Take Heart

Take heart, progressives!  We will be getting our butts kicked in the upcoming election and I don't want to minimize that, but it is useful to remember that all does not revolve around politics.  I guess that's what George Soros has decided, too, when he says he will be devoting his efforts and money to nonpolitical groups and bypassing the politicians.

But even in the political arena, things aren't always as they seem.  There have been times in the past when the Republicans have won the short-term tactical battle but the progressive agenda marches forward.  A couple instances come to mind, dating back to Nixon.

The conservatives controlled the China agenda for many years but Richard Nixon finally engaged China in a way that a progressive president wouldn't have been allowed to do.  So we progressives were labeled as weak on China, but the correct agenda was pursued anyway.  That trade-off is worth it.  If you want to be a progressive in this country, just get used to it.

The other example was on Vietnam.  In the 1972 election, McGovern was labeled as weak and naive, and Nixon had his plan to end the war.  McGovern was trounced.  But guess what?  Nixon pretty much did what McGovern said we should.  It was a tragedy that Nixon prolonged the war when we could have gotten to the same place years earlier, but we did end up there in any case.  So who was really naive?

Occasionally politics leads culture, but more often it is the culture that drags the politicians along (civil rights, Vietnam, etc.).  For example, the snapshot of politics today says that the American public is against the health care law.  But that snapshot also shows that most Americans are in favor of most of the specifics in the law.  So even if the Republican/Tea Party succeeds in toying with it for a while, something like it will have to happen because the current system is unsustainable, and the only things the Republicans put on the table (like tort reform) at best just nibble at the edges of the problem.

The same is true for a host of other issues.  The Republican/Tea Party message on the economy today is just a repackaging of the same song we've heard since the '80s, namely, that the only way the current version of capitalism can survive is for the bottom 90% of the economy to lower its standard of living even more.  (That's really the heart of Paul Ryan's plan.)  It's a bankrupt, zero-sum philosophy and it cannot survive, nor does it deserve to.

So although none of this is inevitable, I will try to say optimistic that we progressives are on the right side of history, and that the Republican/Tea Party can only delay what's right but not prevent it.