Don’t get depressed — Get mad

Here’s my advice to Obama supporters: Turn off the television. Put away the depression. Get mad and get active. The race is far from over unless there has already been a stealth coup in this country — a subject for a future column. The Republicans are the party that wrecked America — and McCain and Palin are Republican to the core. They’re counting on Americans to be stupid and easily manipulated. Obama is counting on us to be smarter than that, to be Americans, a people who once were never "easily led" by demagogues.

I don’t trust the corporate media, especially the electronic kind. I don’t trust the polls. They are trying to game the outcome. The "economic royalists," to use FDR’s term, were never going to give up power easily — nor was the military industrial complex. I never doubted that the conservative base would come "home" eventually, or that this would be a close election. And there’s the elephant in the room: will enough white Americans vote for a black man?

It’s interesting to recall that, unlike many other democratic countries, America once had two mass parties. Republicans and Democrats had liberal and conservative wings. In 1936, for example, Gov. Alf Landon was a liberal Republican challenging FDR, and might have made a race of it had not his campaign been co-opted by the reactionaries in the GOP.

Now only one mass party remains: the Democrats.

This is the party of Jim Webb and Charlie Rangel. Look especially at the Democrats elected to Congress since 2006 and
you’ll see a spectrum of ideological opinion, as well as pragmatism.

Forty-four years after Goldwater’s nomination, the Republican party has
become a solidly reactionary-conservative party. Whatever its supposed
tensions (economic vs. social conservatives, etc.), members always come
"home." They move with robotic discipline and push a narrow band of
issues (e.g, tax cuts) relentlessly and effectively. Even in the minority, they become a "veto elite" reminiscent of politics in Arizona.

This isn’t healthy for American democracy. And the Republicans would love to see the Democrats end up splintering into separate centrist and liberal parties if they lose this year. That will only contribute to Republican hegemony (although I think the Democrats do need to reassess their reason for being if they can’t win the White House after eight years of the party that wrecked America, and that party controlling the White House and/or Congress for 26 of the past 28 years).

This reality also should make the duhs and ignos think twice about voting for McCain because they want power to the shared. McCain’s coat-tails might prevent a veto- and filibuster-proof majority. And in any event, the Democrats have been repeatedly cowed, even when they could have acted for political advantage — forcing a vote on child health care — with the ruthlessness of Republicans. So these foolish voters will get more of the same.

But if Democrats get mad and fight, they might consign the Republicans to their rightful place, as a regional minority party, disgraced for a generation. For God’s sake, at least Herbert Hoover was an honorable and honest man. And Democrats now can’t beat McCain and Palin and the trail of incompetence, corruption and torture their party represents?

It’s not over.