Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Sunday, September 05, 2010

What Do You Expect?

If a minority of white-racist theocratic authoritarian know-nothing greedhead crazies sweep radicalized Republicans into the majority and this is then trumpeted as a mandate from The American People for privatizing social security and scrapping medicare and imposing fiscal austerity on those lazy unemployed people and carpet bombing our borders to save us from brown people and then people sputter and shake their fists at how ridiculous it is to describe a marginal minority as the majority when the disgusted disaffected majority obviously refused even to show up because people with precisely those sorts of ugly idiotic ideas blocked government from working effectively to solve our shared problems, this is what I will say to you: What Did You Expect? In fact, here I am saying it to you already here and now as you contemplate letting this happen. Smug declarations that Obama and the Democrats are already doing all this anyway so what does it matter if we vote or not since they're all the same will be deleted with the same fastidious crinkling of the nose that accompanies the flushing of an especially noisome turd. The lesson that will be peddled to the rubes is that Obama was too far to the left and America rejected his radicalism, and the lesson that will be circulated among the wonks is that the left caves under the least pressure and cannot be counted on -- one is obviously utterly idiotically false and the other rather too close to truth for comfort, but the effect of both narratives is the same: to remove the necessary advocacy of sustainable social democracy prioritizing domestic over military spending off the table for yet another lost generation, therefore condemning the United States to a path of economic ecologic and civic ruin. We will surely lose seats in November but if we commit to this mid-term we can try to confine many of our losses to Blue Dogs who we like least and are most vulnerable anyway, and hold on by our fingernails to majorities in the House and the Senate. If we could get organized to push filibuster reform at the opening of the session the next two years can actually be comparatively better than the first two. If we don't, well, the Senate will remain dysfunctional and the House will be more timid with a slimmer majority for Pelosi to work with (she'll likely become the "monster" Pelosi hated by the blogs who took Impeachment off the Table rather than the "fighting liberal" Pelosi beloved by the blogs who got almost everything done the President asked her to, because the difference that makes a difference is the numbers not some ideological makeover). Come what may, it is better to have a Congress with lots of people who are comparatively sensible and can be pushed from the left in control of Congress, however precariously, than it will be to have anti-governmental zealots with no agenda but to destroy the brown president their deranged Base so despises.

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