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• Sunday, August 31, 2008 07:48 AM

  Resentment

  GG... You beat your chest like some sort of rabid revolutionary but it's all confined to comments you leave here. I didn't see you at any of the protests in Denver or here. I've repeatedly invited you to post whatever protests and events you're organizing -- and promised I would do what I could to promote them -- and you never answer, because you do nothing, while attacking everyone who does things for not doing enough.

  He is resentful because he is angry. He is angry because he feels powerless. He feels powerless, like those misguided "anarchists" (who shouldn't be concerned with power, political or otherwise) because he fails to understand, like Dennis Perrin and those "anarchists," what Glenn and Billmon and anyone else who has taken the time to analyze the situation long ago recognized:

  As imperfect a party as it is, the Democratic party is the only vehicle... I'll let Billmon say it. He says it so much better, not that misguided angry fools like adnoto would ever listen:

  My discontents are probably shared by many of you, maybe most of you: The overpowering influence of corporate money, the puerile cluelessness of the Democratic consultant class, the repeated betrayals of those who most need the party to stand and fight for them (Biden, cough, bankruptcy "reform") And my biggest policy heartache: The party's reflexive support for a completely deranged "bipartisan" foreign policy agenda -- the very parade of folly that landed us in Iraq and is now stumbling on in the general direction of Tehran (or the Russian frontier, or both).

  Mostly, I just wish the party would grow a backbone, or at least an exoskeleton -- anything that would keep it standing upright in a fight, instead of collapsing into a quivering blob of goo whenever the battle heats up. I disagreed with the late Steve Gilliard about many things, but I always agreed with him about one thing: The need to fight back.

  But there are loyalties that go deeper than policies, deeper than ideas, deeper, even, than folly and cowardice. When I turn on the TV and see the crowd at a Democratic National Convention -- black and white and every shade in between, Anglo and Hispanic, gay and straight, old and young, Jew and gentile, I know somewhere deep down in my gut that those are my people, the Americans that I want to be my fellow Americans.

  Maybe that emotional loyalty is why I've never quite been able to throw in my lot with the Greens or the Democratic Socialists or Ralph Nader (in the latter case it also helps that the guy is a complete asshole), even though their beliefs and positions are probably closer to mine than the Democratic Party's will ever be, even in the Glorious People's Republic of Obamastan.

  For better or worse, the Democratic Party is the rock; all else is the sea -- to steal Frederick Douglass's old line about a different (very different) Republican Party. It's the only political organization in the country that offers even a remote prayer of advancing a progessive agenda.

  But that's pretty weak beer most days: More of an apology than an argument.

  This evening, though, I watched something happen that I was solid sure would never happen in my lifetime, or probably my children's lifetimes: A major American political party just nominated an African American as its candidate for the presidency of the United States -- the big job, the Leader of the Free World, the whole enchilada...

  http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/8/27/185922/893/893/576781

  It's not perfect by a long shot and even I would prefer a system that allowed more political participation by doing away with winner take all elections and even the electoral college. I think it would make American politics more in tune with and responsive to the majority of the electorate, and less inclined to these bizarre and paradoxical electoral results, than any other action one could take, but there it is. You have to go to the polls with the electoral system that you have.

  —L.W.M. Read L.W.M.'s other letters
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