One Disgusted Democrat

Times are tough for anti-corporate, big-government-loving, social-welfare-fixated progressive Democrat like me. The shine is off the Obama administration after a year of too much money for banks, too few jobs for the jobless, too little action in Congress and too infrequent communication from the White House. The Democrats in Congress act as if they're in the minority, running scared of their own shadow, meanwhile the Republicans perfect their strategy of pure negation.

In such a climate, what is two-fisted progressive to do? I toyed with the idea of starting a third political party of my own, dedicated to the proposition that the GOP has degenerated into a frankly pernicious force in American life, a party so utterly bankrupt that any attempt to deal with them in good faith--as Democrats to this day seem hellbent on doing--was self-defeating. I batted the third party idea around for a couple weeks, conducted a straw poll on the idea of a few similarly liberal-minded Internet friends of mine as well as a Democrats Abroad listserv. Soon, however, I came to recognize that third parties are doomed from their inception. Neither they nor their members will ever accrue any real power to change things. Moreover, I don't have any major disagreement with the general thrust of Democratic Party policy-making, at least as it is articulated by some of its more liberal adherents. The thing that drove me to the brink of fringe-party madness is the rank cowardice and mealymouthed inconstancy the Democrats displayed in the wake of Scott Brown's win in Massachusetts. I thought, "What, our majority drops to 59/41 and we just fold up our tent? We just let the Repubs strut around like this single-state victory, born out of Martha Coakley's hubris and Brown's good looks as much as anything else, gives them some kind of mandate? Here is one more Republican lie to go with all the others, and we just sit here and eat it? How can I be a part of this party of milquetoasts?"

The answer, of course, is that I can and I will for no other reason that I have no other choice. If America is ever to see universal health insurance coverage or an effective response to global climate change or any number of lesser but still significant improvements in our lives, it will be at the hands of Democrats. They're the only game in town. That doesn't mean, though, that every cowardly, uninspired schmuck of a Democratic incumbent needs to be supported in his bid for reelection. If the crazies of the Republican right can drag their officials rightward with primary election challenges and occasionally topple an incumbent altogether, there is no reason that progressives of the Democratic left can't do the same. If I lived stateside (I don't), I'd be going to precinct meetings, doing as much as I could to agitate within the Democratic Party for an aggressive response to the Republican threat. The time for deal-making and triangulation is over. What's at stake is our leaders' ability to govern in such a way as to address the problems that face us in a meaningful way. The Republicans don't want any governance at all. To paraphrase conservative stalwart Grover Norquist, they want to shrink the government to such point as it can easily "be drowned in a bathtub."