There IS a Way Out of This Hell

[Joanne98]

Anger. Despair. Loathing. Sorrow.

The wake of the healthcare debacle could almost make a progressive nostalgic for the Bush Administration.

Not in the weirdly fanciful sense of sophomoric equivalence between the Obama and Bush administrations promulgated by some, but rather in the sense of common purpose progressives felt leading up to the elections of 2006 and 2008. We knew what had to be done in those halcyon days. We knew the forces against which we were fighting. And while we had some disagreements in the selection of our ship's captain, there was no doubt about the danger we faced from the privateer cannons directed against us under the banner of the Elephant. It was either sink the privateers, or be sunk--perhaps forever.

The wake of the healthcare debacle has irrevocably altered that mindset. Those heady days now seem far away from the darkness of today, when in our darker moments we talk openly of mutiny, or even of taking common cause with the scurvy-ridden, obscenity-shouting scum floating aimlessly among the wreckage of our enemy's blasted hull.

thereisnospoon's diary :: :: Glenn Greenwald and Jane Hamsher have come today to embody that sense of disillusionment on our side. They personify a growing number of disappointed progressives who rightly understand that the battles we fought in 2006 and 2008 were either wholly inadequate to our stated goals, or even wholly irrelevant to them. The Democratic Party, we are told, has been irrevocably subdued, bought out and sold to the highest bidder--a kinder, gentler band of pirates flying a smiling skull-and-crossbones against a cheerful drapeau of bright blue, engaged in perpetual mock combat against our red-flagged opponents in a battle designed to enthrall the onlooking spectators as the true masters pick their unwitting pockets. We are told that in order to defeat our overlords, we must free our minds from the reality we take for granted, and engage instead in a new fight against corporatism, welcoming whatever aid we may find along the way, no matter how distasteful.

Jeffrey Feldman neatly and eloquently exposes the fallacy of this appeal to false consciousness: it is clear that the Left and the Right hold two vastly different views of the fundamental privileges held by the private and the public. As Feldman makes clear, the Right envisions a society in which no government can encompass a corporation, while the Left desires a society in which no Corporation can encompass or purchase a government. Moreover, as the Right has become increasingly extreme in its views, the purer manifestations of this Objectivist lunacy increasingly have the loudest, tea-addled voices. Clearly these twain cannot and will not meet. There is a Left. There is a Right. There is a battle royale, and it is not illusory. But what, then, explains our inability to chart a true course through the choppy seas of the healthcare debate? Is it Captain Obama? Is it our big blue ship itself? Feldman's most important paragraph is deeply illustrative on this point:

The difficulty is that neither the current political organization nor the current economic concepts in the debate are anywhere close to developed enough to offer a viable alternative. Even with the existence of the elegantly effective "single payer" idea, there is no equivalently effective model of political organization to achieve it. And so we are stuck with messy.

Feldman ends with an appeal to strive for a more actionable definition of "corporatism" as a way out of a dungeon inelegantly mapped out by Greenwald and Hamsher. Yet his antipenultimate paragraph above already shows us the path we must walk, even as he tacitly despairs of even attempting to do so. It is the same path I advocated earlier in No One Is Going To Save You Fools:

If you want to win, you will ORGANIZE. You will organize in the same way the Right has done for the last 40 years, and you will spend money on persuasion, where it really matters. You will, in short, make the politicians as afraid of you as they are of them. The Right has built vast networks of think tanks, newspapers, periodicals, cable news channels, and political advocacy organizations to spread their finely tuned, well-honed messages. Their politicians may fail them, and their actual policies may be deeply unpopular, but their message machine nearly always works its magic to get them what they want, even when Democrats are in power...

If you want to win, ORGANIZE. Develop parallel organizations willing to persuade with the power and intensity of a corporation. As long as people like me are out there, and most of them are willing to work for the highest bidder, you'll need to stop looking for saviors, and instead learn to fight fire with fire.

At the time I wrote those words, many derided them as vague, fanciful and even magical thinking. It is easy to call for greater organization: the devil, of course, is in the details. This is true. Money, time, and credibility are all necessary components of this strategy, and there is no immediately obvious pathway to any of these. But it is easier and more reality-based to attempt to resolve our organizational deficit vis-a-vis the Right, than to entertain notions of impossibly flawed alliances or resolution of our troubles by coming to a more precise theoretical view of the problem.

The truth is that progressives have the time, talent and ability to work incredible organizational magic far more quickly and more nimbly than the Right has done over the last three decades. As Markos Moulitsas made clear in Crashing the Gate, the Right developed an incredibly expensive infrastructure designed for a 20th century media environment. And as effective as they have been, they haven't been nearly as effective as they could be. The Left can create a far more influential and deeply effective message machine speedily and at vastly reduced cost.

