ELECTORAL HANGOVER

Lots of gnashing of teeth on the left side of the blogosphere today. I'm not quite sure what Rob Salkowitz is getting at over at Emphasis Added, but he certainly sounds depressed. David Neiwert over at Orcinus suggests that the Democrats need to spend more time reaching out to rural America, and I think he's got something there, but I wonder how this can be done in the face of a conservative lock on down-home "traditional values;" if we've learned anything from this election, it's that gay-bashing and war-mongering trump economic insecurity. Atrios is also bummed, of course, and trying to come to terms with this new reality, but he makes a pretty good observation with which I mostly agree:

Democrats and liberals have spent too many years running away from the Right's caricature of what it means to be a liberal that they've managed to obliterate from the public consciousness any coherent concrete narrative. It isn't as many seem to think about precisely where on the Left/Right spectrum a candidate or the Party chooses to position itself. I'm not arguing that Democrats need to be "more liberal" or "less liberal" or anything like that at all. But, they have to be something other than "not Republicans."

The Democrats have absolutely no sense of vision. They have no clear agenda, simply an eclectic crazy-quilt of social issues and ineffective band-aids for the gaping wounds caused by corporate capitalism. They're not trying to take the nation anywhere new: on the contrary, all they seem to have been doing for the last twenty years is trying to stop the Republicans from erasing the previous fifty years of social and economic advancement in America, and they've been failing miserably.

Atrios is absolutely correct when he says that "not Republicans" doesn't cut it. Why? The Republicans offer an agenda, a grand vision, as wrong-headed as it is. Grand visions inspire people; nay-sayers don't. Face it, the Democrats are uninspiring and lame.

On the other hand, I disagree with Atrios' assertion that this isn't about being more or less liberal. The only way to embody what most Democrats seem to believe in, political, social, and economic justice, is to turn to the left. In the quest for money and votes, the Democrats have lost any sense of ideology. They stand for nothing now because they try to stand for everything. They cannot support gay rights while opposing gay marriage. They cannot support both economic justice and the existing corporate system, but they sure as hell try. They cannot support both war and peace, but, somehow, pro-war Kerry was presented and perceived by many as something of a "peace" candidate. The Democrats split hairs all over the place and it makes them look like a bunch of weasels. Hell, they are a bunch of weasels.

I should have voted for the Greens this time, too. But nooooooo. "Anyone but Bush." I won't get fooled again, no, no.

I seriously doubt that the Democrats will turn to the left; their institution just won't allow that to happen: they're stuck in their mind-set, appealing to everybody, taking the corporate cash. But if they did, there could be a major payoff many years down the road. Some day, when I'm old, the Democrats could offer a truly inspiring, truly competitive, vision of an America that could be, a vision that could, by comparison, make plain the Republican view of our nation as the dog crap it is.

Of course, if the Democrats continue to swim in the lukewarm waters in which they currently slosh, there won't be a Democratic Party when I'm old. Fuck them, I'm Green from here on out.

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