The Task Before Us

I don’t know why I’m optimistic.

But then again, I don’t know why everyone else is so pessimistic.

We didn’t win by enough to prevent the second theft of democracy. And the candidate of the Democratic Party didn’t do enough to prove theft, or protest theft, so theft it was and theft it is.

Then again given the tides of history it should not have been close.

People live longer today, so the generational tides take longer to shift than they once did. Yes, 2004 was 36 years after 1968. But the 2004 election was still dominated by the issues of 1968, by Vietnam, and demands for social change.

The whole campaign looked to the past, much as the pre-change elections of 1928 and 1964 looked to the past. They were re-runs that told no new story.

It was a Goldwater election, as I feared a year before, yet we basically broke even. Bush will be unable to break through as Johnson did, unable to overturn the Great Society, let alone the New Deal. His majorities are too thin.

Meanwhile look at all we’ve done. In Moveon.org and Democracy for America, in 1,000 blogs and tiny movements, we’ve built a mass political machine, well-funded and well-organized, with its own media outlets and (most important) its own worldview.

What is that worldview?

Balance

Tolerance

Internationalism

Personal liberty

Technology

Education

Satiation

Charity

Environmentalism

These are views held in common by the vast majority of civilized people. They are the assumptions of Europe, the assumptions of Japan, the aspirations of India, of China, of Latin America and Africa. They are enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations, and they are baked into the American Constitution. They can’t be unmade, and won’t be.

The only way our opponents could claim power was to transform the word "Freedom" into its opposite. The second Bush inaugural reminded me of nothing so much as the platform that "the master of alternate history," Harry Turtledove, gave Jake Featherston’s Freedom Party in his series "American Empire"

It is, at its heart, a lie, a lie that in due time will be found out and dealt with. Which means our future task is clear, it’s set by our recent past. We’ve already begun the work:

Youth. The assumptions of the Baby Boom Generation need to be abandoned, and that generation (my generation) abandoned with it. We must embrace the Internet Generation instead. What we learned last year is most boomers will always be for Nixon. Let ‘em rot.

Online Governance. This is the great unmet task. We have yet to "scale the intimacy" of the early Dean campaign. We need to be building with tools like Scoop, and Slash, which can scale to serve huge communities. DailyKos has already done this. Others must as well.

Below the Web. Moveon.org is basically a "Below the Web" organization. Its decisions are taken at a clearly-defined center. We need many other organizations like it – think tanks, lobbying groups, funding sources. Republicans lacked these in 1964, although many were built then. The same is true here. We just need to build, not make.

Events. If we’re right (and we are) the other side will find no relief in their temporary victory. Iraq will bleed. The deficit will balloon. The dollar will fall. Rival nations will rise. Americans will age, and more will become frustrated to see the tide of history run out. There will be crises for which their ideology has no answer, and their whole movement will be buried under its rubble.

It doesn’t matter, to me, whether Howard Dean becomes chairman of the DNC. If he does, this work can go on under the Democratic Party. If he loses, it will go on outside it. The party is merely a hollow shell that will be occupied, in the end, by those movements who bring the most bodies to the polls.

It is for us, then, to simply build on the work we have begun. We have no obligations to govern. We can, simply, oppose and propose, as we have done, building against the inevitable day when we’re called upon, or perhaps when our children are called upon, to bring this country back from the depths to which it is falling.

Dana Blankenhorn   danablankenhorn@mindspring.com Mooreslore Blog The Chinese Century at Mooreslore  archives/028588.html A-Clue.Com Newsletter 

  Posted by Jock Gill at January 21, 2005 5:16 PM | TrackBack