Giving Up on the Democrats Would Move the Country Still More to the Right

While on most accounts the GOP is poised to regain a majority in the House and unleash some real havoc, the fact remains that the GOP is in utter disarray -- its leaders are, to a person, not even holding elective office, their more groomed and reliable candidates (few of whom seem much better than scoundrels to me, but, incredibly, still worse apparently can be found in the precincts of the GOP) are getting picked off by not-ready-for-prime-time anti-governmental zealots, meanwhile they are appealing for funds and eyeball-relevance to a white-racist know-nothing bullied-bullying rabble whose fulminations have actually been out of the mainstream of American thought for over half a century and which the demographic browning and ideological secularization of the American people render now even more marginal.

Given the depressed economy, the costly mass-mediation of their disinformation and scandal-mongering machine, the ferocity of their Base of dead-ender white racists and christianists and patriarchal pricks, the GOP is catapulting themselves into a last gasp last grasp of power that is more or less a public act of suicide, the farthest thing from the dawn of a new era. They can still do enormous damageas they are and where they are, but that doesn't mean they're not done.

One of the things that concerns me is that part of what needs to happen now is for the center-right moderate Republicans and Independents to re-capture the GOP for the good of the country, but that this will be an appallingly painful thing for them to do and I am not entirely sure they are up to the task. I fear that if these sorts fly to the Democratic Party in earnest instead the Democrats will move further right still -- it'll be neo-feudal Crazytown against the crap sandwich of neo-feudal with a somewhat human face Sensible "Centrists" -- just when we have managed painfully to consolidate for the first time a fragile foothold for the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party.

Part of the story of the "enthusiasm gap" (a story I happen to think is being told too early and too insistently) is a story of the lack of experience and perspective of this new organized progressive force within the Democratic Party. It seems to me crucial for the Netroots to be a force that strengthens the electoral prospects of the Democratic Party even as we work to push the Democratic Party from the left to the left. Both of these efforts are equally indispensable, and it is crucial to grasp that with every cynical or resigned relinquishment (of which the most foolish variation involves self-marginalizing third-party nonsense) of the hard-won terrain the left has won in the Democratic Party the substantive work of the left grows that much more distant and dim in fact.

The Democratic Party is the tool we have on hand that must be honed and directed ever more effectively and forcefully to the work of providing universal healthcare, lifelong education and retraining, public investment in a sustainable renewable economy, a basic guaranteed income via ever deeper support of commons and ever more expansive welfare entitlements compensated by ever more progressive taxation, and a key role in a democratic world federalist polity devoted to equity-in-diversity. This is no time either for quitters or re-inventors of the wheel.