The frustration from the Left is clear and getting louder.
In comments, via email and across the blogosphere, I get all of it, and agree with most of it (as I recently told a friend, sometimes I think we're going down like Charlie in "Flowers for Algernon"; that China or somebody put a giant Emdumbening Ray satellite in geosynchronous orbit over the United States in 1975 and we've just been getting stupider ever since. And the two questions the Left must absolutely demand that Barack Obama answer as he gears up for 2012 are "How could you have been so big a chump?" and "Why did you waste your first year and trade away so many things that were important to us...for nothing?")
And then I remembered that I have this here blog, so rather than responding in oneses and twoses, let me say this.
Over in the Better Universe, people have multiple, distinctive ideologies that both compete and cooperate with each other (in business, this is called "cooptition") and from which they can form governing coalitions to solve problems.
Here, we have a Democratic Party that can be budged incrementally in the direction of rational and humane problem-solving as long the crisis is immediate and scary and then only as long as we Constantly Scream At Them and beat them on the soles of their feet. Even then, after they get our nickels and dimes and sweat and votes, we get 1/4 of a loaf, a lot of chin music, and the back of Rahm Emanuel's hand.
On the Right we have American Fascism, right out in the open, being energetically championed by people who are unhinged, despicable, impervious to reason and ridiculous well-funded.
Those are the choices: A Democratic Party which depends on us for everything they have, which is still shot through with decent, honorable, hard-working men and women, and which nonetheless still treats us like a smelly hobo to whom they occasionally feel obliged to toss a bone...and a Republican Party now wholly captive to outright psychotics and which sees us as internal enemies to be wiped out.
In 1919, Max Weber wrote:
"Politics means slow, strong drilling through hard boards, with a combination of passion and a sense of judgment."
Over in the Better Universe, that "drilling through hard boards" is still difficult, but not the fuck-all frustrating nightmare it has become here.
But we don't live in the Better Universe.
We live here, in a place where our choices are complete capitulation to the hysterical and amply bankrolled vanguard of a new Dark Age...or building our own Better Universe in the face of ridiculous odds, incompetent and unreliable allies and malevolent opposition.
And to make matters worse, given the news of fresh outrages and enervating failures that are delivered to us piping hot every day, it is not just a choice that principled political agnostics can make once, but one that we are forced to re-visit and renegotiate every fucking day.
I'm tired too, and frustrated, and heartily sick of having to argue with idiots whose discredited and ludicrous opinions continue to find a place at the head of the table, while begging "friends" to please, please, please stop selling out what remains of the few Liberal values that 30 years of Conservatism has not obliterated in a vain attempt to bribe those same idiots into behaving like responsble adults for five minutes at a stretch.
All that being said, I do not know what tomorrow will bring, but today I'll side with Churchill:
"For myself I am an optimist - it does not seem to be much use being anything else."
UPDATE: Welcome C&L Readers!
