistake. The disappointments will make us feel powerless, but only our acting on that disappointment will truly make us so. People disappointed in Clinton stayed home, and Gore lost, which meant things got worse. People disappointed in Obama stayed home (whether progressive, independent or whatever), and things got worst. We have to consider who gets power as much as who deserves power. We have to consider these choices in terms of alternatives.
If you're shopping for a car or a stereo, you don't get a worse one if you fail to choose one at all. If you're shopping for a President, a senator, or a representative, people rejecting a disappointing choice or their designated successor can mean a worse alternative, because there is no null alternative. There is no neutral choice, no doing nothing. Every choice has a consequence.
We have to stop acting like letting Democrats get defeated, if they disappoint us, will be a neutral choice. We have to stop muddling the nature of that choice, in light of just how radical and uncompromising the GOP is.
The crappiness of our choices is a measure of just how much the political situation in this country has degenerated, just how crappy it is. Trying to ignore it won't change things for the better. Waiting for perfect candidates to come along won't help things. We will have to trudge our way through the muck and the mud of years of Republican political victories, and push things back from decades of their rule in order to win.
You will get hurt. You will be disappointed. You will wonder why you support your party. That is normal, I would say, when your party is actually competing for power. When you're just a minority, and there's no hope of any change, well of course you won't get disappointed, or have your hopes dashed. If you don't fight until things are perfect, well of course you won't lose so much. And you'll rarely win, either, or win for long.
Whether your heart's in it or not, your vote has the same power. You can help prevent bad leaders from getting into power, and put better leaders up there. One way or another, the government that comes together will have your approval, whether it's your explicit approval in the form of a vote, or your tacit approval, in the form of the results you decide not to contest. Your failure to push government in the direction you want it to go, will not mean the failure of those who would push it in the other direction. Our constitution gives them voice, gives them the ability to shape our government, and when we win elections, they may very well feel motivated to wrest back power from you, so you should not let your guard down.
The Bush Administration represents the absolute depths of our power. I know it seems like it's worse, now that part of the government is Democratically controlled, but things aren't getting much better, but if you look at it objectively, things could be a hell of a lot worse. The Tea Party may seem like a scary return to power for the Republicans, but in my opinion, that group and the Republican's reliance on them are evidence of the desperation of the party, and it's unstable standing with the voters. If any of you remember what Alfred said about the Joker in The Dark Knight, it pretty much works here. We hit our political opponents pretty hard, and they responded by turning to people whose fringiness and extremity they did not fully understand.
I think many of them understand now. I think a lot of Republicans these days are tired and demoralized. They may want to beat Obama bad, but they're not going to be as robust in their ability to promote their candidate, especially if Rick Perry is their candidate. But Mitt Romney isn't much better for them. They seem to have a Hobson's choice here: pick the dull guy who may be too moderate for many in the party, a milquetoast known for his support of the very plan Obama coopted, or pick the guy who gets their people excited, but reminds people too much of Bush.
However much you might dislike, distrust, or simply not think much of the spine of Barack Obama, he is, at the very least, a smart man who will have much less trouble appealing to a center he never left behind. Much as you might mourn the way the party's evolved, we do have the ability, thanks to the greater moderation and centrism in our party to simply take positions and stick to them. We don't have to veer to the far left to satisfy them, and then careen to the right to satisfy the center.
What we need at this point is for people to wake up and realize some things.
First, a lot of what disappoints them about Obama is fixable. Give Obama a better Congress at his disposal, and you'll get a lot of what you want from him. At the very least, you'll get a functional Congress.
Second, Republicans these days are the most screwed up kind of party. They are way to the right of the nation's political center. More to the point, when they get hit by a bad election, they don't soul search about what they did wrong, they just assume they need to get more extreme about their politics. They're even more insufferable if they win. If Democrats have tacked to the right a little bit, we can say to voters, "It's because you the voters went that way."
Which is to say, you can much more easily hold a Democrat accountable, because they care where the country is politically, than you can hold a Republican, who will just push the policies you hate regardless of what you think. You might not have gotten everything from Democrats they promised, but you got some things, and can get more over time as they get better used to being in charged, better used to getting their way.
Third, There are mountains of laws, regulations, and social norms that need to be changed, and that didn't happen overnight for the Republicans, and it won't happen overnight for us. Some people may not know this, but they had the Senate in their control from 1980-1986. These people didn't keep it, nor did they keep the Presidency. For all their fervor, they couldn't just convince people to hand over power overnight. There were generational issues and everything. We ought to consider that we face the same issues.
You can quit of course, but what Republicans did early on is decide not to quit, not to accept defeat. They at least understood that if they wanted to keep liberals like us in there place, they couldn't let up, give up, concede victory to us. As a result, they got some early victories which, even if somewhat reversible, helped set up their eventual takeover and domination of politics. We forget the times in which their points of view were more controversial, when the thought of the House going Republican was just unthinkable. We've forgotten what a struggle real policy typically is, expecting things to go just as well as they did for the Republicans now that we got in charge.
My advice? Expect it to be a slog early on. Expect disappointment. Expect to succeed only by inches at first. But don't stop fighting, and don't stop voting Democrat or getting others to do the same. What you're doing now is investing in a critical mass which when built up far enough, will start to put Republicans back in the position they were in before Reagan, along with all their laws, their regulations and things like that.
What you're doing now is keeping those who have sinned against you in the Wilderness until they start entertaining compromise and centrism as a way back into America's good graces.
What you're doing is making a conscious effort and a conscious decision to shape America, for your small part, in your way.
And that is the key. We're in a satire-worthy position now because people are used to things being screwed up and dysfunctional. Left to ourselves, following our natural inclinations, we might not challenge the system. But if enough of us make the decision to challenge things and change things, it will be difficult to stop us. We have to keep it up, though. If they can just weather our fervor out, wait for their obstructionism and sheer stubborn resistance to do their work, they'll beat us for the time being. If we don't subside, if we just snap and keep ourselves strongly committed to this, then at some point, they'll get tired of doing stupid things that don't defeat us, and other people, based on their social instincts, will start moving our way, as people tend to move when they sense things are going a certain way.
We have to make it clear to people, through our efforts, that it is not impossible to turn things around, that our current setbacks are nowhere near the end of the dream we had in 2006 and 2008 of better government. It's been harder than we expected, but that's no reason not to follow through on our noble goals all the way to the end. That's no reason to give up. In fact, it ought to be reason not to give up. The Republicans fear their time might be over, that if they don't resist us with every inch of their power, we'll win.
Let's make their worst nightmare come true.