Perhaps it is time for the Democrats simply to embrace their destiny as the party of grown-ups. No members of congress threatening judges. No gonzo federal legislation cooked up in the middle of the night to game a family struggle in Florida. Borrowing money and saving money are not the same thing. A reasonable respect for the rules under which the country has long been governed. Congressional staffers will neither steal work material from members of the opposition party nor stand on principle when caught. Bribes tendered on the floor of Congress will be frowned upon ...
April 09, 2005
Thank You, Josh Marshall
One of the things I love most about blogging is when you run across someone that seems to feel exactly how you feel and has either already put it into better words than you ever could or has found a source that does it for us both.
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3 comments:
But what does that GET us?! We can be the party of grown-ups, the party of the elite, and we can spend our time being SO much better than the GOP but that still doesn't push our agenda, it still doesn't put food on the tables of starving Americans, it doesn't get our dick out of the sand in some third world nation (Thank you, Ani), and it sure as shit doesn't make our schools better. But we can be proud of reaching adulthood. Good for us. Big pat on the back. Problem is, there's nobody to hold the "other guys" accountable. There's no longer a system of checks and balances. So it won't do us any good to be happy that we're adults, a party of complacence that sits in an ivory tower unmoved by the huddled masses. Nor will it do us any good to tear our hair and wring our hands at the injustice of it all (Oh, the HUMANITY) but I don't hear anybody coming up with anything else. There aren't any new ideas coming out of Reid's office, the DNC, the D-trip, and all the OTHER organizations I work with here in DC. Truth be told, the GOP is doing to us now what we did to them in the 60's. Remember, it wasn't so very long ago that we killed the Republican Party. LBJ, God love him, told Congress what he wanted, he got the people in there he needed, and he pushed through legislation that forever altered social programs in the U.S. We created this beast when we wouldn't work with the other party for the good of the nation. Where do you think Goldwater and Wallace came from? Would they have had a prayer if Senators and Representatives were working together? Oh, and let's talk government patronage. Where's THAT? I want some! DeLay's doin' a damn fine job of it in the House, that's fo sho. Where's our generation's Master of the Senate? I'll wrap this rant up with this: We could get stuck in the "if Gore had run a better campaign" or "if we had seen the disenfranchisement coming" cycle of "if's" and "only if's" but again, it's not doing us any good. The people in power are centrists, not Democrats. The Republicans are religious extremists. The only way back, it seems, is to run more left of the party and jerk things back into balance. Right now, well, things are tipped far too right for my liking.
Re the end of the rant: It sounds like what you want is precisely what Josh M's talking about (though I am merely speculating from the given quote), a party of people with genuine respect for what's right and just, and who want to work hard to bring that about.
Re the top of the rant: Some of us feel that it's even more important than working for a better world to work for that world in the right way. A lefty party that achieves its goals through dissembling and opportunism is not, I think, truly a lefty party at all. At the same time, concern with doing the right thing at all levels of action does not necessarily lead one to complacence or the inability to act; indeed, since it grounds our ideas for the way the world sholud be, such a concern would seem to be a call to action more vigorous than the opportunism I'm reading into you.
I read JM to be saying not that we should be proud of ourselve for being so much more grown up that the Republicans, but that that this is one possible way to frame our issues. We're not crazy out to the left by millions of miles. We're responsible, we treat government like adults should, unlike the Republicans who seem to treat it like a child's toy.
This isn't to say this is the only framing we can/should do, or even that this is the entire and complete frame. This is just something Democrats should be talking about. We're for responsible government and the Republicans aren't.
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