For the past five or six years the political winds, or the political pendulum if you will, has begun to swing back from Reagan era conservatism and trickle-down economics towards American populism and Jeffersonian democracy. This shift has not occurred among politicians, or the corporate media talking heads, but at the grassroots level of American politics. We the people.
Perhaps it required an unprecedented, and unconstitutional wake-up call from the likes of Bush and Cheney to alert the American electorate to the dangers posed by a government whose checks and balances have been thwarted by the executive branch. Just maybe, the Bush and Cheney administration’s blatant malfeasance is exactly the tonic that a somnolescent American public needed to stir them to political action.
When you hear politicians talk about change, listen carefully to what they say next, when they try to explain what precisely they mean by change. If that recipe for change does not include a serious challenge to the current corporate mentality that puts profits above people, economy above equality, and corporations above the law, then it may not be the type of change you had in mind.
Political movements don’t happen in a moment, even if heads are lost at the gallows. The Republicans worked slowly over the last 3 decades, step by step, to take the Congress and White House. The Democrats can’t expect to move the political pendulum faster than it can naturally go. Political mills grind slowly, but in the end, they produce the results that the majority dictates. Be part of the progressive political mill, and help the progressive majority grow. Once Democrats have control, then the political mill can begin to work on them to move the agenda to the left.
Political change doesn’t move like a bullet train, it grinds like a mill, seeming at times exceeding slow.
Dr. John Moffett is an active research neuroscientist in the Washington, DC area, who has published articles on the nervous and immune systems. Dr. Moffett is also the author and webmaster of the political opinion website www.Factinista.org, and is a Managing Editor at OpEdNews.com.
John you are obviously a smart man but I wonder if
Americans can actually be true progressives in these times.
You write as though it is inevitable, natural and acceptable that compromises will have to be made between the desirable and the politically possible in order to get America back on track. You write a little like Rob Kall writes. As if in the end you are an American first and a progressive second.
There is a problem with this. There is a problem with accepting that building a Democratic Congress is going to take time and is going to be enough to aim for. The problem is that the rest of the world that doesn't vote in your elections or take much part in your Republican versus Democrat elections really is profoundly and seriously affected by what you Americans let your political leaders do.
America is frankly a world leader. But it is currently leading the world in a regressive direction. The rule of law is not just something esoteric or whimsical but it is something necessary to have even the possibility of peace. Your President, yes George W Bush is your President because you are an American and you haven't impeached him yet, has set back the rule of law globally. He has undermined the UN Charter a treaty that is over 60 years old which the US ratified along with the many other people who truly were progressives in their asperations because they wanted to "save succeeding generations from the scourge of war". The only way to restore confidence in the global rule of law, the only way for Americans to redeem themselves in the eyes of progressives outside of the United States is for impeachment to occur. All else is mere distraction and window dressing.
Too much harm has been done. An aggressive war has been launched that was illegal. And the premise of that war - to remove weapons of mass destruction - was invalid. There is a piper that has to be paid in order for American's to be trusted again.
American progressives simply don't have the luxury of presuming that they will be held in good standing by foreign progressives if they put America first when American villians are undermining the rule of law and basic human decency around the world. America has played a large role in human civilization and has provide some great champions of human progress but so to did German for one period in history and then Germany became a nett force for regression.
The refusal of American politicians and of American people at the citizen voter level to take responsibility for what is done in their name, the penchant and tendancy to rationalise that impeachment is too hard, that the Republicans will not allow it, these things are simply unsatisfactory excuses for you American progressives not doing your human duty. You are letting your country take the world backwards on your watch. You are allowing circumstances to develop which if not addressed will see American progressives on battlefields against progressives from other countries where you guys will be anologous to the good Germans.
You know you have regressive elements within your own country that would like almost nothing better than a war to use as a means of consolidating power and removing civil liberties. At least I think you know that. But what you don't know perhaps is that they might - if impeachment doesn't occur - not be the worst problem you have to deal with. The worst problem may be that progressives of other countries decide they can't have the absolute basics and fundamentals of civilization undermined by parochial and narrow American national interest anymore. There comes a time when former friends will become deadly enemies and where we progressives of other countries will reluctantly fight you and try to kill you because you are Americans first and decent second and because America itself has been allowed to slide and to corrupt into becoming the enemy of wider humankind.
What the Bush Presidency has done has been to speed up the clock and let the rest of us in the world know that American regressiveness (American exceptionalism) is a deadly serious phenomenon and a deadly serious threat to the values that we thought we shared with Americans. The Bush Presidency cannot be papered over. Americas word on treaties (prohibiting torture and prohibitting aggressive wars - the real big stuff in other words) is currently utterly worthless. Foreigners would have to be crazy to trust Americans and we aren't, not all of us, not in sufficient numbers, that crazy.
I apologise for the ranty nature of this comment. But I'm posting it anyway because its better to say this imperfectly and longwindedly than to not say it at all.
I don't believe one can be a progressive and an American at present unless one is pursuing impeachment as the highest national and international political priority. Without the rule of law we humans cannot have the confidence to do anything else. Without the rule of law we cannot even have the confidence that we won't be rationally plotting and then killing each other.
If Bush isn't impeached terrorism (unlawful political action) against Americans may be a moral imperative. If that sounds exteme or radical recall that it was Jefferson that said "I tremble for my country when I recall that God is just." Your country is capable of behaving in a way as to morally warrant the wrath of the world. With aggressive invasions and torture it has been doing exactly that.
by
Brett Paatsch (0 articles, 2 quicklinks, 16 diaries, 771 comments)
on Monday, January 7, 2008 at 6:30:44 PM
