Itching Powder 2
This has been building for some time.
[RANT MODE ON]
What most annoys me about my fellow lefties are the purists–the folks who, if you don’t fight to the death for every jot and tittle of whatever their pet causes may be, turn their backs on you and desert the fight. These are the folks who vote for glibertarians as “protest votes,” because “the two parties are ‘indistinguishable.'”
They are, ultimately, deserters with temper-tantrums.
Do they still think that, if Al Gore had won in 2000, nothing would have been different?
Are they really so clueless?
Purists don’t get stuff done, even as they equate failure with virtue. They remind me of the “student radicals” of my youth, who used to fantasize about American “workers and peasants” uniting, without realizing that the workers hated them (remember the “hard hats“?) and the peasants did not think of themselves as “peasants.”
Purists need to realize that there is a real world–an untidy, un-pretty, sloppy real world–and live in it.
I’m probably about as leftie as you can get and, were I a purist, I would not vote for most of the candidates that I have voted for the past few years. But, honest to Pete, I live in Virginia. I have to take what I can get. And I do so quite happily, because I try to live in the real world.
The first step to the real world is to realize that, as things stand now, every Democrat–however flawed–is better than any Republican.
Quibbles can proceed from that point.
[RANT MODE OFF]
December 5, 2013 at 2:40 pm
Hmm, Democracy for America is in my mailbox pleading for money quite a bit. In fact my old e-mail address is pretty much overrun with micro-donation appeals from the professional left/progressive industry. I made the mistake of contributing a couple times during the Obama campaign and I’ll never do it again. They’ve convinced me it’s just another job and part of it is to automatically shake money out of the trees with mailing list abuse. Like every professional cadre, they have their celebrities and, at some point, every agency gets fossilized and from then on never listens to anyone outside the bubble. If you send them stories about your experience with Obamacare or with food stamps, it’s just used as emotional material for more fund-raising mailers. If “hard hats” and “peasants” wind up hating them, part of the reason is also the perceptions that come with the racketization. DailyKos has turned into that. Mail in the inbox every day, a pop-up that can’t be bypassed except by using a proxy that strips scripting, always pleas for more money because ad revenue isn’t what it used to be.
December 5, 2013 at 11:52 pm
I sure as shootin’ don’t donate to everyone who wants a donation. I donate regularly to the ACLU, the NAACP, the SPLC, and the Accessible Computing Foundation. To be blunt, with apologies because we are generally muy sumpatico, complaining about appeals for donations is a misdirection play; that’s what email filters are for.
My concern and my post were about turning elections into pissing contests about side-issues, while missing the big picture, which is that elections matter; they matter in the real world and affect real people and should not be subsumed in some some ideological pissing contest about the placement of a some metaphorical ideological comma. Voters who say “A pox on both their houses” and then throw away their votes guarantee a pox in everyone’s house, including their own.
Also, I don’t find the continual appeals for funds offensive; I just ignore them. After all, there are no Koch Brothers to fund the forces of truth, justice, and the American Way, right-wing BS about George Soros notwithstanding, and causes need money. I just delete them; I have only so much I can donate. But at least I know they are legitimate causes, even though they may wear out my welcome from time to time.
I must take issue with your last comment about “hard hats” and “peasants”; it takes terminology from 40 years ago and forces it into a modern frame, a frame in which it does not fit. The “hard hats” of the late 60s and early 70s thought that they were patriots in supporting the Viet Namese War, an earlier war for a lie, a lie that LBJ did not have the courage to disavow because he feared the right-wing lie machine even then. They were wrong, of course, and ultimately were acting against their own best interests and the best interests of the nation, as blood and treasure were sacrificed in a vain and misguided crusade. My point was that lefties who dwell in a fantasy world don’t get stuff done–they might sit up all night and feel great about their dorm room conclaves, but they don’t get stuff done.
Politics is about getting stuff done.