Why Am I Moving Left? - America’s changed, and so have I. ---By THOMAS E. RICKS

[earthside]

5. It is happening.

I am a year younger than Ricks and have always been fairly progressive though quite independent-minded.

The events since the Bush/Cheney theft of the White House in 2000, have driven me further to the left.
Indeed, I would now consider myself closer to anarcho-syndicalism than any other political philosophy.

Indeed, I find the Hillary Clinton potential candidacy, the knee-jerk pro-Israel protestations, for instance, to be disturbingly conservative and reactionary in a nation that desperately needs a non-violent revolution to empower the average working person.

Though I am moving towards notions that are surely too unorthodox for most folks, nevertheless I am find that many of my moderate and conservative-moderate friends and associates are tacking to the left as well.

The Democrats ought to, therefore, do well in 2014 if they get smart and nationalize effectively the theme of just how extreme and crazy are the Tea Party-Republicans.

These are weird times -- I get encouraged by things like the Ricks article, by the clear trend among regular people against the Tea Party, by the slow but sure acceptance of climate change science, etc.; but then I get discouraged when I realize just how much money the Kochs, et al., are willing to spend and how powerful are institutions like the Supreme Court, the banks, the military, the corporations.