Let’s start here: The Center/Left has NEVER willingly formed coalition with the Left.
They have always had to be forced to do so. Forced by both circumstances….and by the powerful coalitions that The Left forms, that grow to the point where they can no longer be ignored. The two situations are almost always intertwined, as it is almost always circumstances that lead to the formation of strong Leftish Coalitions.
Those times are coming once again. With the government unable to even coming close to addressing the near Depression conditions being endured by the poor, the Lower, and now the Middle classes, circumstances are once again ripening for The People to start to look for other solutions than…He’s Got This … to their very real problems.
Wall St may be recovering, but Main St is not.
Teacherken has a great essay over at the orange wherein he quotes Meyerson (though Ken’s title confuses me a bit…Obama has an agenda???) I will do the same…
The America over which FDR presided was home to mass organizations of the unemployed; farmers’ groups that blocked foreclosures, sometimes at gunpoint; general strikes that shut down entire cities, and militant new unions that seized factories. Both communists and democratic socialists were enough of a presence in America to help shape these movements, generating so much street heat in so many congressional districts that Democrats were compelled to look leftward as they crafted their response to the Depression. During Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, the civil rights movement, among whose leaders were such avowed democratic socialists as Martin Luther King Jr. and James Farmer, provided a new generation of street heat that both compelled and abetted the president and Congress to enact fundamental reforms.
Historically, when The Right has yet again produced another recession or depression (and if you go back and look nearly all of them have been created under Republicans) The People have no choice but to look to the Left. And when they are desperate enough (haha) to look to the Left, and to take the time to educate themselves on why they have just been screwed….again…by the Right, a certain percentage always become more active, a certain percentage become activists, and a certain percentage get down right radicalized.
As The Promise of Change starts to ring more and more hollow as Obama is compromised more and more by the Powers That Be and his “agenda” becomes more and more about preserving the status quo for the PTB and less and less about helping The People out of the mess the Right made for them, we HOPE we will see the same phenomena. In significant enough numbers to force the kind of real and “radical” change we actually need….instead of the cosmetic Change that seems to send a thrill up the leg of his “supporters.”
In other words, as things get worse, more and more of The People will move farther and farther to The Left.
Despite the picture painted by the centrists and the media of the fringey fringey loony loony Far Left, the light of reason does finally dawn. History is dredged up that shows again how indisputably right The Left has always been, and there is a growth of healthy ‘cynicism’ regarding the policies an the motives of The Center and The Right. Who as WE all know, have no interest in helping The People at all, but is all about feathering the nests of the Haves at the expense of the have Nots.
So what then is the duty of The Left under these circumstances? How can we best utilize these unfortunate, but seemingly inevitable, circumstances to affect real change?
By having coalitions and structures in place for them to join. By having information handy to educate folks with, and by recognizing that these folks aren’t really interested in the overarching causes of The Left to begin with. And that is where the pragmatism of The Left must enter the picture.
Bombarding folks with Leftist propaganda or expecting them to …. initially ….embrace things like a Department of Peace is not pragmatic. These folks are not so much interested in the ideals and policies of The Left….they are interested in making their lives better.
As Ministry of Truth points out in his essay Why I fight, that is what The Left has to always keep on the front burner, making peoples lives better.
“Politics isn’t about big money or power games; it’s about the improvement of people’s lives”~ Senator Paul Wellstone
That is the basis on which a real coalition can be formed, showing people how The Left can make their lives better.
As the Center fails them yet again.
It behooves us to have this as our central goal and philosophy as the disaffected start to look to The Left for the answers they cannot find elsewhere.
Let’s all think about and work on that aspect, as we each pursue or individual agendas and priorities, because…..
This time, we cats need to work harder on herding ourselves in the right directions to build lasting coalitions to improve the world.
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and the left won’t be given a real shot. “Hey we tried HCR the left’s way and look what happened”.
I think progressives in congress are making a HUGE mistake not distancing themselves from this.
(except for the typo’s) lol
yeah. Move OVER! Sydney Panic and I Are fast becoming “radicalized”! ~Sally Panic
this one stood out to me:
That is exactly how I feel. We don’t need to just yell louder (although that’s of course necessary), we need to wave our arms or stamp our feet or some other metaphor for getting off the computer and going out into the streets. Protests, starting community gardens, volunteering at health clinics, going door to door to support local or state or national legislation (rather than personalities or candidates), getting involved in local politics – all of these things and more are necessary for a social movement. I’m glad some people are starting to realize, including me, that a social movement is necessary in addition to progressive electoral success.
churches work.
You can point out again and again and again how things have been deliberately rigged in the favor of the rich and things like the MIC and so on. Over time, that may make a difference, but where people’s loyalties lie is in those who are there for them in the tough times.
As we talk about coalition building in cyberspace, one thing I hope we will think about more and more is how we can help people through the worst of the worst that is coming.
For the center this is about politics. For the left it is about talk. And no I am no more good about that than anyone else so in some measure I am talking to myself (heh, what else is new?).
There is a saying out there for churches that those on the far religious right are more concerned about souls and less concerned about bellies.
For different reasons people revile organizations like the Mormon Churches and Hamas, but one thing they do is create structures not so much to “resist” but to help their people — or as much to help their people as resistance by winning them over philosophically. Through thinking about the belly as much as about the soul, they create hundreds or thousands of converts. I would tend to suggest that we of the Left you speak of try to begin doing the same thing, but with a different message attached — one of non-violence and social aggregation.
Uniting is a prerequisite for resisting effectively. And to do that we have to start creating communities.
We are The Conservative Center.
The “left” is a bunch of looney freaks with crazy ideas like huge free government socialist programs for deadbeats like wall street and the pentagon who can’t survive by producing anything useful for anyone but instead think they should be to live off the sweat and toil of everyone else.
F*ck them. Let them be left behind.
The Conservative Center (us) wants to conserve the environment for the children and the future, wants to ensure prosperity and safety from terror for all, and wants to conserve constitutional ideals like the rule of law. And maybe a few other things you can think of.
…whenever the masses have turned to the left for help during bad times, they have found that we are right…as long as we work to restore their comfort and bury our own concerns in the file labeled Things to be worked on later ™.
BTD at TalkLeft pointed out a piece from Harold Meyerson of the Washington Post
I agree with BTD that Obama is not especially progressive and he is not our leader and Meyerson, who is an inside Beltway Leftist, is still failing to recognize that. That failure will continue to marginalize the Left/Progressive movement. That will be the failure of Dkos and other left/progressive blogs and groups. We need to get them to wake up and smell the coffee. Be the “Reality Based Community” they claim to be.