Beyond sad . . .

If you're still not convinced the Democrats have become a purely reactionary party, completely bereft of new ideas, check out Harry Reid's rebuttal to the SOTU.  I mean, how pathologically risk-averse do you have to be to call plopping a small portion of your retirement money into a mutual fund playing "roulette"?  And the lame appeal to "old fashioned moral values" is simply pathetic.  For my entire life, I assumed it was written into the laws of the universe that this country's politics is cyclical.  If you're down on your luck, you just have to wait long enough and the balance of power will eventually swing back to your side.  Now I'm wondering whether the Democrats aren't truly in a terminal decline.  Yikes.

Comments

[Eli Senter]

More repetitive, than cyclical. Where are the Whigs now? Maybe the Dems will be replaced by a party that is actually in opposition to a corporate conservative agenda. Hopefully libertarians of some stripe, since the other option seems to be the Greens.

[Schrock]

Good point. I've often thought there is a good libertarian case to be made against the corporate leviathans that are just as capable of trampling the idividual (at least spiritually) as big government. Such a critique would have to be pro-business to be taken seriously. But how many Democrats wax eloquent on the wonders of entrepreneurship? Alas, they seem to be too bent on perpetuating a statist solution to every problem. Look how they ridicule even the idea of an "ownership society."

[Lancelot Finn]

I was hoping that getting beaten in 2004 would prompt a reinvention of the Democratic Party. I was hoping they would move right, and maybe embrace a free-marketeer agenda, since that's more compatible with their base than the cultural conservative agenda that the Republicans monopolize. So far, it seems like that's not the lesson they got.

The Democrats now think that they can take a lesson from Newt Gingrich in 1992-94; fight hard and dirty, undermine a major domestic policy initiative, and you can regain the momentum. Not quite. The Democrats are like the Gingrich camp in 1994-96: bitter, angry, fighting, at a time when the country wants consensus. But then the Republican had just won an election, so their overreaching and losing ground led to balance. Now the Democrats have just lost an election.

We need a revolution within the Democratic Party. Some of us should try to engineer it. Maybe some hawks and free-marketeers should start commenting at Democratic Underground...