(10 AM – promoted by TheMomCat)
I heart Glenn Greenwald and urge you to read the whole article if you already haven’t.
Has Rahm’s assumption about progressives been vindicated?
For almost a full year, scores of progressive House members vowed — publicly and unequivocally — that they would never support a health care bill without a robust public option. They collectively accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars based on this pledge. Up until a few weeks ago, many progressive opinion leaders — such as Moulitsas, Howard Dean, Keith Olbermann and many others — were insisting that the Senate bill was worse than the status quo and should be defeated. But now? All of those progressives House members are doing exactly what they swore they would never do — vote for a health care bill with no public option — and virtually every progressive opinion leader is not only now supportive of the bill, but vehemently so. In other words, exactly what Rahm said would happen — ignore the progressives, we don’t need to give them anything because they’ll get into line — is exactly what happened. How is that not vindication?
Pretty simple really. No money, no votes. If we all stay home in November, what will they do?
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Didn’t Krugman cave after his trip to the WH? I distinctly remember him ragging on the way Obama was handling the economy and stimulus until that visit and then shazam – “it wasn’t perfect, but……… ”
A Stay Home / Election Day Sit In protest
-Requires no money.
-No buses or logistics issues to deal with.
-Requires only a few volunteers to organize.
-Sets the table for 2012.
Message to Democratic Party:
We will no longer be taken for granted. If you won’t fight for us, we won’t fight for you.
Yes, Rahm is correct — progressives will always cave because the intellectual underpinnings of American Liberalism/Progressivism are extremely shallow. The left in America is a sentiment not a legit ideology. It is, compared to other societies I know, jejeune and tends to ignore history and political dynamics.
As I’ve said here many times, power is the ability to hurt your enemies and help your friends. If you want to play the political game you must be ready to use political weapons. It is very unlikely you will be able to sermonize your enemies– which is precisely the way the American left operates. I’m sorry but that just doesn’t work. The American people are, on the whole, a fearful, deluded and radically uninformed populace who live under a national religion whose chief tenets are American Exceptionalism, love of violence (for its own sake), escapism, sex, and bizarre forms of religion. You aren’t going to convince “the people” or the corporations to act honorably when honor and morality barely exists when it comes to public culture. Most Americans are relatively honest in their day-to-day dealings but it only involves people they see all the time thus makes a good reputation somewhat useful. But even there American communities, compared to others I’ve experienced, are impoverished and shallow at best.
Rahm understands politics and has bothered to learn how to “do” it. Progressives have not. The only exception I’ve seen in recent years is Rep. Grayson. Again, progressives need to go back to the drawing boards and water their roots — why be progressive rather than merely selfish? Find out where your motivation comes from and go back. Is it the Bible? Plato? Rousseau? Jefferson? Aquinas? Marx? Dewey? Mill? Buddha etc., etc.
What will they do? Move to K Street for a seven or eight figure salary?