Street Fighters vs. Pointyheads

Thanks to my friend, Hugo Zoom, for the following heads up:

Here's a spot-on analysis of what might be called establishment Dems vs. populist Dems as posted by John Emerson of Seeing The Forest, who states, among other things...

I think that the collegiality of academia, combined with excessive doses of Orwell and Gandhi, tend to incapacitate academics for the kind of gutter fighting you need when you're facing Rush Limbaugh, Karl Rove, and Grover Norquist. I think that the habits and ways characteristic of academic institutions are the problem, and I think that many of these habits and ways are also characteristic of the various other kinds of large institutions where Democrats tend to make their careers. The Republicans hire semi-criminal entrepreneurs, and it works for them.

Me being me, I added my two cents in the comments, preserved here as follows:

There hasn't been a functional, formidable Left since the seventies. The Democratic Party has been run by the same accommodationist chumps for the last twenty-five years or longer, and that doesn't hold up well in a climate of Fascism.

The populist Left ceded power to the collegial go-along-to-get-along types for a few reasons, among them: (1.) we're lazy; (2.) we were waaaay late in appreciating our opponent's trends toward extremism; (3.) we responded to the radicalization of our opponents by appeasement; (4.) we lost hope in populism as a political force; (5.) we're fucking lazy.

There is a reactive, defensive animus by establishment Dems toward its own rank & file, yet the Republican establishment is literally comprised of its rank & file members. Tom Delay and his pals are crazy as a headful o'bats, but no one can say they fail to fairly represent the crazy constituents. By contrast, Congressional Dems say "Screw the constituency. We're here as a mitigating force to Republican dogma." Of course, they've failed miserably in that capacity, but we keep sending back the same bleeding roosters for more abuse. Institutional ideology takes a great deal of time and effort to change, and we're only now begining to recognize the task at hand.

I don't buy the pendulum theory, and I think too many of us either still do or did until recently. That pendulum will swing when we push it hard, and not a moment before.

We're also guilty of DLC-style, short-term thinking in which we confine strategies to the next one or two elections. This has to stop. Until we recognize long-term change very often comes at the expense of short-term objectives and adapt a "no pain, no gain" approach to politics, we might as well resign ourselves to having essentially zero representation.

Our weenie Dems can barely defeat Republicans, and they certainly can't withstand coordinated assaults from their own rank & file. What is the mantra by Republicans about Republicans: "He/She is not conservative enough."

Of all our challenges, the greatest one is not the Republican Party nor its corporate media arm, but our very own Beltway insiders. When enough of us realize this, we'll make a compelling case for change. Only then do we stand a fighting chance.
Arvin Hill | Email | Homepage | 04.12.05 - 8:20 pm | #

Whether I'm right or wrong, anyone with a set of firing synapses knows the status quo is untenable unless we're happy to live the rest of our days with the knobby boot of Fascism pressed against our throats. I'll take my chances on a radically different strategy.