Letters to the Editor
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Frustration
Yes I am frustrated, not defeated (did somebody just put me in a headlock and I cried uncle?) Yes I may be faulted for projecting. The “ship” may take some/a long time to turn. In the meanwhile people are actually dying “over there”. Yup, we got our own deaths, you know, heart attacks, cancer, car wrecks, murders, Katrina, etc. But right now, in a land far away, lots of people are dying or are fleeing. If the survivors could have an overview of what we are doing about it, what would they see?
“Well gentlemen, it takes time and patience to righten the ship”.
Oh, and they and our soldiers continue to die and be wounded and they flee while we take our sweet political time to righten the ship. Yea, it looks like the constitution is being sacked. Heck, we torture! We are being spied on! O horror! In the meanwhile, people are dying in a far off land. Is there really not enough empathy in this country that we can come to the conclusion that people are actually dying in another land due to us/our government? Should we not put a stop to this NOW! I understand, no health insurance, unemployment, busted unions, crappy economy for the average person, bad dept, etc. In the meanwhile, death and destruction via our government in a far away land. What can we do about THAT.
If the answer is that we must first must remove the rotten people from our system, then there is a problem with system, and not just the people in the system. Who is paying the price (in blood) for our governments current problems?
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To despair or not to despair
I have read all 38(!) pages of comments on this thread and I think kovie's post at the bottom of 35 encompasses my particular view. That view is this: things are broken, from my perspective as a progressive thinker, in how my government is working. Fixing them will require some combination of working to elect people who better represent my point of view and pushing them to reform the things that are broken. That may or may not include fundamental reforms to the Constitution; I'm not convinced of that yet because I'd need to more closely examine what we'd have to trade off for what we'd put in place to try to prevent such abuses as the current ones from happening again.
The beauty is that there are mechanisms in place that can be employed by elected officials inclined to do so (such an inclination likely resulting from pressure from like-minded citizens) to create those reforms. Look, if the Bush administration can move quickly, so can an alternative administration if its will is strong enough.
Regardless of whether or not one assumes that the 2000 (and 2004?) elections were stolen from the will of the people, the fact remains that the votes were close enough to allow the result that occurred to occur. It is easy when reading the pages of Salon to assume a groundswell of progressive thought and be baffled as to why that groundswell doesn't result in different election results.
But there are plenty of people who are all for the imperialistic view of how the U.S. should be in the world and they vote too. There are also plenty of people who opt out entirely. In a sense, one can argue that the whole crazy experiment IS working as it should because it's representing a majority, albeit a very slim one, of the people who have the will to vote. That I am not a part of that majority tells me I need to do what I can to win their hearts and minds as well as trying to convince the non-participants to join the fray if I want to change the majority view. Glenn's work, it seems to me, is in service of just that, which is why I support it.
I suppose apologies are in order to rollotomasi for my contribution to the "eharmonyization" of the UT comment threads. However, for what it's worth, I thought I was engaging in some lighthearted banter designed more to recognize a longtime and valued contributor to these threads who has given me much to think about than any actual sort of trolling for love, and I expect the others who chimed in had similiar thoughts. There are some amazing minds that gather here and I respect and admire many of them. They are why I bother to read the comments here rather than just the articles. If the anonymous commenter hadn't started the lovefest, I probably wouldn't have done so on my own, but I personally see nothing wrong with recognizing someone in this sort of community whose contributions I find to be of particular value.
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Joe Vecchio:
It's probably best not to conflate a movement's rise with the sudden changes that occur with revolutionary subversion and overthrow. I would also argue that the Bushviks are not actually part of the rightist movement of the last 30 years. They have used that movement, but their goals and objectives are quite different than those of movement conservatives. The goal of the Busheviks was to seize the government of the United States, conduct wars of aggression abroad, and steal as much of the treasury as they could with no consequences to themselves. They have been spectacularly successful in their enterprise, and it has not taken them any time at all.
As for an "embryonic" opposition... it's an astute observation. You know the history of the Progressive Movement as well as anyone, but I suggest that the opposition to the Bushevik Autocracy is not really part of it, nor is it really an outgrowth of Progressivism. In fact, Progressivism itself is very authoritarian and and it's possible one reason the Democrats in Congress simply haven't opposed the Bushevik Autocracy is because... at root they agree with it, or at least with its authoritarianism. They just don't think the Busheviks are doing it right.
The "progressive movement" on the internets has very little or nothing to do with classic American Progressivism or even Liberalism as we once knew it. Instead, the embryonic "progressivism" of the internets is more akin to Libertarianism; a slightly left leaning Libertarianism, but not Liberalism or Progressivism. And the problem with Libertarianism is that it is primarily a system for argument, not for governance.
If we're going to actually counter the Bushevik Revolution, we're going have to come up with more than argument.