American politics isn't an arena where people ask things, it's a place where people know things. It is a culture fueled by the fear of embarrassment, populated by people who have professionalized a vocation, who look down their noses at passion and sneer at the capacity to be surprised. Our political culture is a place where the pants are always pleated, the wisdom is always conventional and the worst of all crimes is iconoclasm. The people who thrive there, including the alleged Democrats among them, know everyone and everything, and are always telling the rest of us the way things are.
For instance, the lesson of the Clinton years, according to their disciples, was this: Cling to the Republican-Defined Center No Matter What, Because Democrats Won't be Able to Defeat the Republican Agenda Unless They Elect Candidates Who...Support the Republican Agenda. This is the thinking of people for whom the worst thing in the world is losing a political campaign, and it has sustained the pseudo-centrist wing of the Democratic Party for the last several years. But now that they have lost this presidential nomination campaign, and have been exposed as the courtiers they really are, it's time to start asking some questions.
Almost thirty years ago, Ronald Reagan got a lot of people to follow him down a very deep rabbit hole to a place where big is small and up is down. And unlike six-year old Alice, many, many Democratic leaders who went there never bothered to question the new, unreal reality. Instead, they assimilated, and by doing so gave credence to a Mad Hatter worldview that eventually made George Bush president and torture morally debatable.
Until late last year, when it became completely politically untenable, those Democrats smiled ruefully, first at Reagan, then Bush, then Gingrich, then George W., all in that clubby, Beltway, "you gotta give the guys credit" kind of way, as if those guys were just the widget-makers across the street. But they weren't. The product they produced is a world with much more needless suffering and death than it would have had otherwise. But the Democratic Leadership Council, Third Way types and their talking head compatriots in the media let them go about their business virtually unmolested, while they nodded indulgently at their Wonderland parsing and spinning. They routinely offered only the most tepid of objections. and then quickly moved on to the chuckling, "isn't politics fun?" portion of the show, lest they be caught caring about something.
It's been sickening to watch these "centrists" nodding their heads, smirking and mumbling, "well, yeah, that Cindy Sheehan/John Murtha/Howard Dean/Russ Fiengold/Ned Lamont/Ted Kennedy is pretty kooky, I'll give you that." What were they so afraid of? What is it about the Washington culture that makes these people have a lower threshold for embarrassment than the average teenager does? If Cindy Sheehan is crazy, how crazy is it to care more about not being seen as crazy than anything else, including opposing reprehensible policies?
The DLC'ers helped perpetuate the insidious, Orwellian double standard of modern political conversation. They routinely cautioned other Democrats about using strong rhetoric, as Bill Clinton did when he tut-tut-ed about our unseemly "hatred" of George Bush (while indulging the Bush administration's hatred of the poor, and women, and the truth.) When Democrats lost elections, the pseudos raked those Democrats over the coals, but threw up their hands when it came to the opposition and said, "Hey, those Republicans are better than we are at this campaigning stuff- what are you gonna do?"
Well, here's what we're going to do guys: We're going to stop seeing this campaigning stuff as an end in it self. We're going to climb out of the damn rabbit hole. And then we're going to ask a lot of questions: of Generals, Congressmen, Telecom CEO's, former Vice-Presidents, military contractors, Intelligence Agencies, and Mortgage Companies. We're even going to say what we think once in a while. We're also going to bowl badly and put our feet in our mouths and fall on our faces sometimes. But we're going to have a sense of humor about it, stand back up and cede the moral ground to absolutely no one, least of all those who support war-for-profit, or the dismantling of the constitution. We're going to be willing to be embarrassed, but never ashamed. And we are going to win, which we know you like to do. So why don't you join us? You didn't get into politics to be widget makers, did you? You wanted to do some good, right? Here's your chance.