Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Apologies to those who have read numerous versions of the following post in recent weeks or months. Think of it as my futile but imperative campaign against the scourge of conventional wisdom afflicting The Left.


Its original context can be found as the first missive in an exchange at American Street. I've completely lost patience with pretty much everyone making statements such as "Let's hope our party wakes up." Cluephone: The party isn't asleep. It's dead. And winning midterms by default won't bring it back to life.

And, yes, I know I'm tilting at windmills, but American Street has a pretty good signal to noise ratio in terms of readership and sometimes just I can't help myself.

Five years and no opposition party.

Five years of complicity.

Five years of spelling out “what the Democrats need to do…” on every grassroots outlet on the freaking internet and every halfway decent Left-leaning ‘zine should raise a red flag, but, alas, most of us still Don’t Get It.

But what the fuck. Allow me to spell it out in detail because rank & file Dems are the slowest goddamn learners on the planet.

Beltway Democrats are not going to magically start taking advice from the people who send them to the House and Senate. Why? Because the people who send them to the House and Senate don’t exact a price from those who betray our most basic values and principles.

It’s that simple.

As things stand now, as long as there’s a (D) after a candidate’s name, by golly, that’s the only thing that matters.

Only it isn’t.

What the Left completely refuses to consider is that appeasers - and we all know who they are because it’s damn near the whole team - have to be punished. Rejected. Sent home packing. We could - if we had the will and the vision - pool resources to rid the Democratic Party of those who consistently undermine it. We have the ability to influence elections in states that send these weaklings to Congress, and until we realize that ability, we have nothing.

A party that cannot summon the strength to function as an effective opposition party cannot lead.

Democrats had better get serious about primaries and dislodging the pigs at the trough because they aren’t going to suddenly spring into action like reincarnations of Paul Wellstone or Harry Truman or whoever your idea of a fighter is. They’re going to feed and feed and feed every single time they’re sent back to do a job they’re not suited to do.

They do not share our values.

They do not care about you or me or anyone else without a PAC, a TV Studio or a column in a major daily. They are an unprincpled lot, ill-suited in ability and temperment to resist the onslaught of theofascist extremism.

Listen closely: The Democrats in Congress now are Not. Going. To Change. PERIOD. EVER. We are losing to petty tyrants because the people we have sent to Congress are more like our enemies than ourselves.

If we want fighters, we’ll send fighters to Congress. No more holding our noses to cast a vote for someone simply because there’s a (D) after their name. You know where that’s gotten us? Where we are right now. Where we’ve been since before 2000.

“Throw the bums out.” They’ve earned it. If we lose in the short term, we are still strengthening the character of our party. There is no task more important than that.

The NeoCon Revolution will continue with or without Karl Rove. With or without Democratic majorities in the House and Senate. With or without a Democrat in the White House. This is nothing short of a generational struggle that will last for decades to come. Do we have the heart for it? It remains to be seen, but it doesn’t look encouraging. We continue looking to the Next Election for salvation, but that’s not how salvation - if it comes at all - will be delivered.

Risk averse Dem voters had better realize we are in a new era of politics, and it is not strictly a numbers game. Does anyone here really believe if Dems were to take back the House & Senate during mid-terms that anything other than the most superficial changes would occur? If so, you’re dreaming. It would be Iran-Contra redux because we have not even begun to change the nature of the Democratic Party. That can only be accomplished by expelling our weak links and coming to terms with this counterintuitive reality: A strong minority party is infinitely more useful than a weak majority party. Our enemies realized it a long, long time ago. Will we? Ever? Our failure to awaken to post-Constitutional politics will bring further disaster on a scale we cannot even begin to imagine. The clock is ticking.

If all this sounds alarmist and over the top, well, fine. But don’t keep crying about it and expecting a sympathetic ear. In the end, we really do get the leadership we deserve. We aren’t victims. We’re co-conspirators because we refuse to get a fucking clue. If we don’t have the wherewithal and vision to do whatever is necessary to change the character of the Democratic Party, it’s not going to be easy pinning the blame on “those spineless Democrats” like we’ve been doing for the last five years.

Don’t make me say I told you so, Grassroots. There’s no pleasure in it with stakes this high.

In case you're a masochist, the rest of the discussion is here.