There are a number of reasons for this:

•The Internet has become a revolutionary leveler of the playing field. No longer need a talented individual or group of individuals purchase access to an expensive media platform, when the Internet increasingly provides communications platforms for opinion writing, video, and audio. And this revolution, hard as it is to believe, is only beginning. We don't need to invest money in buying newspapers or cable TV stations or AM radio bandwidth wholesale: all of those dying or increasingly irrelevant in an increasingly accessible and hyperlocalized media environment.

•The vast majority of America's creative capital and talent is liberal. One need only look to Comedy Central or Avatar to see the full force of this. The truth is that the Left has been winning the majority of the culture wars directly due to the influence of film, television and music. If the James Camerons of the world were to put 1/10 of that level of creative intensity toward winning the economic wars, we could move the needle in a major way.

continued>>>
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/12/27/819517/-There-IS-a-Way-Out-of-This-Hell

[Goldstein1984]

1. You lost me at

"...weirdly fanciful sense of sophomoric equivalence between the Obama and Bush administrations..."

[glitch]

3. Yeah that is gratuitous, a sign of weakness. But the author does make some good points. nt

[Goldstein1984]

4. Yes. There are some good points

But you know that old saying about catching more flies with honey.

I would have saved the jab until the end.

[glitch]

6. I would have left the jab out. Strong arguments don't need them and this had plenty of those. :) nt

[midnight]

2. Joanne is very smart....... And organized..... good points..... Never give up...

[Goldstein1984]

5. Here is the problem I see

I would imagine that the top 2%, which controls as much wealth as the bottom 95%, are mostly Right Wingers with a huge investment in the status quo. Further, I would imagine that, when 2% of the population controls as much wealth as the bottom 95% of the population, they have much more disposable wealth with which to do battle.

I hope the people with the resources to do all of that stuff do it. And I hope the pacified masses drag themselves away from their sports, X-Boxes, Wiis and reality television and pay attention.

Until then, I'm:
Holding politicians accountable for their promises
Doing everything I can to boycott the economic system that powers TPTB

[bertman]

7. First problem, Goldstein1984, is how do you hold them accountable when they are already

accountable to the people who get them elected--namely the Top 2% you already mentioned. You can elect as many 'different' ones as you want, but the result will still be the same because you are only ALLOWED to vote for the ones they want you to vote for. Of course, there are a few weirdo/eccentric exceptions who prove the rule.

Today as I was watching a highlights segment of a sports channel devoted to pro football, I asked myself what would happen if those hundreds of thousands of fans who were filling those immense stadii decided that it would be better to spend that money and time on political awareness and change instead of on attending a sporting event.

Then I thought about how many people were Watching The Game On TeeVee and wondered the same about them.

And then I began to wonder if we will ever be able to get ENOUGH people to WANT change as long as they have their pro football and Oprah and WWF and all of the other distractions that keep us preoccupied.

[Tesha]

8. I've claimed that as long as the beer's still cold and the TV's on, people will *NEVER* pay enough..

...attention to rise up and overthrow their corporate masters. They'll
just keep swapping between the Red demi-party and the Blue demi-
party as the staged propaganda moves them ever-so-slightly back
and forth between the two false "opposites".

Tesha

[Goldstein1984]

13. I'm afraid you are correct

The masses have been engineered to self-pacify.

Things are going to have to get worse (can't find beer; can't afford beer) before people suffer enough to change the system.

That's one of the reasons I've advocated, and been shot down for, a massive economic boycott. The argument against is that a lot of working people will suffer. I think that's also the argument for.

[pokercat999]

21. Could it be? Cold beer and TV have replaced religion? nt

[Goldstein1984]

12. You are correct

There aren't enough people who know the plural of stadium is stadii to make a difference.

The masses are pacified.

[bertman]

9. I like that, Joanne98, but I do want to quibble with a line of argument about Left versus Right:

" . . . the Right envisions a society in which no government can encompass a corporation, while the Left desires a society in which no Corporation can encompass or purchase a government. Moreover, as the Right has become increasingly extreme in its views, the purer manifestations of this Objectivist lunacy increasingly have the loudest, tea-addled voices. Clearly these twain cannot and will not meet. There is a Left. There is a Right. There is a battle royale, and it is not illusory."

