More, and Better, Democrats Is the Only Way Forward

Most of the Democrats who are angry at the President because of the debt deal fail to grasp that the debt ceiling crisis actually began the night the Republicans regained the House with a hefty infusion of Teavangelical Crazytown. The single way to avoid the crisis and its unsatisfactory result was to retain the House by energizing and mobilizing the Democratic Base in the face of the obvious danger Crazytown would represent for the country, especially at a time like this.

As we know, the media's endless gossiping about trivia and bullshit party equivalency theses and genuflections to the "Serious Middle" that is actually a Far Right was no help, and the left blogipelago was certainly no help either, devoted as it was (exactly as it still is) to endless whining about the imperfection of policy outcomes and the slow pace of reform, usually offered up in indifference or defiance of the constraining realities of the 60-vote Senate, complete economic meltdown, ongoing wars, an ill-informed to misinformed electorate, and the fact that one of the nation's two parties has lost its mind altogether.

To blame the President for the unsatisfactory but in fact far better than worst-case debt deal is to invest the President with supra-constitutional powers or with the symbolic aura of some kind of Super Dad in whom we might sink all our hopes and demands for the change we want to see in the world.

Of course Obama rightly insisted that it is we who are that change, but like so many things he said in his campaign it would seem that few listened to the words because they were too entranced by the melody.

Now the blogipelagic left stridently demands the President stop governing with the Congress he has altogether and making awful deals in the awful swamp he's actually slogging through and indulge instead in providing completely ineffectual symbolic spectacles and interminable pedagogical exercises on prime-time TV for their delight and edification day after day until he is finally drummed out of office -- yeah, that would be a real hit with the American people! -- or they clamor for him to participate as an equal and eager partner in the current GOP debauchery of governance by responding to their endless irresponsible stunts with his own stunts (minting trillion dollar coins or inviting a constitutional crisis) as if it would be a good idea for all parties to send the nation veering crazily unpredictably unprecedentedly to and fro every few weeks until the whole apparatus explodes and Americans start clamoring for some suave authoritarian dictator to start knocking sense into people. Marvelous notions!

It is, of course, the failure of Democrats -- from the rank and file to office holders high and low -- to educate people about the threat posed by Republicans in the mid-terms and to organize the Base and independents to get out the vote in the face of that threat to retain the House that is mostly to blame for what has happened this year.

Although it is enormously inspiring to observe the spectacle of Wisconsin throwing off the yoke of Republican anti-civilizationism in a righteous fury of protests and rallies and recalls, we shouldn't forget that the ugly outcomes against which Democrats are united there were far more predictable than the left is admitting, and that they could have stopped the evil from ever taking place by devoting just some of their present energy and organization to electing Democrats in the first place.

Wisconsin voted for that snide creep Walker, with his record of ruinous right-wing stunts, and that whole gang of smug thugs in suits, after all. Florida elected a demonstrable villain governor. While it's nice in a way to find voters recoiling in horror in New Jersey, Ohio, Michigan, Maine in the face of the reality of Republican governance, it really is hard to credit that after all the hysterical nonsense of the Clinton years and all the criminal catastrophe of the Bush years Americans are really so innocent or indifferent to what Republicans who hate government of, by, and for the people do with government and to the people any time you give them the chance.

It is almost flabbergasting to observe the bad faith of those so spitting mad that they would invest their energies even now in a completely quixotic effort to primary Obama (and so punish the Dad who has disappointed them in failing to live up to their idiotic expectations) rather than to fight to regain the House -- an incredibly difficult but possible outcome in this environment, all the more crucial given how likely the Republicans are to win the Senate given how many Democratic seats are being contested compared to Republican seats in 2012.

No serious Democrat can possibly imagine that there is any individual candidate, however pure and fervent their progressivism by their lights, who could accomplish substantially more than Obama has done in this environment (which is not at all the same thing as proposing that there is nothing to disagree with or disapprove of among his many decisions and efforts and addresses), let alone in a Washington in which Crazytown controls both the House and the Senate.

I am already pretty convinced that the earliest we can reasonably expect Obama and Democrats to do any good is going to be in 2014, assuming Obama regains the White House (if for no other reason than to make court appointment and stave off the worst damage of divided government with lunatics in the room), but we fail to secure control of both (or either) the House and the Senate but are within sufficient reach to regain them next mid-term.

I am also close to convinced that Democrats simply don't have the discipline or resolve to fight for what's right that long, and expect them to retreat to the ruin of the world to their couches in a grumpy huff rather than fight on in the profoundly demoralizing slog ahead of us.

It is hard not to despair in the face of that kind of time-line given the macroeconomic illiteracy in the midst of economic crisis means three years of doing nothing at best and active damage at worst in ways that probably ensure a lost decade of avoidable stasis, poverty, and misery as well as climate-change denialism in the midst of catastrophic global weather-weirding that may ensure avoidable human deaths in the many millions.

It is hard to believe that these vast-scaled world-historical outcomes could connect concretely to or turn on outcomes happening in electoral contests at the far more modest level of Congressional races between profoundly imperfect candidates who scarcely seem equal to the scale of economic convulsion or climate catastrophe... and yet, nonetheless, they really, actually, do.

Unless you are engaged in literally revolutionary activity (and more than whining in the comments sections of blogs or enjoying the occasional protest bacchanal in the streets is involved in actually substantial revolutionary activity), there is really little you can do right now that is more useful to the prospect of a more sustainable, equitable, peaceable world than educating, agitating, and organizing to get more, and better, Democrats elected at every layer of governance in every single election.

In some states there are also concrete campaigns you could be working on to protect women's access to health services, support lgbtq or immigrants rights legislation, implement statewide single-payer healthcare systems, or establish state infrastructure banks. And of course you could always volunteer to help actually vulnerable actually needy actually exploited people in endlessly many ways that make a difference wherever you are, if, as often happens, the slow pace and frustrating vicissitudes and high emotional costs of political struggle are really not for you when it comes down to it.

But if you would be political, if you would be responsible, you should be working to get more, and better, Democrats elected to office. -- You should be supporting the Democratic President. -- And when you push him and other Democrats to do better from the left, you should always try to do so in a way that proposes an actually realistic pathway for a better alternative and in a way which does not smear them with the stink of betrayal for making a mistake or having a reasonable disagreement with you. -- You should always take care to offer up critiques in ways that actually strengthen rather than divide or demoralize those who are closest to your own side in the struggle.

The market fundamentalists in the GOP with their dreams of feudalism and the Christianist fundamentalists in the GOP with their dreams of theocracy are the clear and unambiguous enemy.

Like it or not, in the world we live in, in a winner-take-all election system, if you are on the side of equity-in-diversity and sustainability, it is the Democratic Party that is only available vehicle to take you where we want to go.

More, and better, Democrats is the only way to go.