Progressives Need to Shift Into Election Mode Now

If you are a democratically minded American I personally think you would do more good by post-poning or at any rate balancing your righteous complaints about Democratic inadequacies, if only just for the four months until the mid-term elections, and start flogging Democratic accomplishments and phone-banking for Democratic candidates and making sure all the people of good sense and good conscience you know are registered to vote and then do vote for Democrats.

This upcoming mid-term election is starting to look truly grim and I am not sure everybody who can help is helping.

If too many progressives spend most of their time criticizing the Democrats for not doing enough good rather than the Republicans for actively standing in the way of doing anything good, with the consequence of depressing Democratic turnout and energizing Republican turnout, progressives will be handing over the country to actively crazy and evil forces at the cost of everything they claim to care about.

My point isn't to pretend that Democrats are perfect when palpably they are not or do no wrong when palpably they do, but to recall accomplishments along with frustrations, to weigh outcomes against actually available alternatives as well as ideals, to recall the constraints of the actual stakeholders and actual processes through which legislation and policy are accomplished, and to focus our energies where they can do the most good at this moment.

That much has been done that is far from progressive (surging rather than leaving Afghanistan, bank bailouts rather than jobs programs) and that much more could have been done that is far more progressive (prosecutions of war criminals, undoing the unitary executive) does not alter the fact that this Congress and this Presidential Administration has and will have done more good in progressive terms in two years than Carter and Clinton managed in twelve years, and that unless you happen to be over seventy years old this has been the most progressive American government in your entire lifetime.

It also does not alter the fact that every person who votes for a Republican by voting for a Republican, or voting for a third-party protest candidate, or not voting at all will be actively working to ensure that the most progressive Democratic government of your lives will be replaced by Republicans at the time in which their party has been captured by the most extreme, insane, idiotic, authoritarian, racist, theocratic elements of the right.

Anybody who thinks of themselves as democratically-minded and yet thinks this country will either be little changed or even better off with House Speaker Boehner or anarcho-capitalist Senators in place of mushy Democrats needs to have their head examined. I mean, honestly.

I have been laughing for months at what have seemed to me to be hysterical and ridiculous headline-grabbing mainstream-media narratives about a revolutionary Republican resurgence in the face of whomped up white-racist Repugs and demoralized Dems… I had thought that the transparent stupidity and plainly crazy policy positions of so many of these Teabaggy and Randroidal Republicans disqualified them -- as it obviously should -- from serious contention in elections…

But polling isn't exactly bearing this out as it should and I'm not laughing anymore.

Meg Whitman is trying to buy her way into running California (not just a State, but on its own terms one of the most populous and economically powerful and most culturally influential polities on the planet) while quite plainly saying she wants to do exactly the same things that have been destroying California for years and which lead her predecessors to unprecedented unpopularity. How can she possibly be running neck and neck with Brown? Racist hysteria about immigration is looking to be a winning issue for Republicans. How on earth is that possible? Economic illiterates are peddling utterly discredited Friedmanian slogans cheered by the very people who are targeted for destruction by their doctrines. What the hell is going on with people? Policies once advocated by conservative Republicans are now being vilified as "socialism" and consensus science vilified as "scams" by passionate mobs bent on installing corporate warlord feudalism and Christianist theocracy in the name of "liberty." Is this some kind of madhouse?

Progressives, for heaven's sake, get in line and get to work and get the message out. More, and Better, Democrats, defeat Movement Republicanism before it destroys America and destroys the world.