The Fight That Never Ends

Yes, Obama and the dems fucked up royally, and not just once but time after time after time. The repugs are totally rolling them, winning every single round in knockouts. We needed a fighter, but there were no democratic fighters to be found, so we went for a negotiator. Little did we know he'd be negotiating away everything worthwhile about the Democratic Party.

Giving up is what they want us to do. This shit is hard. You wanna know how hard, watch Iron-Jawed Angels. If you think women won the right to vote by marching decorously down the street carrying polite signs, you don't know anything about how power works. If you think demands that you call congress and the White House, that you join demonstrations, that you recruit your neighbors to the Good Fight are too much, replay the scenes in Iron-Jawed Angels in which women are tortured - some tortured to death - for the crime of demanding their rights.

Every setback, every failure, every betrayal should fire us to do more, not less.

Digby:

One must be defeated to be controlled.

And control is the point. When you have income inequality at the levels we have it in this country it is natural for the oligarchs and aristocrats to begin to get nervous. Even in America, the land of opportunity, the malefactors of great wealth have always worried that the polloi was going to use this "democracy" to wake up and grab a pitchfork. One of the ways to control that is social control.

There is, I've recently realized, an impulse among liberals to constantly reinvent the wheel and switch gears manically when things do not change rapidly enough. I suppose that's a natural function of the personalities that veer toward rapid change rather than conservation. But it's a political weakness, especially when it's in reaction to authoritarianism and economic intimidation.

I'm older now, so perhaps my newfound "patience" can be seen as resignation rather than wisdom. But I have learned a couple of things over these years: don't panic, don't drop out and don't despair. The reactionaries and revanchists aren't all powerful and the will to progress is as fundamental to humanity as breathing. Bad things happen, to be sure. But liberal focus and persistence can be a powerful antidote. We need to hang in.

Back in March 2010, Digby wrote this:

They understand something the left doesn't ---- this is a fight that never ends. It's easier for them because they are temperamentally suited to permanent battle. But it doesn't change the fact that there is never going to be a permanent armistice in the march for human progress. After all, we just went through the bloodiest century in history, fighting all this out on the world stage and yet the war, by other means, continues. It's the nature of our species. Liberals had better recognize that it's going to take vigilance, creativity and persistence just to protect the progress that's been made, not to mention any further advances. The reactionaries, authoritarians and sadists never rest.

If we want to survive, neither can we.