"The death of moderates"

In my profound disgust with our current politics -- its players, its behaviors, its terms of debate, its outcomes -- I find myself more receptive than I once was to pieces like Ted Rall's "The Death of Moderates." His argument, essentially, is that compromise in the face of extreme policy proposals results in even worse policies being implemented, or in no action at all.

As we have seen time and time again in American history, compromises usually mean no solution at all. From the status of Missouri as a slave state to last week's tax deal between Democrats and Republicans, compromise usually means kicking the can down the road for another generation of people and politicians to contend with.

The comments to this piece are even more interesting. Pointed, often impatient, sometimes redolent of what I consider stereotypical leftist rhetoric (in spite of being very much to the left of the rightward-skewed center of this nation's politics, I have never had much patience with the "workers unite!" talking points that typify university-centered socialist and communist organizations), yet thoughtful and often persuasive, these comments reminded me I'm not alone in declaring "a plague on both your houses!" to the Republicans and the Democrats.

One exchange caught my eye. Commenter "Unless" wrote:

... I honestly think the best way to initiate change is to engage in grassroots cultural transformation. We can argue about politics and economics till our mouths run dry, but in the end our culture is what influences these factors.

As much as I hate to admit it, John McCain was right in assessing that the United States is a "center-right nation". We need to pretty much reach the "hearts and minds" of everyday American people. We need to change the way their think and live. The standard forms of political activism aren't really working anymore.

(I omitted some of the comment that I deemed irrelevant to this discussion.)

"Two Americas" replied:

Why not focus on power, rather than this vague and amorphous "hearts and minds" stuff? Politics is about power, not beliefs and feelings. Leave that stuff to religion - they have been working on improving people's moral tenor for a long time, with limited success. That field is pretty crowded. We need to focus on objective reality, on improving the conditions that people are actually enduring.

Peaceful social change is not an option that is in our hands, and it is a lie that people are advocating violent revolution as though that were a strategy or a solution. Some are acknowledging that no change is possible without there being a violent reaction (it is actually already happening on a daily basis all around the world) from those seeking to hold on to the power that we have over all of us.

We seek freedom. Those who are holding us in bondage resort to violence to keep us in place, and we need to fight back and to defend ourselves. That is not advocating violent revolution, that is facing reality and abandoning childish fantasies.

Two Americas sounds like a Jacobin. I don't know if we're as oppressed as the French population just prior to the Revolution, but I'd like to think we're not. In any case, we have to try for change within the system before we start taking violent action even in our own defense, or we're guaranteeing a bloody future for ourselves.

It's my "childish fantasy" that we can change this country's direction if we follow Unless' prescription.

Conservatives spent decades laying the groundwork for the Reagan revolution and its aftermath, and so successful were they that even today, our political discourse is carried out pretty much within the constraints of the world view that conservatives like William F. Buckley laid out in the '60s and '70s. A similarly long-lived effort is required of progressives today.