Atlas Shrugged: The Mocking
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Thursday, July 30, 2009
Pressure
Think Progress reports that the White House pressured Congress to remove the Don't Ask Don't Tell amendment, which would have weakened the policy. This was very predictable; Obama is a religious authoritarian and will not be in sympathy with gays. Just as Obama won't tell white society that they still oppress Blacks. Or disavow American Exceptionalism. Or pull out of the Middle East. Or a lot of other things. It's important to acknowledge this and there is no reason not to--voting for McCain wasn't an option. If we acknowledged that Obama is largely conservative we would understand that it is necessary and appropriate to pressure him to go further left.
Before the election, my hope upon hopes was that Obama was more liberal than he was letting on, playing the centrist only as a dodge to the inevitable attacks from the right.
ReplyDeleteNow that he keeps proving me wrong over and over again, I still foolishly cling to the hope. Sigh. I'm retarded.
NT: I felt just the opposite. :-( I was convinced that the many people caught up in his hopey-changey universe were being taken for a ride because there wasn't anything special about him or his views. Many of his policy stances remind me of Nixon, for instance.
ReplyDeleteAnd, you know, I don't really know what to do about any of this. I think we have a broken country. The majority of the citizenry pays no attention to politics at all: "they're all crooks" and "it's boring" and other such remarks are what most people say (& apparently truly feel). Our citizenry is also getting stupider -- thank you Mr Reagan -- which doesn't help matters. All this make it fairly easy for a disconnect to exist between elected officials, what they say, what they do, and what the people actually want.
Except for some religious nutcases and a handful of people clamoring for the halcyon days of the Dark Ages, the majority of the population -- & I think the numbers are much much higher than they poll -- are basically pretty liberal in what they believe. The problem is that they've had "liberal = BAD" drilled into them so they say they're not that bad thing.
If only we weren't so damn big, our eventual marginalization and reduction to a strictly second- or third-rate country would be fairly innocuous. Unfortunately we're so damn big that our (exceedingly bad) elected officials can do a helluva lot of damage before we get there.
One of the things that has given me a bit of actual hope is seeing how fast bloggers and others have caught on that they need to apply this pressure themselves, and persistently, at that.
ReplyDeleteI remember back during the Clinton years, very few peeps thought of pushing Clinton to the left, even as he gutted donor support for liberal orgs. More than once I heard that we had to wait until after midterms, then we had to wait until he got reelected, etc. (of course there were no blogs, so, no real way to mobilize opposition). Heck we didn't even have an ActBlue, so there was no way to help more progressive candidates.
Now, liberals are waking up a lot quicker, coming around to the idea that Obama will not magically do everything they want, and that they are needed to help push progressive causes constantly and continually, not just every four years.
Further, I think that there has been a realization that a lot of the democrats we helped to get elected in `06 and `08 are not the sort we want to continue to help. They just used the bloggers as an ATM, and they want us to pipe down until election season comes around again. Somehow I don't see bloggers raising money for the same sorts of candidates in 2010 as they did the last two cycles.
So, bloggers being pushier, and pickier, than ever before, this gives me a tiny bit of real hope.