Make More Liberals

“I think we have to think on two separate tracks—vote Democrat because the Democrats are the less actively evil (less creatively evil) party, while realizing that if we actually want to reverse the regression in this country, we have to get it done ourselves.” - Steve M. at No More Mister Nice Blog

So. Obama secures his place in history as the President Who Murdered Social Security.

And don't forget he's now to the right - far to the right - of Ronald Reagan.

Now can we stop pretending the Democrats in Washington are anything but bitches for Wall Street and start working locally to make more liberals?

Yes, of course I'm going to vote for Obama next year and encourage everyone to do the same. I won't even have to hold my nose to do it, because by that time I will have made significant progress making more liberals to bite his DINO ass.

First, I’m going to do everything I can to make sure the centrists get the blame. Down with Tyranny:

Three years ago this week, at the height of Obamamania, Matt Stoller predicted this would happen.

As a liberal, I believe that if Obama comes in and implements a bunch of muddled centrist policies, proposing tax cuts to deal with poverty and an expanded military and entitlement reform along with a weird convoluted health care reform, he will fail because basic liberal ideas like accountability, oversight, and integrity in leadership will not be embedded into our institutions. The rich have left us with a massive bill in the form of an intractable trade deficit, national debt, and oil addiction, and someone's going to pay it. If it's the public instead of the people who ran up the country's credit cards (take a look at the nation's billionaires), it's going to make a lot of people much angrier than they are right now.

This anger will go somewhere; right now anger is going against Bush, but he's out of the picture come 2009, though we can kick his corpse for a few years or so if Democrats act smartly (which they won't). If Obama's centrist policies fail, and he is considered a big government liberal or progressive, the public will reject liberalism and progressivism, as it has for the last forty years. But this will not be a result of disliking progressive ideas, but as a result of believing that bad centrist ideas are progressive ideas.

So, as liberals who believe in a different vision for America than Obama, it's important that Obama's centrist policy sympathies are blamed for what goes wrong when he takes over and screws up the country worse than it is right now, which we'll notice after our honeymoon of hoorays some time after the transition.

Steve M. has been on top of this for years, repeatedly writing that liberals will find nothing but heartbreak in Congress and the White House until we find a way to create more liberals locally – liberals who will support candidates who stand tall for genuine liberal values.

So I will give him the floor.

From April:

Yeah, my congressional district on the Upper West Side is extremely blue -- but we already have a solidly progressive member of Congress, Jerrold Nadler. How many districts like mine are there? How many states? The number of states where an extremely right-wing Republican can challenge a very right-wing Republican and almost certainly win a general election for the Senate if the primary challenge is successful is probably in the double digits. The number of similar House districts may be close to the triple digits. What are our numbers like on the left?

We can't do this until there are more genuine progressives all over the country, to the point where we're a significant voting bloc in many districts and states. As I say all the time, we need to make more liberals.

And as I also say all the time, I have no idea how that can happen.

SNIP

But teabaggers, thanks to corporate cash, have the numbers to put pressure on their politicians. We don't. We can amass the numbers to join up with a traditional Democratic campaign, but we don't have the clout to work effectively in opposition to established Democrats. Or at least it doesn't seem as if we do.

Teabaggers have the wherewithal to work with the GOP establishment or work against it (but in the latter case they're working to create a new even more extreme GOP establishment). They engage in hero worship when it suits them (St. Ronnie!), but they can peel off from the GOP as it exists because there are enough of them to pressure the establishment.

On our side, without the Democratic Party, we feel we're nothing. So of course we hope that Democratic politicians will get us to the Promised Land -- we don't see any other way there.

There need to be more of us. We need to make our own clout. And I'll say it again: I
have no idea how to do this.

In May:

The best hope ordinary people have would come from engaging in fights that are issue-based, not campaign-based. I thought about that while watching "Freedom Riders" on PBS last week. The civil rights movement wasn't built on the hope that electing certain candidates would get its goals accomplished. Nor was it built on the hope that primarying the bastards who let the movement down was the key. The people who fought for civil rights fought for civil rights. They backed some candidates, and sometimes worked with elected officials, but primarily they just kept pressing their demands, on their timetable -- which didn't coincide with an electoral timetable.

I'm also thinking about one of the few progressive movements of my adult life that seem somewhat successful -- the gay rights movement. Straight acceptance of gay people and their goals has a way to go, but there have been real advances -- and that wasn't inevitable, especially given the AIDS epidemic, as a result of which there was actual talk in polite circle of tattooing and quarantining as public health measures. Again, how did it happen? It happened because gay rights groups did stuff. The movement wasn't hitched to the electoral calendar.

I still support voting for Democrats. I just don't support counting on them -- even the best of them -- to solve our problems. Some will sell us out. Some will sell us out some of the time. But meanwhile, we have to do stuff. We have to fight for what we need and not assume that if we elect the right people, we'll win. It doesn't work that way.

And last week:

It wouldn't be "entirely an inside game" if a large number of Americans had class consciousness and were out in the streets demanding some sacrifice from the greedy, and some limit on the sacrifices required of the rest of us.

And while it would be nice if the president used the bully pulpit to rally us against the Republicans, the fact is that we don't need to wait for his permission, or the permission of any other elected official -- we're legally entitled to decide on our own that we have grievances that need redressing.

I know that there really isn't any such broad-based class consciousness in America today. And I know that, even if there were, it's hard to imagine our outrage making any difference in a society where cash rules, and where Roger Ailes acts as the entire news media's assignment editor, valorizing the rage of the right while portraying anger from any other direction as nothing more than a freak show.

