" It's Not Mere Cynicism or Demoralization - More Likely, It's Humiliation and Alienation" /Sirota

[KoKo]

It's Not Mere Cynicism or Demoralization - More Likely, It's Humiliation and Alienation
by: David Sirota
Tue Jan 19, 2010 at 21:37

Let me interject something in the midst of all the finger-pointing about the unfortunate results of the Massachusetts senate race tonight - something that I think has been missed in all the media punditry, activist Twittering and netroots blogging.

Various polls (here and here, as examples) have shown that a good chunk of the opposition to and/or frustration with the health care bill that played such a central role in the Massachusetts race comes from a progressive perspective - namely, a perspective that says the bill doesn't go far enough. How much that precise kind of opposition/frustration played a role in the Massachusetts race is anyone's guess - but among those that it did, my guess is that the feelings of demoralization are particularly intense, because those feelings are rooted in the most powerful emotion of all: humiliation.
David Sirota :: It's Not Mere Cynicism or Demoralization - More Likely, It's Humiliation and Alienation
After a 2008 campaign that saw Democrats promise to genuinely take on the health care and financial industries, we've seen a 2009 that has asked Democratic voters to fight for extremely small, extremely modest scraps. We've been relegated to having to mount fierce campaigns to keep things like the public option in the debate and not to stop trillion-dollar bailouts - but just make sure they have one or two flimsy strings attached to them.

We've loyally mounted these campaigns. They haven't been fun, and worse, they haven't been legislatively successful (at least not yet). But beyond the substantive failure is the embarrassment that comes with even having to mount such campaigns in the first place.

There is something deeply embarrassing about Democratic voters/groups having to fight with Democratic leaders to get those leaders to even seriously try (much less pass) even the smallest, most modest shreds of their promises. Having to do that evokes feelings of genuine shame - shame in front of the other voters we told to vote for Democrats because it supposedly "mattered," and shame when we look in the mirror at a self that may have allowed itself to be unnecessarily duped.

I feel this sense of humiliation every day I am talking to regular folks here in Colorado on the radio. As a longtime single-payer guy, I feel embarrassed that I've been relegated to fighting for the fulfillment of as modest a campaign promise as the public option. Likewise, as a person who opposed the bailouts from the get-go, I feel embarrassed to be relegated to simply asking for a bit of transparency and regulation from a party that promised tough New Deal-like measures against Wall Street. And my guess is that - whether consciously or not - many people who voted for Democrats in 2008 feel that same sense of shame as well.

Again, I don't know if this deep sense of humiliation is what drove down Democratic performance in Massachusetts tonight, or is driving down President Obama's numbers as a whole. But my bet is it has at least something to do with it, especially because the 2008 campaign had so much to do with raising people's expectations.

More at.........
http://www.openleft.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=17005

And, be sure to read the comments posted in reply at the site..

[Mojambo]

1. That's a good piece. n/t

[Autumn]

2. #5 and off you go

I really liked the comment one poster made, "The blue dogs seem to think that they'll get re-elected by doing nothing. And they're the only ones the White House listens to. "

[Yuugal]

3. You are right about the comments.

"Shame and outrage at being taken advantage of by representatives we not only empowered and trusted, but leaders that used that power and our trust to abuse us.
It makes my skin crawl to think of it in these terms; never in my life have I felt so abused as I do this last year by the party I've voted for since Carter, the candidates I've contributed money to and worked for. To put it bluntly, never have I felt so fucked over.

The feeling is outrage first, then, like you say, shame. And finally, more than a little bit of wanting revenge on Obama's White House. I'd like to see them discredited, to see them lose their power; to suffer in kind for the suffering they inflict by their deceit and arrogance.

Shame on them."

Wow. Someone is even madder than me.

[Howler]

4. WOW!!!!

Now that hit a nerve...painful but true.

[IndianaGreen]

5. K&R n/t

:kick:

[bemildred]

6. Well, the question is: what do you do about it?

This really does remind me of Clinton's first term, the effort to reform health care back then, which gave us the deformed health care system we have now.

The political hacks will be happy as can be if we all get "alienated" and give up on politics. I always wonder in these situations if this is not a dog-and-pony show designed to accomplish exactly that, and whether our "leaders" are really happy as can be with their "success". So, is that what we are going to do?

[Faryn Balyncd]

7. K&R...but it's not that HC "reform" didn't go far enough"...It's that it went in the WRONG DIRECTION

(But Sirota has the right idea.)



:hi:






:kick:

[Igel]

8. Sounds great.

He uses national polls.

They don't match the polling out of Mass., however. Those who opposed HCR were far higher in Mass. than in the polls he points to; those who thought it didn't go far enough were smaller.

Moreover, it misses the demographics polling entirely, which is the only (albeit less than perfect) way of mating the opinon polls to the electoral poll in the absence of exit polling. Support didn't fall that much from the tried-and-true dems, the fall-off in polling support came from precisely those who are more likely to be "unsure". We could argue that this led to lower turnout, but turnout wasn't that much lower. We're left with less than a 6% margin of victory for Brown, but probably not that much less.

So we're left arguing that the less-than-progressive HCR bill didn't fire up the base to properly increase the vote. Which, it seems, isn't just dems that always vote dem, but progressives. (Which is an interesting left-handed way of redefining the term.) I'm not sure I buy that. And I'd have to be shown that the number work out.

My best default "don't look at me" argument is that Mass. has already achieved the ends of the HCR, the HCR would muck with a popular state of affairs that even Brown endorsed, and, moreover, would most likely lead to higher taxes as Mass. residents subsidize those outside the state. I'm not sure I entirely buy it. Mostly because of the polling--I mean, I can spin it enough to make myself buy it, but it's hard to keep it from losing angular momentum.

[southernyankeebelle]

9. You said everything I was feeling and thinking but didn't know how to express it. I

want to thank you. I hope this is a wake up call to Obama.

[FlyByNight]

10. Escalation of the pipeline/poppy war in Afghanistan...

...probably didn't help either. I know it's not exactly a "kitchen table" issue but, for me personally, that decision was REALLY disappointing. (I don't live in Mass.) So far, there doesn't seem to be any willingness to rein in the MIC (or other industrial complexes for that matter), now at, what, something like $700 billion a year?

Obama and the Dem leadership would do well to ignore the Lanny Davis' of the world and start listening to people who live outside the Beltway.

:scared:

[yurbud]

11. this nails it.