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While this is a very bad day, I have to say it's not the worst I've ever had. I feel badly for all the people here who have so much time, physical energy, emotional energy invested in removing from office a president of whom history will not look upon kindly, and who did not see our candidate prevail.
It's too early to know all the reasons why Kerry did not prevail. Some say voting fraud. Some say the media. Some say it was a reactionary backlash from the religious right. I suspect that, eventually, we'll discover that it was a combination of all those things, and maybe more we haven't yet figured out.
I also feel badly for a significant number of people in the country who have had a crisis of faith due to this election, and for those who are now worrying about the course of the country over the next four years.
The worst-case scenario is, admittedly, frightening. More war. More crony capitalism. Further diminishment of civil rights. The virtual eradication of a free press. Concerted moves to bring down the wall between church and state. Declining environmental health. Increased poverty and human ill health as the gap in income and real wealth broadens. The bankruptcy of the national purse. A pervasive anti-intellectualism which may presage a descent into the modern-day equivalent of the Dark Ages. The virtual irrelevancy of a once-great nation in the international community.
The possibility of all this and more happening is bound to make for strong emotions. For the last twelve hours or so, I've been trying to determine what it is inside me, and I've come to the conclusion that I am simply smoldering with anger. Not the sort that strikes out at anyone and everyone, but, rather, the kind which, if not controlled, leads to brooding and self-doubt. But, that's an emotion I've managed to control most of my life.
It's necessary to channel that anger. It's necessary to understand that one cannot think clearly with an angry, unfocused mind. That may be the greatest lesson provided us by Mahatma Gandhi.
There's angry talk about civil war, and yet, no thought of the reasons why civil war may be part of our current problem. There's much talk of the South being our problem. Perhaps the real problem is that our first Civil War did not truly solve a problem, but merely caused it to go underground, like a subterranean river which now percolates to the surface in a place we didn't expect.
Are there solutions to these problems? Certainly. No person with a rational mind and a belief in human rights could think otherwise. Finding those solutions and implementing them is the task.
Most of all, we need to use those rational minds (be "reality-based" people) to understand the irrationality which seems to surround us now. Venting serves a purpose, but it's not a substitute for thinking.
Taking a longer view backwards, what has happened today has been decades in the making, and it's very apparent that this election is the result of a confluence of determined events--the profoundly effective PR campaign of the far right, the calculated use of people's natural and unnatural fears of lack of security, a news media which has lost its objectivity and curiosity due to corporate concern for profit. Few of those reasons can be changed or blunted in the short term.
The one thing which does begin that process, however, is a recognition of the shortcomings of the Democratic Party as it is currently constituted. The problem, as I see it, is that the Democratic Party has become in practice irrelevant to its traditional constituency. There's an old Biblical aphorism that one can't serve two masters, and that is precisely what the Democratic Party has attempted to do for nearly two generations. Those two masters are corporate, wealthy interests and the ordinary people who live paycheck to paycheck. It should also be abundantly clear that, over time, the Democratic Party has not been particularly successful in this strategy (even if we take into consideration Clinton's eight-year stint, his policies, thirty years ago, would have defined him as a moderate Republican of reasonable social consciousness).
I don't know what is necessary to bring the Democratic Party back to its natural constituency, but I'm quite sure that moving steadily further to the right in order to attract conservative voters while at the same time preserving a liberal cause or two to attract the money of wealthy liberals and trying to become better at raising corporate money than the Republicans clearly has not worked. Neither has the combination of grassroots Democratic progressivism combined with the machine politics of the DNC. As we've seen, this has only helped create elections where there is immense capitulation on core political attributes to attract an ever-diminishing pool of undecided voters.
Neither has the fractionation of the Democrats into liberal special interests which share a few liberal values helped create much party identity or solidarity.
Whether the answer is a melding of Green Party and Democrats, or a return to the old-time populism of, say, Minnesota's early Democratic-Farm-Labor Party, or something entirely new, I'm not sure. What I do know, with some certainty, is that the current party's reputation is a far cry from that of Roosevelt's in 1932, which first put the country on a path toward genuine progressivism and a truly egalitarian society.
Over the intervening years, we've allowed the opposition to label us in ways that resonate with some part of the population, and have grown steadily more reactive, rather than truly progressive. That's because of the serving two masters business--our leaders too frequently measure their words and legislative deeds to avoid offending corporate interests. And we haven't followed through with truly progressive legislation for the same reasons.
Doing so has caused us no end of trouble as a party. Our party has let the Republicans rewrite history to their advantage. Our party has participated in the evolutionary destruction of the legislation which formed its modern core principles. Our party, despite its flashes of brilliance and wit, has been outsmarted by the opposition. Had our leaders been smarter than the opposition, and been less conflicted about the identity of our core constituency, we might have avoided problems such as those with which we are now plagued, such as paperless voting.
It seems to me we have a choice. We can continue to drift closer and closer in nature to the opposition, adopting some of their tactics and policies, and occasionally winning elections when we've found some artificial wedge issue which attracts the undecided voters, or we can set off in a new direction which will resonate with a high percentage of the nation's people, and develop the tools to get that message out.
A careful look at both recent and not-so-recent history indicates that our leaders have tried, and failed, to serve two masters. If we are truly the party of the people, we have to acknowledge that in not just words, but in legislation. Unless we're willing to let the country descend into the soullessness of post-modern fascism, we have to make a choice. We have to start putting people first, once again.
This election should tell virtually all Democrats that the reformation must begin soon, before it's no longer possible. We simply cannot fight for people's economic, civil and human rights if we at the same time try to accommodate the opposition and the big business interests they represent.
Cheers.
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