But in theory we could try. And in fact, until we take our own side in the argument, everything's just going to get worse and worse.

And it's still Obama's fault for moving the overton window rightward and thus making any liberal progress a hundred times harder.

Zandar, in April, on "Playing To Win Versus Not Having To Worry"

There's been a lot of kvetching and moaning about "Why Progressives Can't Get Anything Done" and the answer is simple. Progressives play to win an election. Wingers play to not have to worry about them. BooMan speaks the truth today. Progressive failure is structural.

I stopped being very idealistic when I finally got around to making myself understand our system of government. I don't get disappointed by a whole lot because my expectations are so low. I see a real threat out there. I see a threat to our way of life and to all humanity, and it stares me in the face every single day. That threat isn't coming from Barack Obama or the Democratic Party. It's coming from the other side of the aisle. And insofar as the Democrats are failing to meet the challenge (and they are failing) the real culprit is deep and structural and ingrained in our system and in our laws.

You may have noticed that the right is engaged in this fight on a structural level. They go after the people who register voters. They pass laws making it harder to vote. They attack the unions. They attack MoveOn.org. They go after anyone in the media, be it Bill Maher, Keith Olbermann, Phil Donahue, or Dan Rather who expresses any skepticism about the right. They built their own cable news station and took over the radio spectrum. They make it so corporations can give unlimited money anonymously. They are coming after us with real aggression, trying to make it impossible for even middle-of-the-road Bill Clinton-style Democrats to get elected in this country. If we want to defend ourselves and ever see real progressive change in this country, we have to fight on this structural stuff. In the meantime, we're playing defense. And we can't do much more than that.

So, I'm obviously troubled and concerned about our country and the future, but I am pretty clear-sighted about what our limitations are and why we have to settle for so little. Our problems are not one man's fault. One man cannot fix them. But we also need to remember that we have one man standing between where we are now and an immeasurably worse situation. I think about that every day, too.

We considered ourselves lucky in 1992 and 2008. Both of those wins were followed by the House going back to the Republicans two years later and a government shutdown in the case of 1995. Let's keep in mind that while Clinton was re-elected in 1996, and the American people hated Newt Gingrich at the time, the Republicans kept the House for another dozen years and they patiently waited until they had the whole ball of wax during Bush's first term to really push the structural stuff.

I poke fun at the Tea Party and the Republicans all the time. It's a coping mechanism. It doesn't mean they don't frighten the hell out of me. Right now the Republicans are doing everything they can to make sure they will basically always win future elections. The Democrats do not have that level of organization, media reach, or power at the state level that the Republicans have now and will continue to have for a very long time. They've spent 30 years doing it and now it's finally paying off.

Now they have a chance to put us away for good, with Voter ID laws that seek to disenfranchise minorities and the poor, with redistricting that will maintain Republican power at the state level, even in states that are growing due to increased minority populations. They have a chance to force structural, long-term changes in the federal budget to rearrange social safety net programs. They are not playing for 2012. They are playing for 2012 through 2042.

If anything, the lesson for progressives in the last two years is this: you can't get anything truly progressive done in just two friggin years. And since Obama took office, the progressives that have failed to figure that out are trying to do everything they can to take down the man standing between us and the tsunami of red state corporate fascism. The last 30 years is not the fault of Barack Obama.

It's the fault of letting the Republicans have their way for the last three decades. America pushed back a bit in 2008, and it was only because Obama played the corporate game even better than the Republicans did, because as an African-American he had to. Some see him as a sellout. I see him as the guy fighting fire with the necessary application of better fire. Yes, Obama's playing their game, because it's the only game in town right now. The GOP shifted to taking over the states instead and 2010 was a landslide for them.

Progressives showed they can fight back in states like Wisconsin and Indiana too. That's what we need to do in all 50 states. That's where the real fight is, not Washington, not at FOX News HQ, not on the AM dial, but your city council, your county commission, your school board, your statehouse.

We spent everything on one hell of a free agent in 2006-2008. Republicans went out and got themselves an entire farm system instead. Structural. And the Republicans are literally killing us at it.

Finally, yesterday, Down with Tyranny gets down to brass tacks:

Blue America never endorsed Obama in 2008, when there was a slim chance he might turn out to be a progressive. I'd say there's far less of a chance we'll be working towards his reelection next year. Instead, as you probably know, we'll be working to raise campaign funds for proven progressive leaders running for Congress. We've endorsed 5 who are running for the House so far and starting later this month we'll be adding to that list with candidates from Arizona and Wisconsin. Meantime, can you give us a hand? No matter who wins the presidency, we're going to need smart, aggressive progressives in Congress.

I'll pass for the moment on the folly of using the euphemism "progressive" for policies that are proudly liberal, except to say that "progressives" are pussies who can't commit, but here's the point:

Liberalism that can eventually reach Congress and the White House must be built from the ground up, one voter - one future voter - at a time. We even have a template for success we can copy.

For 47 years, wingnut freakazoids have been listening to their neighbors' complaints and responding the same way: "conservatism will fix that. Conservatism is the answer." A lie of both omission and commission, of course, and thus effective.

Unlike conservatism, liberalism really does have answers to what ails our neighbors, ourselves and our nation: fair-share taxation; government investment that creates jobs; regulations that protect both consumers and small businesses; renewable energy to end dependence on fossil fuels and stop global climate change; a military that supports soldiers instead of mercenary contractors and avoids insane clusterfucks ... you name the problem, liberalism has the real answer.

We've just been too shy - too beaten-down and intimidated - to stand tall and say so.

Have you told your Democratic neighbors the good news about Liberalism?