Screw Enthusiasm. How about good old fashion, nasty teeth-gritted application of willpower to get what you fricking want? I read this article by Ezra Klein, and this article by Brian Beutler, and I'm like, "What the hell? Is this what we've reduced ourselves to as liberals?"
I mean, good God, folks, thinking of letting Romney win for the sake of undoing the gridlock? Going out there, and taking the most pessimistic possible appraisal of the jobs situation, and headlining one of our major publications with it? I know many will call that "reality", and praise it as realism, but there's a difference between acknowledging realities, and creating self-fulfilling prophecies of failure.
It's time to acknowledge a crucial difference here, between acknowledging where you are now, and allowing your opponents to manipulate you psychologically into surrendering your will to overpower them, because that is exactly what the Republican program for success is: to gut your morale, and reduce all your options to letting them win.
Fuck them. Not the authors I mentioned, but fuck the Republicans for their self-mutilating policy of obstruction. They have taken their political rivalry with us, and escalated into a complete failure to get the point of why they are in there in the first place. The political agenda is supposed to be secondary to their responsibility to look out for the general welfare of the country as a whole.
They haven't only failed at it, they have nearly run this country not simply into the ground, but through the ground flaming into the Grand Canyon like a giant, national version of the car from Thelma and Louise. And no, we weren't going to be fucking holding hands in a triumph of empowerment as we make a grease spot on the side of world history. It was going to be painful and nasty and worse than anything we'd experienced in American history, and it wasn't ever going to fucking end.
Does that seem to any of you like the kind of folks you want to submit to? Do you think the fucking nightmare stops when these people get what they want?
The bullshit that held true when we celebrated the end of the Bush Era still applies now, only worse, they've managed to make themselves believe that they weren't wrong the first time, and made it even more difficult to admit their error. So far, any wishful thinking from our side that their time in the wilderness has softened the Republican's stupidity in the face of our country's challenges should be quite sufficiently beaten to death by the evidence.
Yet I hear we're unenthusiastic. I hear we're not going to get out there and vote. We're going to teach a lesson to those disappointments in Washington and elsewhere. But unfortunately we're talking about being this stupid regarding elections that have the potential to change our nation's fate, and not for the better.
It's not just a matter of making somebody bad or mediocre lose, not if the replacement is worse, and in just about every case, they have been worse. I don't know, are people just operating under the assumption that Republicans have to behave as well as they did before 9/11, before all too many of them convinced themselves that even the slightest deviation from having a conservative court, a Republican White House, and a Republican Congress was an invitation to our nation going up in flames?
You're not simply trading disappointment for a little time in the wilderness, you're trading disappointments from our party for bold and confident members of a party undergoing an experiment in terminal stupidity, folks who, having been confronted with a shitload of evidence that their policies were utter failures, simply decided not to acknowledge it. The politicians we have at work here are the folks who, having poked themselves and felt excruciating pain, decide to poke themselves again and again in hopes that the pain will just go away.
We've let their unwillingness to just simply submit, their viciousness of response to our victory, their stubborn unwillingness to let change go forward not only hollow us out, but blind us to the fact that we actually have a decent president on our hands, one who will do quite a bit of good if we get a Congress behind him of value. But the folks who expect him to pull miracles out of an even partly Republican Congress are just kidding themselves. They're letting wishful thinking get the better of them.
No, the Republicans will not change until the shear volume of losses convince them that they're on the decline, and undoing the progress we've made is no longer an option.
They are convinced that if they beat on you enough, if they maintain their rabid committment to undoing anything and everything liberal, that sooner or later, you'll just lay down and accept it. That's their gamble, in the face of an electorate that showed an alarming willingness almost four years ago to elect Democrats. They want what we did then to be a fluke, an example of America losing its damn fool mind.
What do you want it to be?
The simple truth is, the people who win in a democratic republic like ours are the ones who show up, and who deliberately choose, regardless of what mood they are in, to shift the system towards their political preference. It's those who don't give up when what seemed like an unstoppable revolution becomes an incremental, exhausting battle with disappointing results, but who instead keep showing up, keep making their influence felt, until the changes they wish to see are no longer just dreams, but the new normal of American society.
I see way too many posts here, with the good intentions of trying to motivate people that simply end up telling us one reason or another why the system isn't going to change, why the Rich and the powerful and the right-wing and the religious zealots have won, and why everything we value is going to go down the toilet. I see way too many people saying that the poverty of our times is inevitable, that there's nothing we can do to make things any different, so on and so forth.
As a response to the angry, belligerent, psychopathic obstruction and obfuscation of the right, we have adopted as stance of paralyzing resignation, rather than taking our anger and our frustration right back out on them. We're bashing Obama on these pages practically more than we're bashing the Republicans, and we're reporting on each shortfall as if its the end of the world.
I remember a line from a movie: "Everybody's got a plan until they get hit." Well, we had a plan, and then we got hit. Then we got hit with what has to be one of the most toxic political movements of modern times, the movement to restore the Republican Party to power. There's no use to denying it, these folks are very intent on winning, and if we let them, they will. But there's also no use in letting them win, for reasons we can see all around.
They're wrong, and things won't get better until somebody is in there who know what's right. It would be dereliction of our civic duty to knowingly leave morons and incompetents in charge like the GOP is filled with at this point. Their policies are degrading our nation's future. Already they have done signficant damage by the results of their debt ceiling fight, results even they are scrambling to avoid the fallout from.
You don't want this! Fuck enthusiasm, what do you want? In one version or another, that's what you should ask people!
Because the vote doesn't care who's enthusiastic, who has great choices, it only cares about the choice you make. How many times do we have to experience the terrible consequences of not choosing a Democrat to lead our country. Do we have to suffer through another four years of Bush style economics and policy, with a heaping helping of tea party stupidity doing further damage to our country, before we'll act to serve our own interests?
I think that's the question. Do we want to be in control more than the other side does?
If the trials of the past few years are too much for us, will we basically be waiting another twenty years for the stars to align, and give us the government we want because the Republicans so screwed things up, people had to get rid of them?
Me, I think that's intolerable. Republicans have been put to the test, and found wanting, and no matter how badly they throw their nasty rhetoric at us, we're still more right than they are. Our most mediocre candidates are still better on the ball than the best of them, because the best of them lack all conviction, and the worst are full of fiery passion. They'll burn themselves out within the space of a few years if we take the fight to them and defeat them.
But if we allow them to take things back, it's another decade or two of this stupidity until demographics finally comes to our rescue.
No. You have to make a choice, and make it clear to others that they they have a choice, too. You have to convince people that despite all the brouhaha, they made the right choice the first time, and that going back to the Republicans in hopes of some kind of government of mixed blessings, like we had under Clinton, was a mistake.
Most of all, you have to make the source of your enthusiasm not the hopeful advent of a charismatic candidate, but the simple, stubborn, competitive impulse not to lose in the face of competitors who can't accept anything less than total victory over you.
If you truly believe in your politics, in this worldview we liberals subscribe to, go out there and make the marks of your official support for it, and get others to support it, too. Things won't change unless we make them change, unless we force them to change.