But just because the Republicans are Snidely Whiplash doesn't make the Democrats Dudley Do-Right.
I think they're more like another cartoon character, Lucy in the Peanuts comic strip who can be counted on to pull the football away every time poor Charlie Brown tries to kick it. "I won't pull the football away, Charlie Brown," insists Lucy. And every time, she does and Charlie Brown goes tumbling head over heels.
This was the year the American voters pulled the football out from the Democrats, who took their worst tumble in over 60 years. The Democrats may not survive this one, and in a certain way I hope they don't -- at least not how they have survived since the Reagan years, as the corporate party whose position has been "we're not as bad as the other guys".
Why Hopelessness Is Our Only Hope, Or the Truth Shall Upset You Free
Sometimes the bad news is the only good news, and this is one of those times.
This is the perfect time to abandon all hope in the Democratic Party and its entrenched misleadership, and to concede that the oligarchy won the game it so blatantly and brutally fixed. No, the Democrats cannot out-Republican the Republicans, even if they shred their last shred of conscience.
There have been numerous excellent analyses of why the Democrats lost, but none of them go deeply enough into why the party of the New Deal has devolved into the party of the No Deal. The reason why the Democratic Party cannot help us through our current political crisis, has to do with three qualities it has failed to cultivate: vision, leadership and courage.
Let's begin with vision, which involves both hindsight and
foresight -- and of course, clarity about both the seen and the unseen. As the Biblical saying goes, "Where
there is no vision the people perish." In the last chapter of his
eye-opening autobiography, The People's Advocate, Danny Sheehan (the
courageous attorney who cut his teeth on the Pentagon Papers and the Karen
Silkwood case, and later exposed the Iran Contra scandal) writes,
"Twenty-two years after the end of the Cold War, the leadership of the
American liberal community has still not deigned to identify ... a set of
ethical principles."
He continues, "Until this task has been faced and effectively completed by
the leadership of the liberal community in the United States, this community
will remain disconnected from the true source of ethical and moral
authority. Consequently, it will not be asked by the American people to
govern."
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