A website like Daily Kos where it's more acceptable to be against gun control or spew Infowars conspiracy theories than to call for the impeachment of Antonin Scalia is fun and all, but is there a website somewhere for liberal activists? Somewhere that it's permissible to make more than an idle pretense of progressive politics? Not saying I wouldn't still come here for the brilliantly grownup comments and sane analysis, but Libertarianism isn't always my cup of tea. Sometimes I just get a wild, crazy hankering for reality-based discussion and at least the distant possibility of progressive action arising from it. Anyone know anywhere like that?
I get it: Cultures evolve, new people come in, old people get stupid and complacent, things change. People build credibility by being focused and reality-based, and that credibility attracts people who are less so in order to feed off of it by association. This forces the reality-based voices to struggle that much harder to stay above muck, which only makes the place that much more attractive to people who don't understand the light that's responsible for the heat they enjoy. The boldest and most productive voices of Daily Kos have already flaked off and gone who-knows-where over the past few years, to be replaced by a Chuck E. Cheese animatronic band of Infowars-like incoherent fear and hate columnists and redundant mirrors for major media commentary.
Obama = Hitler and electronic spying = the Holocaust is now considered a legitimate matter of debatable opinion that gets anywhere from several to hundreds of Recs with only a brave few daring to HR them. Unfortunately, even those stands are usually futile because the hysteria and hate are allowed to be spammed at every opportunity by their promulgators while they team up to HR people who so much as express skepticism about the alternate universe in which they increasingly operate. A diary defending gun anarchy despite the thousands of corpses in American streets every year would get a more supportive reception than one suggesting that striking down enforcement of the Voting Rights Act just to enable a Republican electoral strategy is an act of impeachable judicial tyranny.
And I get that some people - in fact, most human beings, to be honest - are just group thinkers who have to struggle very hard not to believe that 2 + 2 = 5 when the loudest voices around them are insisting it is and the dissenters peep like mice as if what they were arguing were radical rather than common sense and the alternative contemptible gibberish. I get that those people believe whatever the prevailing "wisdom" is and are virtually useless to affecting change in their own time, but somehow confidently think the opposite of themselves because they agree in retrospect with previous generations of dissenters without learning a thing from them.
So I don't begrudge anyone the empty theater of cargo cult progressivism: Some people need the illusion of rebellion while avoiding genuinely empowering ideas at all costs. Some people, I understand, are like teenagers who just need to huff and pout at Daddy but would be sobbing in desolation and terror if they actually had to make their own future as a free people in an actual democratic republic would. The closer we get to having a chance to really change things, the more frightened and confused these people become. We've all seen it - we've seen them flounder for an anchor when things go right, as if they're not capable of seeing the way forward unless things are as bad as possible. And we've seen them invent the ODS universe out of thin air because a world without Bush is a world where they have to invent Bush out of someone else.
And now because the media tells them the VRA ruling is no big deal by default of failing to cover it in the same depth as other issues, and no Big Name Pundit is telling them to get up on their chairs and scream "I'm mad as hell," they make up excuses for why things are as they're told. They get bitter and fearful when someone says otherwise. It's an exposed nerve that none dare touch. Unless some authority has granted its permission to think beyond the narratives promoted by the media, it is rank apostasy to raise them yourself or dare to expect anyone to consider them. And so the bubble of denial and alternate universe belief bobs onward on the breeze, oblivious. When people are denied the right to vote in 2014 because of trivial quibbles in their paperwork, despite all efforts to appease the Jim Crow 2.0 systems being put in place in the wake of the Supreme Court VRA ruling, that will be the time to idly complain and then go back to sleep until the next outrage rigs the next election.
So I ask again: Where can I find some liberal activists so we can get busy defending the right to vote, so that Daily Kos won't be interrupted from its busy schedule of writing romance novels about Edward Snowden?