We’re not doomed.

So sit down, grab an oar and shut up.

Yes, before there was Agent Smith, there was Dr. Smith. The perpetually whining “We’re doooomed”, “We’ll never make it”, “It’s all hopeless”, Dr. Smith.

Of course, I’m sure you “Lost in Space” geeks all remember that Dr. Smith started out as a saboteur. A bomb-planting paid agent of “The Reds.” A fifth columnist stranded on the ship by accident who worked tirelessly, nibbling cancerously from within, counseling defeat and failure when Plan A failed to destroy the Jupiter II outright.

Until it devolved into the Will Robinson, Robot and Dr. Smith Comedy Half Hour (and don't think for a minute that Guy Williams or June Lockhart were anything but highly pissed off at the new arrangement.)

When I hear a weary fellow traveler tired of the long road, in my own small way, I try to offer a little comfort and a laugh. I'm sure you do the same: the knowledge that we are not alone is a powerful, healing and revivifying thing.

But when I hear someone adamantly advising lay-down-and-die-ism, I cannot help but think of Dr. Smith.

I have to ask myself, why are you practically watering-at-the-mouth eager to get others to give up and give in? Who but an enemy ever whispers in your ear that you should slip the barrel of the revolver into your mouth and pull the trigger?

This comes by way of a terrific little chat people were having in one of the comments section over the nature and future of politics in and out of the party system.

(Side note: I am a lucky guy in some ways, and one that’s prominent every single day is the level and thoughtfulness of comments that I receive, and the degree of serious engagement ideas get “below decks”. Some very sharp people come around here and talk some very interesting talk, and you have no idea how much I appreciate it; how much I simply love sitting back and learning new things, or having old concepts everted and re-examined.

I don’t say “Thanks” often enough for that, so thank you. End maudlin side note)

I’m a strong believer in holding my own Party to account, in the same way I’m strongly in favor of setting a broken ankle...after you first take care of the massive chest wound that’s gouting arterial blood in great, huge arcs in every direction.

People that don’t know how to triage problems piss me off, and people that insist on shooting the bottom out of the lifeboat are nothing but reckless.

However, it is a balancing act, no doubt about it. How do you shotgun marry idealism with the dirty realities of politics and not run screaming for the exit? Except there is no exit, and there is no Eden, and no Prefect Candidate is going to descend from a Spielberg Cloud Effects Heaven and save us from our own dumbassery.

Sorry, but it’s just you & me, kiddo, and a whole bunch of crazies on one side, and quite a number of children on the other who are going to stomp off in a huff (a bio-diesel or hybrid Huff one might suspect) if they don’t get Utopia Right Now. So given those constraints, how do you, as Harlan Ellison described writing for teevee, climb the mile-high mountain of shit to pick a perfect rose from the summit and still retain your sense of smell?

Well, for starters, the Kerensky Government was a fascinating mess, but consider what replaced it.

The Weimar Republic became an unmanageable joke, but what civilized person would not wish it back into ailing, doddering existence if it meant that the world would be spared the Third Reich.

To choose between Good and Evil is child’s play; it’s choosing between the lesser of two evils – and knowing that you’ll have to pour an ocean of sweat over the course of generations into the your choice in order to force it to begin to live up to your ideals – that’s the real game. A game for grownups.

So we’re talking of such things (like we do) and commentator Malacandra (whose profile links to this site) summed up my own position so very well that I thought I’d bring those comments topside for a little more attention.

Malacandra said...

stealthbadger's sets up a condition:
When I see people like Wellstone in office again, then I'll believe we're getting somewhere.

I think that's a completely acceptable indication that hard work is paying off.

But first comes the hard work.

I'm just as critical as anyone else who complains that the Democratic Party hasn't done enough to distinguish itself from the Republicans, by and large.

This presents a number of options:

1) Despair that both parties suck and give up.
2) Despair that both parties suck, but since one sucks marginally less than the other, support it.
3) Despair that both parties suck and try to start a third party.
4) Wait until, by act of Divine Grace, some messianic candidate will appear who will fix things.
5) Work with others who feel as you do to gain control over one of the parties.

Since I started paying attention, in the mid-seventies, progressives have mostly been bouncing back and forth between choices 1, 2, 3 and 4.... while the right-wingers chose Door Number 5.

Here's the thing about these options, respectively:

1) Giving up means that your opponent has won. Not an option, given our opponent.

2) This works fine, assuming can resign yourself to electing people who suck marginally more or less than one another.

3) This is doomed to failure for a number of reasons. In a winner-take-all system, third party candidates are spoilers at best. And the voting reforms needed to change the winner-take-all nature of national politics won't happen: The bloated, inertial bodies of the Democratic & Republican party will stand together in concert to impede the way of the establishment of any 'progressive' party.

4) Messiahs get crucified. (c.f. The Dean Scream, Gary Hart, RFK, and an endless array of others ) If we’re to take our country back, it isn’t going to be because some great political giant will come along and make the Bad Men Go Away: if there isn’t sufficient ground work, even a giant can be brought down by an army of Lilliputians. To effect political change, you need a bunch of people who can give air cover and ground support to even the most exemplary of leaders. Especially them.

5) This is the strategy that worked for the right-wing loonies who blight our nation... back when they found themselves in a similar fix to the one we're in now. The media was against them. They didn't have the presidency, the house or the senate. For them, 1964 was like our 2004. You know how crazy the media made Dean seem to the Man in the Street? That was Barry Goldwater 40 years ago: "In your guts, you know he's nuts". So what did they do? They took the long view and decided that a Republican Party without much going for it was the perfect Host Organism for them. Why start from scratch when there's an organization with a national presence that one can take control of?

If I'm reading driftglass right, he's saying that if you don't like these Democrats, then it's time to raise us up a whole new crop. But to do that, we have to plant seeds, water them, fertilize them, and not just stand around waiting to see if this year the crops look better than the field we left fallow last year.

On a personal level, because I don't like a whole lot of the Democrats we've got now, I'm trying to become the kind of Democrat I want to see more of. It's an inside job.

I think we’ve got to look to each other, starting on the local level, in our communities... to build a political climate in which we rise up through the ranks... supporting each other with time and money... and increasingly occupy positions of influence and authority in order to institute the changes we desire and desperately need.

If you think that'll take time, you're absolutely right. There's no time to waste.

But if anyone has got a better alternative, I'd love to hear the plan.

My reply...

Right on the money. I'll do fury and sadness (and some naughty stuff that I'll blog about one day), but I don't do despair. Counciling "We're all doooomed" is easy and lazy and let's people off the hook. Vast, untraceable conspiracy is to the cynical-to-the-point-of-useless Left what the Rapture is the the Right: the final act of a story already written.

Churchill faced odds a hundred orders of magnitude worse. So did Washington. So did Lincoln.

This is a fight, but it is a winnable fight, and those who say "Shit this is heavy!" and then thow their shoulder into it because the cause is worth the pain are our heroes.

Damned right it's heavy. So what?

But those who say that the fight is over and that we should lay down and die, or that we should spend our passions on useless boutique movements that stand no chance of doing anything are every bit as much of an impediment as anything Rove can throw in our direction.