Raise your hand if this seems familiar:
"In the middle of the summer Moses the raven suddenly reappeared on the farm, after an absence of several years. He was quite unchanged, still did no work, and talked in the same strain as ever about Sugarcandy Mountain. He would perch on a stump, flap his black wings, and talk by the hour to anyone who would listen. `Up there, comrades,' he would say solemnly, pointing to the sky with his large beak -- `up there, just on the other side of that dark cloud that you can see -- there it lies, Sugarcandy Mountain, that happy country where we poor animals shall rest for ever from our labours!' He even claimed to have been there on one of his higher flights, and to have seen the everlasting fields of clover and the linseed cake and lump sugar growing on the hedges. Many of the animals believed him. Their lives now, they reasoned, were hungry and laborious; was it not right and just that a better world should exist somewhere else?"
That's a segment from George Orwell's classic "Animal Farm". Moses actually symbolizes the church, and its role in keeping people complacent by offering them false hope for the future. Not quite our situation, but I have to say, the rhetoric of many Democrats is beginning to resemble exactly that. Don't quit the party, just keep working! Vote in primaries! Work for your candidates, and donate as much as you can! Elect as many Democrats as possible, regardless of what they believe in! And someday, we'll have our own Goldwater Messiah, and he'll lead us to victory just like the Republicans have today! I have to say, all of that inspired me and spurred me to action after our first few Democratic losses. But after six years, it's starting to wear thin.
I haven't been doing this as long as many of you. The first time I ever voted was when I turned 18 in 2000. I was voting absentee in Florida, and given what we know about absentee ballots going to Republican counties (which mine absolutely was), my vote was almost certainly not counted. So I don't know how accurate the diaries of people like Meteor Blades and Delaware Dem are (although I respect both ENORMOUSLY). What they say certainly jibes with everything I've ever heard about "making a difference in society". Hey kids, get involved! Take over the system! Make it work for you! Be the Change You Want to See in the World! Drink Sprite! I haven't seen it work, though. I don't know if that's real, or just a political fairytale. Is "don't mourn, organize!" a real political philosophy, or is it just our liberal Sugarcandy Mountain? I don't know.
But I do know one thing: I've been angry for almost every moment of the past six years. And I've been doing things about it. But I'm still angry. I was angry that my vote wasn't being counted, so I actually flew home and protested for a weekend (keep in mind, this was literally a few days after the first time I had EVER done anything related to politics, and it was in the context of people screaming "babykiller" in your face and riots erupting in Miami-- I was terrified). Then I came home and fitfully participated in some of the school's liberal clubs, but nothing fit. Protesting in front of Niketown seemed so useless-- more for the benefit of the protesters than anything else. But I was still angry, and getting angrier. Arsenic in the drinking water, illegal immigrants in the Secretary of Labor's house, USAID killing programs because they handed out condoms. Outrage after outrage, but how quaint it seems in retrospect.
9/11 is really when rage begins in this country. Sikhs being murdered for looking like Muslims. Ann Coulter saying the government needs to round up Democrats to remind us we can be killed. The PATRIOT Act. Suddenly, we had to watch what we said, watch what we did, because if we didn't then we hated America. That's when I started to get into the blogs. That was the only place you could find any REAL news (eg: more substantial than "they hate us for our freedom"). I started to get pissed off, and began to hear the "don't leave those idiots Daschle and Gephardt, organize!" mantra in places like Democratic Underground.
And so I did. I got a few friends together and we started a College Democrats organization (the school had once had CD's but the club had effectively collapsed by 1999). In a year, we went from a few kids sitting at a lunchroom table to a huge organization with several hundred on our mailing list and nearly 50 active members who came to most of our weekly meetings. We experimented with policy forums, debates, GOTV, and we were actually able to link up with our campus' many liberal groups that had virtually ALL turned their backs on the Dems as agents of change. But the ideological pathogens of the national and state parties seemed to percolate down, and we were quickly colonized by cynical poli sci types looking for an in to the Chicago Democratic machine. Soon we were actually inviting DICK MORRIS of all people to campus, and he blatantly told us how Al Gore had absolutely deserved to lose for that "people vs. the powerful" hokum. It was my first experience with independent thinking Democrats being absolutely hosed by a better-funded , better-connected establishment.
