Vote to Save Yourself and the Country

Mad as you are at the Democrats, excellent as your reasons may be, it all pales to insignificance beside the catastrophe teabaggers will visit on this nation if you don't vote against them.

From Digby:

Voting isn't just about making good things happen for yourself and your family. It's about voting against things that will make your lives worse. And if this Republican party -- at this point in history --- wins big over the next two years, the lives of average Americans will definitely be worse.

Right now all that should matter to any of us is defeating the most radical, authoritarian, anti-intellectual Republican class in modern memory (and that's saying something.) They were thoroughly repudiated at the polls in the last two elections and they haven't learned a thing from those losses. Indeed, the lesson they took was that they hadn't been aggressively wrong enough. Instead of seeing where they went wrong and making adjustments, they've doubled down on their worst policies and are prepared to go even further.

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The Tea Party candidates themselves are using violent rhetoric about "second amendment remedies" and violent overthrow as casually as most politicians talk about tax policy. Many of them are endorsing a far right social conservative agenda that even the most die-hard Republicans of a decade ago wouldn't have dreamed of and their view of government is nothing short of incoherent.

Most ominously, these same candidates are backed by billions of astroturfed dollars which are channeled through the tea party front groups. This fantastic article by Adele Stan called Tea Party Inc pulls the whole thing together in one place. It's a devastating portrait of a so-called grassroots political movement being guided and manipulated by plutocrats and oligarchs.

And that means that even aside from their radical views on government, their xenophobia and their hardcore social conservatism, their economic prescriptions will make this sick system much worse for average people (and naturally much better for the extremely wealthy people who are bankrolling it). Paul Krugman said it well in his column yesterday:

The tragedy here is that if voters do turn on Democrats, they will in effect be voting to make things even worse.

The resurgent Republicans have learned nothing from the economic crisis, except that doing everything they can to undermine Mr. Obama is a winning political strategy. Tax cuts and deregulation are still the alpha and omega of their economic vision.
And if they take one or both houses of Congress, complete policy paralysis — which will mean, among other things, a cutoff of desperately needed aid to the unemployed and a freeze on further help for state and local governments — is a given. The only question is whether we’ll have political chaos as well, with Republicans’ shutting down the government at some point over the next two years. And the odds are that we will.

Is there any hope for a better outcome? Maybe, just maybe, voters will have second thoughts about handing power back to the people who got us into this mess, and a weaker-than-expected Republican showing at the polls will give Mr. Obama a second chance to turn the economy around.

There's nothing wrong with voting defensively. Republicans do it almost all the time --- they're always saving the country from ruin from their imaginary Terrible Commiesocialistliberalprogressives. Indeed, it's their primary organizing principle. It's harder for progressives to do the same because we tend to think in terms of using government to better the lives of the people rather than using it to stop something bad. But in this election, saving the country from ruin by the Terrible Tea Party Republicans should be the Democrats' organizing principle as well.

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If you'd like to help GOTV, the PCCC has put together a great program and teamed up with DFA and Blue America to Call out the Vote for our favorite progressive candidates who need our help. Aside from voting, we can also help the good guys down the stretch. (And if we could pull off a surprise and help keep some of our endangered progressives in their seats while the Blue Dogs are sent to that lovely farm in the country (if you know what I mean) we might just be able to start changing the way this whole thing works.)

Have you made calls for your Democratic Congressional candidate today?