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Friday, January 01, 2010

Democratic Netroots, Discouraged and Encouraging

Given the last post, and a whole parade of posts railing at Republican outrages and Democratic-Netroots mis-steps and histrionics over the last couple of weeks, you may be surprised to hear that I am feeling quite encouraged overall right about now.

In the first place, I think polling numbers keep showing that the crazytown right-wingnut Teabagger base and its embrace by the "mainstream" Republican Party indicates a radical ongoing self-marginalization of Movement Republicanism as any kind of sustainable force in American politics in its present incarnation.

I think one should be careful not to forget that broad disappointment with the healthcare reform process is actually split between those who are disappointed that reform does not go far enough and those who think it goes too far and that this split will not benefit Republicans in the generalized way often suggested by pundits -- and this will be even more true when passage of reform yields none of the apocalyptic outcomes saturating Republican rhetoric, nor even consistent Republican opposition to reform once it is in place.

This is rather like the confusions of those who regard the rightward skew apparent among Independents as a danger sign to Democrats, when it is clearly a function of dis-identification across the right with the Republicans and hence is far more a danger sign to Republicans than to Democrats.

In terms both of polling on both the whole gamut of policy questions and on party-identification, America is the center-left nation it has always been since the New Deal and ever more inclined to identify with Democrats over Republicans. Obama is enormously popular, Hillary Clinton is enormously popular, Nancy Pelosi is more popular than you might think and considerably more so than any elected Republicans. America has repudiated Movement Republicans and that repudiation is not ebbing in the least.

Republican ideologues might be able to succeed here and there as celebrities theses days but they are less and less likely all the time to succeed in becoming or remaining elected.

This is encouraging.

Also, I think that saner voices are beginning to prevail across the Democratic Netroots, suggesting a very wholesome tendency to self-criticism and self-correction among us. The Netroots is making more quickly and thoroughly than might have been expected the enormously difficult transition from the blanket opposition to the Killer Clown administration in which the Netroots were baptised (their birth was in the corporate-mediated outrage of the Clinton impeachment, which set the scene for the Gore-bashing facilitation of the 2000 Bush putsch and the subsequent cheerleading of an immoral illegal war based on lies) into a force for the facilitation of democratization through actual governance in which we are ourselves implicated and responsible rather than a strident outside opposition.

I think the relatively swiftness of this transition (which took place through the fraught Obama/Hillary nomination contest and now through the heartbreaking sausage-making of the healthcare reform process) testifies in turn to a surprisingly quick if still-ongoing self-education up a steep learning curve about the baroque architecture of Senatorial, Department of Justice, and Congressional Subcommittee processes and the realities of democratizing governance with a majority so precarious as to be effectively Phony.

This, too, is encouraging.

I'm discouraged by the apparent fate of the Public Option, by the slow-moving to no-moving of torture and war-profiteering prosecutions, by bailouts for financial fraudsters, by the ruinous escalation in Afghanistan, by pointless betrayals of queer citizens on DADT and DOMA -- but I'm more encouraged than not by the Democratic Netroots and hence about the prospects for the Democratic Party as a force for ongoing democratization in the United States in the short term, the middle term, and the long-term.

More, and Better, Democrats, and we can turn those discouragements around, and there's more where that came from. 06 and 08 were the starting gun not the finish line.

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