Why? Because progressive philosophy is about making progress. Not the shadow of progress that is standing up for progressive principles, but the solid substance of it that we see with the passage of laws and the enactment of executive branch policies.
This will not be easy at first. We have to deal with the inertia of years of regressive, backwards looking policy, a politics that was primarily focused on the breaking down of what Liberals, moderates and progressives had built up during the last century. The Republicans are not content with being a check and a balance against us. They are still, even after two electoral defeats, zealously pursuing their dismantlement of government and its protections for the average person.
At the very least, our mission is to neutralize and turn back their efforts to drag us further backwards, to unlearn lessons that were hard-won in hard times past.
Then, our mission is to push things forward, to resume the march towards better things that our forebears began.
This current healtcare bill does provide progress in several areas. It is far from all we hoped for, back a year ago. But you know what? Nobody imagined the Republicans would be this stubborn, this deeply sunk in their denial. We imagined they'd finally get the point and get busy getting used to being the minority party. Instead, they seemed aimed at topping their previous record for obstruction.
Anybody who blithely supposes that it is liberal weakness alone that has us in these troublesome straits simply does not have a clear grasp of the situation. Even those folks in the Senate we rip on so much only have power because few if any Republicans cross over. if just one Republican were to vote yes on Cloture, that would mean one less Democrat who we'd have to satisfy. If the Republicans didn't make cloture votes necessary at all, we could do fifty plus one.
The pressure we're under here with healthcare is artificial, and strategically aimed at making people frustrated, disillusioned, and most importantly at making them quit.
That strategy is in the service of an agenda of regression, an agenda that has brought this country to the edge of permanent decline. If we are true progressives, we must not merely fight against the Republican's principles, we must also fight against their means of making those principles real policy. If we are progressive in politics, but fail to make progress in policy, then our politics are worthless.
Obama and others are fighting to at least begin the fight to improve healthcare over the next decade from a better battleground. However distasteful we find their compromises, we gain more progress supporting them than letting them fail. If they fail, that becomes the defining moment for healthcare politics: the politicians, those cynical creatures out there, will wait until the crisis is imminent before taking up the fight again, and that will make for an even tougher, even higher-stakes fight.
Progressives cannot carry out their politics from a position of despair. We must carry them out from a position of pride and optimism. Not the cheap optimism of panglossian inevitability, but the hard won, effort-bought optimism that if we make the effort, we can do more things than we could rationally believe possible before we tried.
We must not simply believe that it would be nice to improve healthcare, labor laws, environmental protections, trade law and others- we must believe that we should try for no less, because our nation deserves better, and we do, too. It must not be something we simply pursue because we think we can win everytime, it must be something we pursue because we believe we must and would not let ourselves be shamed by quitting.
Don't do it for the politicians or the leaders, for Obama or any other charismatic candidate. Don't do it for Dean, don't do it for Franken.
Do it for yourselves. Do it for the belief that Corporations must not be allowed to rule our lives and curtail our freedoms with impunity. Don't be the storm that comes every decade or so, be the waves that are constantly pounding and shaping the coast, whether it likes it or not. If you are pissed off, let your anger motivate your continued involvement in politics, not your disgusted withdrawal from it.
We didn't start out with ideal delegations. Special interests had some of our people bought from the start. Policy has been written that is shameful, influence has been brought that is wrong.
Your response can be to say, oh, the corporations and the corporatist have power, so what's the point. You'll be saying that, like so many of the past few generations have said. And you'll be wrong for having said it. They rule to the extent they do because so many were silent or complicitous before hand. You can cooperate with them by taking their line as the Republicans and centrist Democrats have, or you can cooperate with them by forfeiting the fight to them and not showing up.
Which has me asking, what's the bloody point? What was all your efforts for? I will not allow them to convince me that people like me cannot fight back and take over. I will not dignify their efforts by doing that. I will fight. As sad as the compromises have been, as useless as things sometimes feel, I don't think I can stand to just stand back and let things slip backwards like this.
Rather than impress upon ourselves, well in advance, the futility of fighting further, we should have to pride to fight for what we believe regardless of whether it's just us, or a hundred million who agree.
But whatever we do, the thing we should be doing is moving forward, by any means we can manage. Republicans can afford to sit on their asses and do nothing. Why? Because that's their policy prescription. A Republican standing up for doing nothing is like a Mermaid standing up for the virtues of swimming. They are in their element preaching futility, demanding either impossible compromises or doing their best to block things outright with their power.
We Progressives, though, must move and do, or otherwise we are seen as having failed. We will not be seen as successes for our marvelous ideas. We will be seen as successes for whatever we can deliver.
Make no mistake, we should make every batch of law we brew as strongly progressive as we can. But we should expect others in our party and those on the other side of the aisle to water it down. We should expect to be frustrated by these people, and harden ourselves to that frustration.
If we let the frustrations do their job, if we let ourselves destroy ourselves, out of disappointment and hard feelings over that disappointment, we've only served those whos aim is to stall our agenda and roll it back. We must think to the consequences of action in ways that work beyond what we intend, to what we can manage given the current state of things.
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