It’s been a rough week to be a progressive, to be sure.
First, Martha Coakley lost Ted Kennedy’s Massachusetts Senate seat, which supposedly put the health care reform bill in jeopardy.
Then, in a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court showed its current stripe and actually ruled that corporations didn’t have enough power in the political arena, and could spend as much as they wanted campaigning for anything they wanted, thus certifying that the more money you have, the more speech you’re entitled to.
Then, to top it all off, Air America radio went belly-up, thus taking away a very important progressive voice from airwaves that have been dominated by wingnuts in recent years.
All in all, a lousy week, huh?
And yet, in the very small amount of free time I had to peruse the progressive blogosphere, I saw no calls to arms. I saw no calls to take back this country. I saw…
Whining.
Yes, where I see a call to arms and a need to fight harder, I have largely seen progressives whining about everything that's happened. Whining that they’ll never vote for a Democrat again, and lumping all Democrats into the same worthless pile, even though there are only a half dozen Senators who are creating a problem occasionally. They’re whining about the Supreme Court, as if it’s just occurred to them that most of the Justices were political appointments put on the court by Reagan or one of the Bushes. The decision itself is seen by a great number of progressives as a fatal blow to democracy and we should just give up, because “the corporations” won. And Air America’s demise is living proof that “the corporations” have taken over the radio and won that, too.
There are two ways to see this week, politically speaking, folks, but there is only one acceptable one. If you’re not pissed off and registering to be a Democrat about now, then you need to resign your commission as a self-described progressive and just admit you’re nothing but a whiner.
This week pissed me off. It demonstrated to me once again that electing Barack Obama as president was only the BEGINNING of a long fight to take back this country for the people.
Everyone blames “The Democratic Party” for losing the Senate seat in Massachusetts, and the national party does deserve some of the blame, to be sure. They took the seat for granted and just assumed voters in the state would vote for anyone with a “D” after their name, apparently forgetting about Mitt Romney, who served as governor for a time.But you know what? Progressives did the same. How many of you sent money to Coakley until the last week, when it became apparent that she might lose? How many of you played her up in the press, or joined phone banks to tell people about Scott Brown and to praise Coakley for her splendid credentials?
And “The Democratic Party” didn’t push Coakley to run; Coakley chose to run, and won a primary back in December against a man named Kennedy who was no relation to “The Kennedys.” Why didn't progressives put up a candidate? Where was the progressive candidate in that primary, holding Coakley's feet to the proverbial fire? Oh... there wasn't one? Isn't that a problem, folks?
Coakley just ran a classically shitty campaign, along the lines of the 2000 Gore campaign or the 2004 Kerry campaign; two campaigns that were only topped in their vapidity by the 1988 Dukakis campaign. See, voters really don’t care what you stand for; they care that you stand for something, and Coakley didn’t seem to stand for anything.But where was the progressive candidate in all of this? There were no progressives willing to take Ted Kennedy's place for almost three years?
Why do we think the entire country should just spontaneously become progressive because we are so convinced in the rightness of our cause that everyone should just adopt it without question? And how many elections do we lose before we finally figure out that such a thing never happens?
With Coakley’s loss, you would swear a hole was cut in the space-time continuum, and the entire issue of health insurance reform is a lost cause because, gosh-darn it, we no longer have 60 seats; we only have 59. Waaaaahhhhh!
Bullshit, folks. It just means we probably won’t get a public option. It doesn’t mean there won’t be any reform, just not as much as we’d hoped. That should signal to progressives that we have to work harder. We have to take what we can get this time, and work to get more progressives elected in the coming years. Instead of seeing Coakley’s loss as a sign of gloom and doom to come, we should see it as a wake-up call. There is no such thing as a “safe seat,” and we should work our asses off to get as many progressives and moderates as possible into Congress. I know a lot of you are pissed at Barack Obama for not "changing" enough, but his administration only represents one branch of government. To make the changes he wants to make, he needs Congress. His pen will only get him so far. If 60 Senate seats isn’t enough, perhaps we need to shoot for 68 or 70 for the time being, until the mood in the country changes and the right wingers are back in the political margins, where they belong.
The Supreme Court’s absurd decision the other day should really piss you off; I know it did me. But the problem is NOT “corporate personhood.” For some reason, we were able to deal with “corporate personhood” for many, many years without a problem. Now, all of a sudden, it’s become this huge, symbolic issue. “Corporate personhood” is actually an important concept and shouldn’t be scrapped just because right wingers choose to abuse the concept. But just as “actual persons” who have committed felonies can have exceptions carved out for them in the interests of public safety, “corporate persons” do not have to be entitled to the same rights as “actual persons.” It should be possible to carve out an exception for specific categories of “persons,” especially for those who aren’t actual “persons,” as described in the Constitution.
