Liberal Victories?

(In answer to Jim Wright's "Winning Civilization.")

Or we could try mobilizing women and young people for liberal causes.  There's a lot of women who have discovered what feminists knew all along: that, in the clinch, Republicans will oppress them.  Young people, who grew up during the depression that followed on the crash of 2008, knew that all along.  If liberals can assemble a coalition of women and young people, there would be little it could not do.

Against that, we have to look at Democratic betrayals.  Huge numbers of people long-term unemployed, huge numbers of people losing their homes, these things are not lightly set aside, and the Obama administration fell far short of what it could have done.  In the crash of 2008, the Democratic leadership served their rich donors, rather than the whole of the people, and the people know.  I have before alluded to the gospel saying that a man cannot serve both money and god. I would say rather money and the people, but the point stands: though the Democratic leadership is far more decent than the Republican leadership, both are far too dominated by big-money contributors.

We also have to understand better organizing in the electronic media environment. Electronic media are an enormously powerful way to motivate people, but getting them to actually organize into political factions and parties is enormously difficult, and revolutions have failed because activists have treated formal organization as unnecessary: consider Occupy and the Arab Spring. We need to concentrate, therefore, on formal organization.

Finally, we need to embrace our own activists. We must not, as Martin Luther King wrote in his "Letter from Birmingham Jail," confuse the false peace that comes from exhaustion or oppression with the true peace that comes from social justice. I do not care if activists are unsettling and disturbing, so long as they are active!