I keep on hearing the same refrain: they're no different. I keep on seeing things go further to the right when they take over, further than if we were in charge.
Truth is, giving up is what gives the right it's power. They don't quit applying pressure or voting for right-leaning candidates when they get confounded. Quite the opposite. But we do, and we expect our people to take it as punishment. We lament voting for the lesser of two evils.
Tell me: would you prefer voting for the greater evil that allowed the Hobby Lobby case and so many others to go the way they did?
I had a very strict, very conservative Civics teacher. She did me a favor, though. She gave me a thorough knowledge of how our government works, from the President down to the House committee. I learned early on how much of a sausage grinder our system was.
More importantly, though, I learned exactly what I meant that we did not live in a pure democracy, that we lived in a democratic, representative, constitutional republic.
5-4 that decision went, like so many others these last few years. Another naive, can-of-worms style, anti-liberal decision, even six years into the Obama Administration.
We had just five hundred votes short of having a Democrat in there, deciding so many things, from whether we would go to war in Iraq, to what kind of fiscal policy we would pursue. More importantly, the decisions made a difference in whose party's policies would dominate. To the extend that some of our leaders are weathervanes, it didn't help that the winds were blowing towards the fearless leader, and he was a conservative, fully willing to swell his side's ranks to get what he wanted. We wouldn't have seen a Harriet Miers or Alberto Gonzales nominated for the court, much less get an Alito or a Roberts there.
We keep letting the GOP have those victories, then keep complaining that our politicians don't heed the will of the Democratic Party. Well, why should they when the political trends are not clearly moving in our direction?
This is not about blaming anybody for what happened before. How can we know what will happen? This is to say that since we don't know what will happen unless we try, we need to commit ourselves to creating the best, most liberal government we can. We won't get everything we want all at once. We need to get power first, consolidate it, and then achieve a greater degree of party discipline once we know we have the people to spare.