[T]here are people hectoring Democrats for failing to be properly enthusiastic and I think it's worthwhile to remind them that Democrats have lives and jobs and futures that are affected by this economy too and they are scared stiff about what's happening… [I]t's not irrational. After 20 months in office, if this is the best they can hope for and the Republican freakshow on the right is the worst, you can't really blame them for feeling despair.
I agree that Democratic despair is perfectly understandable -- since I am one of the Democrats feeling it much of the time I suppose that is no surprise -- however, I do think that if the form our despair takes leads to not voting in the mid-terms and hence facilitating a radicalized Republican wave then that expression of and reaction to our understandable despair is indeed obviously and profoundly irrational.
I also have to say I don't much like the way this conversation seems to be playing out. It reminds me too much of conversations with my extended family in which I try to talk about gun control legislation or capital punishment or sex education or climate change in terms of outcomes -- and I find myself suddenly and unexpectedly trapped in an impossible conversation about how I obviously think all Southerners are stupid or all Republicans are mean or racist, and I am falling down an endlessly deep well of personal complaints and distresses, some of them understandable enough, but which don't connect up to the actual facts at hand or the actual policies in question.
One of the ways people talk about low voter turnout is in terms of voter enthusiasm. I didn't invent that phrasing, but I've gone along with it, because it kinda sorta seems a prevailing term of art for such talk. And so, when I for one point to the irrationality of any "enthusiasm gap" that might play out in a radicalized Republican wave directly frustrating desirable outcomes the left might otherwise achieve, this doesn't mean that I think people of the left should feel "enthusiastic" about an obviously insufficient stimulus too much of which was ineffective tax-cuts already, or a ruinous immoral "surge" in Afghanistan, or mandates without a public option, or still ridiculous ongoing discharges of military personnel because of DADT, or the vanishing of EFCA altogether from the radar screen, or the fact that environmental catastrophes in the Gulf and elsewhere demonstrating the need for environmental regulation and public investment in renewable energy somehow make it impossible rather than inevitable that this regulation and investment happen, or that the racist politics of immigrant bashing is a winning strategy on the part of those who make it impossible to address immigration problems at the level of policy. I mean, what person of the left with their heart in the right place or their priorities straight or in their right mind could feel enthusiasm of all things in the face of all this?
But the fact remains that if Republicans regain the House and/or the Senate they're going to shut down the government in an effort to defund last year's compromised but still incomparable first steps in the direction of healthcare reform and they are going to paralyze governance more generally in witch-hunts and scandal-mongering. This is their declared plan -- they did it before, and they are going to do it again. This is the next and amplified implementation of the strategy of relentless obstructionism they declared as their plan in the immediate aftermath of Obama's victory, and which so far they have used to unprecedented and catastrophic effect.
There is no word apart from irrational to describe what it means to deny this is what they have done and what they are doing and what they plan to do, there is no word apart from irrational to describe what it means to reward those who are doing their best to ensure bad outcomes while punishing those who imperfectly and inconsistently struggle for better outcomes of which you yourself comparatively approve. Is it "hectoring" to beg people not to do this irrational thing? Why is trying to describe the context and consequences of not voting in the mid-term elections being described as unfairly blaming people for feeling despair? The point of calling any Democrat's decision to sit this election out irrational is not to indulge in name-calling but to call on what you believe to be that Democrat's rationality so that they will do the right thing for the right reasons instead, however badly they happen to feel about it. I don't understand why talking about what would be fair or not to peoples' feelings is what is even coming up for discussion at a moment like this.
As I said, I feel plenty of frustration and despair myself, and I'm one of the people, I'm a depressed anti-war pro-labor green pro-choice feminist queer advocate of single-payer healthcare Democrat, but for heaven's sake, I'm not going to sit out the mid-terms indifferent to Randroid racist war-mongering Republican radicals taking over and wreaking even more havoc on our goddamned government! I obviously don't feel that I'm better than people who are feeling despair, I don't think they are bad people for feeling angry at all this awfulness, this isn't about making people who feel bad feel worse about themselves. I just want Democrats to vote in the mid-terms for what seem to me to be fairly explicable reasons in the service of outcomes we likely largely agree on.
I also happen to agree that Obama could probably have demanded more and pushed more and held real culprits more accountable than he has done, or at any rate been much clearer in the way he did these things, and that we might now have better outcomes to work with if he had -- but I don't really think what was practically possible given the actually-existing constraints at hand are sufficiently greater than the sad results at hand so far that I think it is right to say his failures are better described as betrayals than as errors, and many of them plenty understandable. I think it is a bit hyperbolic to phrase this as Digby does, as the belief that "this is the best [we] can hope for and the Republican freakshow on the right is the worst," since I do think things could probably be a little better than they are and I think Republicans could be at least a little worse still. But I do think it is still profoundly irrational not to vote against the Republicans, as bad as they are, because Democrats could be better than they have been.
That doesn't make me any less depressed, nor does it make me disapprove any less of all the disastrous policies and outcomes I decried a few paragraphs ago. To the extent that it actually takes time to address structural problems that yield so much of our ongoing suffering and distress, it is obviously true that even if what we have managed over the last twenty months is the best we can do this doesn't mean that continuing on doing only this would continue sucking as bad as it has, but I also believe that maintaining Democratic majorities would create a momentum on the left and demoralize the right in ways that could amplify what we are capable of considerably, build better outcomes out of earlier mixed successes, provide grounds for reform of the filibuster, or a mandate for a second stimulus based on green jobs, or re-invigorate the push for EFCA, or Medicare buy-in, or an accelerated timetable to get more and more troops out of our ruinous quagmires, or who know what else...
Why on earth should we pre-emptively settle in the face of possible victory (maintaining our majorities, despite likely losses, that is) for "capitulation on the Bush tax cuts and an austerity program going into 2012," and, even more to the point, why on earth would we make such a prediction of such an awful patently foolish capitulation the justification for pre-emptively declaring defeat and refusing even to try to win and push for more?
More is exactly what we should be pushing for as we go to the polls in numbers as great as we can muster, to push back the reactionary tide and push forward our painfully slow reformist efforts, rather than indulging in defensive rationalizations for pre-emptive surrender just because we are tired and shocked and disappointed and our feelings are understandably hurt.
I still adore Digby, of course.
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