But I’ll get to that in another column. What that decision the other day should have done is make you mad, and more determined than ever to work to get rid of the status quo and elect as many Democrats as possible. You should be determined to make sure another Republican can’t make a Supreme Court nomination for the next 20 years, so the court can return to moderation and stay that way for a while. Instead of dealing with this rationally, and putting this on the make up of the Supreme Court, however, I’m seeing declarations of gloom and doom and threats to withdraw from the Democratic Party and never vote again. (Yes, I have seen that from so-called “progressives.”)
The problem isn't "corporate personhood," it's that five wingnut Justices thought "corporate persons" deserve the same rights as "human persons," despite the fact that they only exist on paper. FOUR JUSTICES AGREE WITH US (including Sotomayor, FYI), that "corporate personhood" does not translate to the same rights as individuals. In fact, you should read Stevens' dissent; it's beautifully written.
Do you know what our attitude should be at this Supreme Court ruling? (No, but I’m sure Milt will tell us what we should think, the know-it-all.) It should be a push-back unlike anything we have ever seen before. Who gives a shit if corporations can spend tons of money on campaigns in an attempt to influence them? Let’s make sure it doesn’t work! Let’s get out there and use everything at our disposal to make sure the public knows our side, and let the corporations spend themselves into oblivion trying to fight us.
Ah, but that’s so not like us, isn’t it? For some reason, we worked our asses off to elect Barack Obama because he was seen as an “agent of change” and after he was elected, we dropped off the face of the goddamned earth. For some reason, progressives thought that electing a president and 60 Senators was the END of their job, and they needed to rest for a while. Apparently, a lot of progressives thought that putting those elements in place was sufficient and that everything would change simply because we had the numbers. Well, guess what, folks; politics doesn’t work that way. Not only do you have to elect them, you have to support them while they’re in office. The teabaggers have been all over the place, letting everyone know what they’re up to; where are the progressives? I’ll tell you where we are; we’re reading our own blogs and commenting amongst each other, and sitting in the corner wondering why no one invites us in, and we’re absolutely flabbergasted when the right drowns us out.
Changing a society takes hard work, people. It only begins with an election; it never ends with one. These people need your support even after they’re in office. May I remind you that the issue with health insurance reform isn’t “The Democrats;” it’s about 5-6 Democrats who represent states that aren’t exactly progressive strongholds, and who risk their seat if they are seen as “too liberal.”
We have to keep up the pressure; we have to support “The Democrats” and not just whine about the things they’re not doing, and we have to understand that we are in for a very long, very difficult fight. Things don’t change just because we want them to. We have to make them change. Hell; even after we have created a fully progressive society, we'll still have to work our asses off to keep it.
Now, about Air America Radio’s demise…
The post-mortem on them among progressives, as I’ve seen it, seems to be that the demise of Air America is yet another sign that the right wingers have taken over the airwaves and progressive radio is over and done with. Again; it’s that “gloom and doom” attitude writ large. (Gee, I wonder why people don’t like us?)
Air America Radio was a stupid business model when it came into being. I understand that it seemed necessary, in a way, but the entire business model was destined for failure as a capitalist enterprise. I’m actually quite surprised they made it through six years. They were trying to provide a 24-hour block of programming and, because it was assumed (correctly) that corporate-owned stations wouldn’t carry the programming under the normal business model, they started by leasing stations. They paid their initial hosts way too much money, and they were run by the irrepressibly stupid Sheldon Drobny at first.
But the demise of Air America points up a major difference between right and left. The right will spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year propping up failed enterprises just to keep the propaganda flowing, while the left simply doesn’t have millionaires and billionaires who are willing to plaster our media with money to keep it going.
There’s a good reason for that, really. You see, we have the truth on our side, while the right wing peddles bullshit. It takes a lot more money to peddle a lie. The problem with the left side of the equation is, we don’t support (there’s that word again!) truth tellers sufficiently. We get all proud and peacock-like when someone like Rachel Maddow gets a program, and we watch it at first, but then we get bored and drop off.Once more; this is a never-ending struggle.
Air America was
doomed to fail because its business model was unworkable. But its business
model could have been changed. What never changed was the lack of support. A number of progressive talk shows are doing quite well, but they’re still lagging
behind most of the wingnuts propaganda fests, because progressives seem to lack
an understanding of how markets actually work. We see that a progressive radio
show hits the air and we say, “That’s nice,” and we talk about it, and we might
even stream it at work. But we don’t do the leg work necessary to make sure it
succeeds, while the wingnuts do.
It's time for progressives to get off their asses and stop whining. Instead of running away from the Democratic Party, we should be running into it and demanding our say. We should be putting up our own candidates, and speaking to the masses, instead of each other.
This has been a difficult week for progressives, to be sure. But learn the right lessons from it, folks. This country needs major reform, and that’s not going to happen with one or two elections and having a majority in Congress and a black guy in the White House. This week should have reminded us that we have a lot of work to do. We have to undo an entire generation of neocon politics, and that’s going to take a long, sustained effort, not just during election cycles, but between them, as well.
Get pissed and get moving, liberals and progressives.
Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are its only safe depositories.-- Thomas Jefferson
