You ever notice how people start lapsing into categoricals when they get real angry in an argument? You never this! You always that! You don't care a single thing for me! Whatever it was that they care about, the other person has turned it into everything.
That's the way I feel about some Kossacks. Obama has, admittedly, fallen short on some major progressive items. To those who had pinned high hopes on him, who were angry about everything that came out of the Bush Administration, it must seem like he betrayed them, or at least isn't the sparkling figure on the pedestal he once was.
Well, marble is for the dead and the gone, the folks whose compromises and shortfalls are safely forgotten in the past. What this next election is about, is whether or not we want a living president in office for the next four years who we have a better chance of persuading.
It's not all complicated. In our brains, in our understanding of the universe, everything's simple. It's a common feature of human opinionation. If only people did things this way. Now we can go down a couple paths here. We can go down the paranoid path, like the Republicans are, and reject anybody who dissents even in part from the overall political consensus, or we can recognize that in the real world, few people share more than chunks of their opinions. That's why we have a House and a Senate rather than just electing one head honcho to run it all.
In the real world, even in a big party, you have factions, interest groups. Now each dreams of getting everything they want, but in truth, they're not likely too, at least not without creating tension that often releases in a backlash.
The government the framers created for us was meant to be shared, between many different states, many different Congressional districts, and many different political factions and interests. That's why we are a constitutional, democratic republic. That's why we have a bill of rights, with a first amendment just to start, which makes sure nobody can ever force their opinion permanently on everybody.
The secret of our nation's long term stability, where many other governments have crashed and burned in the intervening years, is that our system releases tensions that build up in the political arena, without bloodshed, without folks being permanently left disenfranchised. An opinion denied is not an opinion no longer had, nor shared. a political voice silent, is not a political opinion absent.
The price of a nation where we can be free and where we can speak our mind, and seek the guarantee of good government is that everybody else, including those we don't like, can do the same.
I know that was a bit of a digression, but it brings me to this essential truth: even and especially when we hold political power, we will face compromise, and our politicians will not be able to keep all their promises to us.
Ideals have a way of retreating as we draw close, like a mirage, like a ghost of a loved one in a dream. Just look at the Republicans, chasing their ideals, and becoming more fearful and anxious about the nation, even as they succeed at dominating on the policy front. They're on a never ceasing treadmill of expectations, and I have the feeling it will be instrumental in the fall of the party.
The question is not whether we get somebody who will listen to us on everything, but whether we will get somebody who will listen to us on more.
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You don't get where I'm going?
Look at the way Obama is campaigning right now. He's promoting labor, he's promoting a change in the tax code, he's promoting a better deal financially for every one of us. He's pushing a raft of reforms, and an energy policy which, for once, makes some sense. There are compromises, yes, but his agenda, his campaign platform definitely looks more like that of a classic Democrat's.
Ask yourself one question: would you get anything of that kind from Mitt Romney? Will anything like he's promoting come out of a Congress, if the House remains or the Senate becomes Republican again? No.
The point of electing Democrats at this point in time is not that all of them are going to be pure of the ideological taint of the Republican revolutions of the past few decades. That's unlikely. No, the point is, as our policy becomes more the usual, more accepted by the public, we can move the goalposts back, and move the country further in our direction.
Anybody who was expecting instant conversion of this country from being dominated by its right was kidding themselves. The policy and political legacy of the Republicans will be difficult to undo, and they will tenaciously defend it until they no longer have the will to oppose the changes.
This is what we call in geometry an inflection point. It's the point where the slope in a curve changes from positive to negative, or negative to positive. It's like a plane heading into a steep dive, and then pulling out of it before it hits the bottom. Well, in my opinion, we're at the point in that dive when we're fighting both gravity and our previous momentum. The rate of change may not be satisfactory, at first. We might not seem to be in a position right now that's all that satisfactory, but if we give up at this point, we might just crash instead, and see worse, not better outcomes for it.
It will not get easier, the longer we put it off, the longer we wait for better candidates and better parties, and whatever else. We have to figure out, in my opinion, how to keep the change going, no matter how incremental. The important part is building up momentum, the momentum needed to take a steep dive, and turn it into a steep climb.
Yes, getting the right policies and people in there is an element. But we'll never get the ideal. Despite this fact, we will have to fight to get better. Nobody's going to just hand us a perfect, completely Kossack approved government right off the bat. Change will have to come, and we will have to fight for it against others who are very committed to seeing our movement strangled in the crib.
Do you want it more than they do? Many of those people fought for decades to get what they wanted, and whether or not they were every satisfied, they got a significant part of what they fought for. Now it's our turn. Are we up to it?
We ought to be. There's no point in waiting passively for the other side to get better, or bash our heads against the wall trying to get instant results people aren't ready for yet. We're going to have to win over a bunch of other people and change the way folks think about politics, and that will be a struggle. Struggles entail imperfect results. If you are satisfied with no less than perfect, there will be no real struggle, you will only accept perfect outcomes, which are rare, and the rest of the time you'll let the other side win through forfeit.
I hate doing things that way, more than I hate having to compromise where I think it problematic. I'm willing to take imperfect results, in order to get results, period. And no, I am aware of the fact that some compromised results aren't the best starting point for additional results. But I never said I wanted dead-end succcesses to compromise.
Well, to get back to my point, we need Democrats at this point not because they are perfect, but because they create a friendlier environment for our legislation. Republicans, with their right-wing excesses might create demand for it in the short term, but they won't pass our legislation for us, to say the least. They won't do us many favors, given the current state of the party. They won't even, in many cases, pull towards the center to appeal to folks in the mainstream. They are quite willing to make a home in the fringe of American politics, and take radical action to castrate and sterilize any means of birthing a new political order to repair, much less rival theirs.
If you don't want more of the bullshit that Snyder, Walker, Scott, Boehner, McConnell, and all the rest of the rogues galleries have cooked up for us, then you have some very important choices to make in the next few elections, and probably many more after that. It isn't merely about expressing your political opinion, or your ideals, it's about doing the real work of creating something that is closer to what you want, rather than allowing the other side's work to bear fruit.
We've seen what happens when those who once voted for Democrats don't vote as such again. We've seen that Democrats in Washington will retreat, not be emboldened when their party loses the election. We have to stop seeing this in terms of what we want as individuals, and start seeing this in terms of what we can do as a party, and what we can do.
Obama for all the flaws and compromises he has attached to him now, is a President who increases the likelihood of progressive and liberal policy being passed. A Democratic Congress, whether or not it's pure as the driven snow politically, makes that likelihood increase as well. These are the truths that back the assertion that even if Obama falls short of what you want in a President, even if Our Congresscritters aren't perfect, it's better to win than to lose.
But what about holding them accountable? Of course. But holding them accountable is a balancing act. If you have an electable replacement, put them in. If you don't, you risk putting in somebody who's worse. All the same, Democrats like us need to be cultivating folks to replace the sorts of people we want to hold accountable. The idea is to give those people a run for their money, and then in the general election, give any Republican candidate a run for theirs as well. We don't need to be simply self-inflicting wounds, and hoping the dumb bastards get it.
But one way or another, we need to help this country make the transition of decades worth of misrule, and we can't do that all that well if we don't have the offices in Washington necessary to pass legislation. At the very least, the idea will be to get more persuadable Democrats and eventually Republicans elected, and by doing that, create the environment for further policy changes.