Still, a Democratic win was a Democratic win, dammit. And so I worked. I worked for our state rep and House Rep's re-election campaign (and I respect both, so that was ok). I worked to get Lisa Madigan into the AG slot and Rod Blagojevich into the Governor's Mansion. I didn't necessarily think either was the best candidate, but the poli sci kids who had their various quotes from the New Republic and other staunch establishment critics were able to silence me. How can you disagree with triangulation, don't you know it's what got BILL CLINTON into office? Hell, I was just a science major who learned from the INTERNET of all things, what did I know about politics? The kids with their smirking Republican advisors and machine-connected professors knew far more than I ever could. My role was to shut up, do work, fire up some red meat for the website, and contribute money when I could.
The crazy thing is that we won. In 2002, the Democrats took total control of Illinois government. Amazing. And, in fact, exactly the type of outcome that Markos and others are pointing to as a panacea. But I'll come back to that in a second. But nationally, the situation was awful. As Democrats lined up behind the "take the issue away from the Republicans" strategy of supporting the war and not asking questions, the liberal websites I read went nuts. I wrote letters to Durbin (and, in desperation, Fitzgerald), which was really all I could do. But it didn't matter. Shock and awe went ahead as planned, and then the country went into absolute nutjob mode. Everyone was the enemy: all Arabs, the French, even the Democrats who had sacrificed so many of their principles to support the war. WMDs were right around the corner, dammit, and if you disagreed you just loved the terrorist Islamofascists. After the inevitable November 2nd massacre, I eventually found my way to Daily Kos and thought "wow, a pragmatic liberal who seems to get it! Awesome!" And I thought that maybe the blogs would be a better way to organize than grappling with the layers upon layers of calcification at every access point to the party I'd explored so far.
By 2003 I was getting tired of phonebanking or precinct-walking for candidates who had 80% of the support in our districts anyway. I was also getting increasingly frustrated as the Democrats continued to simply allow the injustices of the war to continue without comment. Every scandal disappeared, and most of Congress never met a Republican policy they didn't like. What was the point? But then Howard Dean exploded and for one brief second it all made sense. A regular guy, whose head isn't full of amoral political calculation, can actually get up and say what he thinks. He can tell us the war is wrong, he can say we deserve healthcare, he can talk about all the values and reasons we have for being Democrats, and make us believe in the party again. The bigwigs never forgave him for that. Apparently in making liberals love the party again he'd upset triangulation, thrown off the camouflage. And once again, a liberal dream goes up in smoke. Once again, the independent thinkers get trashed by the made men, the Establishment Dems. We get John Kerry.
And it goes on from there. Line up behind Kerry, work for the man, watch him lose. Pressure the Dems on Abu Ghraib, torture, Guantanamo, the 9/11 commission, and watch them back down. Watch them fold on Roberts and Alito. Watch them forget about New Orleans, even though the anger that raises inside you threatens to swamp everything you've felt before. Just as you're becoming numb to the Administration, New Orleans is like a jab in the eye with a needle. And it goes on and on. You work and work and the Democrats ignore you. Meanwhile, even your successes turn rotten. Many of Dean's 2004 successes have turned sour-- particularly Illinois' batch. Meanwhile, our stunning Illinois victory has yielded mixed results at best. IL's budget sucks and we've actually had to cut programs despite absolute Dem control. Earlier this year, we actually came close to effectively ending Chicago's mass transit system as a useful mode of transportation, and had to settle for sharp fare hikes and service cuts (even though the Sun-Times reported yesterday that the system is enjoying RECORD PROFITS). The governor's various healthcare programs basically involve shuffling around federal Medicaid money, and it's unclear how we're supposed to pay for the state funding component. Meanwhile, utilities are fleecing state consumers with nary a regulatory body in sight; recently, People's Energy had to be sued by private citizens when they made an error which seriously inflated people's heating bills. HOO FUCKING RAY FOR UNIFIED DEMOCRATIC GOVERNMENT!
The frustrating thing is that at this point, I'm not even arguing for ideology before. In 2000, I would have thought a man like John Murtha was a DINO. Now I love him for having the courage to stand up and speak out. That's all I want to see these days, not LIBERALS, but simply Democrats with self-respect. I'm desperate for representatives who actually act like they have any business being on the floor of Congress. I'm desperate to see Democrats who feel comfortable actually exhibiting leadership.
I guess my larger question is this: is it worth staying angry? Like I said, I've been angry at almost every moment for the past six years, but with every loss, I feel the temptation of apathy get a little stronger. Why work for people who won't work for their own success? Why argue on behalf of people who won't argue for themselves? Why fight for a party that actually attacks you for doing it? Is there ever a payoff, and has anyone actually seen it? Has anyone actually worked hard enough to "take back the party"? Or are we stuck with a history of Deans, Browns, McCarthys, and other wonderful candidates who just weren't quite good enough? Are we actually working for change, or is this just Sugarcandy Mountain?