The Right is no more monolithic than the Left. I have many friends who consider themselves conservatives or right-wingers for any number of reasons. They puff all up when I challenge their reasons for supporting the more virulent crap that Limbaugh and O'Reilly and company put forth as reasoned argument. But, bottom line, THEY ARE NOT CORPORATISTS. They are folks who have been conned into believing that Big Government is the problem, when the reality is it's Big Business that's the problem. They can be disabused of these notions if one can show them the many ways that government SERVES them that they take for granted and do not want to give up: police protection, fire protection, safe food, clean water, clean air, good highways, the VA, to name a few. Just ask them how they'd like for some international conglomerate controlled by Saudi princes to run their local police department and see the reaction you get.

Most of the 'foot soldiers' on the right are one short firing of a synapse away from becoming Left Wingers. It's up to the marketing geniuses of the Progressive wing to come up with the ads and the pithy slogans that will fire those synapses.

Most Americans who work for a living believe in fairness. The Left is all about fairness. The Right is all about exclusivity. If we can ever get that message across we will have a lot of converts from the right side of the political spectrum.

REGARDING Organizing. I agree completely and will begin working to that end.

Rec.

[winyanstaz]

10. k &R

[Atticus]

11. That post was worth wading through a week's worth of internecine pissing contests. Thank you.

I have to say that whenever I read or hear "Organize", I think of labor unions. As another reply mentioned, those of us in the lower 95% may control as much wealth as the top 2%, but THEY can afford to spend a much larger portion of theirs and still not have to worry about being evicted or foreclosed on. Their children will have medical care, shoes and plenty to eat if they contribute over half their income to Freedomworks and the Heritage Foundation.

Our people have to find something besides money to fight their money. In the past, labor unions and some churches have provided the framework---the "organization"---for some pretty powerful political movements. I hope things don't have to get absolutely terrible before people realize that labor unions were, and could again be, the backbone of America's progressive middle class.

[Vidar]

14. K&R.

[raccoon]

15. K&R. nt

[MasonJar]

16. It seems to me that there are some valid points that we could use to

go forward. Number one is the very obvious fact that the internet is just beginning its power. We certainly should be able to change the face of this country through the internet if we begin now and act quickly and expertly. It is necessary to espose corporations and their influence to the many and soon. Then we need to insist on finance reform, make it a cry of the people. Until the big money is out of camgaigns we, the people, are doomed. Once we manage true campaign reform the corporations are dead. Big business has ruled before in US history and has been thwarted. We just have to accomplish that again. The internet is our chance and our vehicle. But getting rid of big money in elections must take priority as our rallying cry. IMHO.

[inna]

17. KR+20.

Thanks for posting this, the author makes some interesting points.

[Martin Eden]

18. K&R -- OP makes a helluva lotta sense

in addition to message & persuasion, we need to target Democratic primaries to replace corporatist blue dogs, then focus on close elections in the general.

[KoKo]

19. Sorrow....K&R..for HOPE!

[puebloknot]

20. K&R anyway! Great, intelligent post.

I dream of a quiet, general economic strike, which is the strongest weapon we have. Ideally, we all just quit spending on *anything* for a time. Or, it could happen the way it did in Gandhi, but there's not enough desperation to fuel it. Not yet.

I have thought that although the idea of an inspired citizenry taking to the barricades is appealing, we may see a "general strike" happen simply out of economic collapse, and not driven by high-minded principle. In which case, who can say what we would face? Rebuilding through a domestic Marshall Plan, or starvation and gulags?

The idea of peaceful revolution through the Internet is very exciting. I'll vote for that.

[fasttense]

22. An easy quiet little revolution on the internets will have no results.

The richest 300 families in America who own most of our national wealth are detached and unconcerned about what real people live through. They could care less if you boycott something here and there. Eventually you have to buy their crap and if you starve and go bankrupt in the mean time, they don't care. They are insulated, isolate, unconcerned and self involved. They have it all and know their children and grand children will own America for centuries.

A quiet little revolt on the internets will mean absolutely nothing.

What you have to do is get out on the streets - like in Iran. Use the internet, twitter and cell phones to arrange and organize. But in the end you have to spend months and months on the streets, inconveniencing the richest 300 families. Make them have to wait to satisfy an urge and you will have caught their attention. Spend months in the streets in DC pressuring our pretend democracy. That scares these wealthy elite because they fear the pitchforks will turn on them, like in France. like in Russia.

You have to get off the couch, away from your neighborhood and into the streets for months and months and months. Bring along pitchforks and torches, you are going to need them.

Until millions of Americans protest in the streets for months and months, nothing is going to change.

[showpan]

23. you are absolutely correct

Until massive demonstrations take place, nothing will change. Those 300 families that control everything will soon control our internet content as well, this change is already happening.