Patriots and Tyrants

No one is impressed with your knowledge of spelling or grammar. "Learn to spell" is not an argument. Criticizing someone's use of verb tenses is not an argument. If you understand what someone wrote well enough to ridicule or correct their spelling or grammar, then you probably understand it well enough to write something about their actual argument. Please do not use bandwidth and storage space doing your impression of a kindergarten teacher.

That is all.

I'll be surprised if some Progressive Caucus members don't vote nay on this rotten failure of a stimulus package. First of all, the bill sucks. It is too small and the money is not spent appropriately. Second, it will probably pass, so if some members want to cast a protest vote they will be safe in doing so. But I'd rather the progressives withhold their support entirely until the bill is fixed. At best, the garbage Reid and Pelosi have come up with will delay a deepening of the recession. It's literally less than half the necessary size. At some point, sometime, progressive Democrats will have to risk something bad happening in order to make something good happen.

So how many times a day am I told that the Congressional Democrats can't be all left-wingers because a real left-winger can't win in vast swathes of the country and so we would be in the minority and then what?

The answer is, I hear it a lot! My argument is, being more left-wing would make the party more effective on a per-congressperson or -senator basis. The Republicans accomplished almost their entire agenda when they were in power, and even now, when they are in the minority, they can have a great deal of influence over legislation. This is because they are more ideologically uniform and extreme with a few exceptions. They are also more dedicated that the Democrats, which I think goes along with the uniformity and extremity. As a rule they don't need to compromise with each other. Therefore they are able to simply act, rather than begging dozens of collaborators in their own party not to shaft them.

Right now there are 255 Dems in the House. Would you  give up 35 of them to get 220 actual liberals and leftists? I would. 220 is still a majority, and with a majority of legitimate Democrats there would be nothing in the way of progressive legislation.

The Senate is more difficult because its rules are designed to keep democracy from working. But with 56 Dems in there now, I would trade the current situation for a Senate with 51 progressive Democrats.

Maybe you like different numbers, but my point is, there's more to it than the numbers. Once you have a majority, the value of adding to it starts to diminish, especially in the House. I understand the fifty state strategy and what it accomplished. But I don't think that we actually gain by adding a Republican to the Democratic majority. It makes it harder for the actual Democrats to solve problems, because there's always some fake there in their meetings screwing things up.

Many liberals seem inclined to believe that if most people were better educated, or if they were better informed, or if we had more informative media, then they would all stop voting Republican. Rich people would be the only Republican constituency. I even hear liberals talking this way about people like Dick Cheney -- doesn't he understand this or that?

I think this way of looking at Republican voters is very misleading. Most people are not completely cut off from schools, and libraries, and NPR, and the Internet, and bookstores,and opposing viewpoints. Especially not these days. Besides, there are plenty of people supporting Republicans who definitely have access to all of these things. This is not a matter of education and access to information. It is a matter of priorities.

Take the Iraq war as an example. We all know that a lot of people believed that Iraq was connected to the 9/11 attacks, even though that is completely untrue. Millions of people still believe this lie. Obviously that belief made one more likely to support the war at the start. If those people had been better informed, if the local news was reporting each night, IRAQ HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH 9/11, would there have been more opposition to the war? I think not. I think this is looking at the problem backwards. People didn't support the war because they had this mistaken belief -- they had this mistaken belief because they wanted the war, and felt like they needed some reason to want it that didn't sound totally nuts. People supported the war because they wanted the war. You can lock them inside a teach-in at Columbia for six hours, and they're still going to want the war, because it satisfied some psychological need for them.

With the economy right now, many liberals seem to think that once people who voted for Republican Senators see what happens without enough aid to states, then those Senators won't be Senators for much longer. But this assumes that those Republican voters voted the way they did because they wanted help for their state economies, or lower unemployment, and so on. Do you really think that after the evidence of the last twenty years, someone voted Republican because they wanted sane economic policy?

I think it's obvious that they didn't care about that either way, or they would have supported the Democrat. What you think are in the best interests of Republican voters in Utah or Kentucky aren't necessarily what those people think are in their best interests. Possibly  those voters feel that it's in their best interests to achieve the catharsis of watching a foreign city destroyed, or to maintain the feeling of well-being they get from pretending that they are superior to African-Americans. Maybe they feel that it's in their best interests that women be forced to give birth, or for Christian fundamentalists to run the public schools. Maybe they don't vote for sane economic policy because they aren't voting on that basis.

I think that for many liberals this is a difficult problem. It's one thing to think of Republican voters as ignorant suckers who we have to rescue from themselves. It's not as pleasant to think of them as opponents who must be defeated in order to set the country on the right track. But I think the latter is the actual situation. Republican voters know what they are doing, and they know what they want. They want something crazy, but they can still vote, and you can't persuade them because your goals and motivations are totally different from their goals and motivations. I think we'd be way more effective as a party if we all understood that. Republican voters don't' care if we have a depression, or at any rate it is not a primary issue for them. They have their own issues, and we are never going to find common ground with them.

Ultimately, it really is about moral values. The complicated part is that not everyone has the same moral values, and sometimes it's impossible for everyone to see their moral values expressed through the government at the same time. 

Stan Collender.