YES, WE DID - So What Now?

OK, let's all enjoy our orgasmic joy at finally having a voice in the election, at not having a complete bubblehead in the White House (as of January, at least - see the Bush clock to the right), and at breaking one of the great barriers of the racial divide. There's been adulation pouring in from across the world. While the CNN article describing dancing in the streets in Paris and Africa and Japan and elsewhere is heart-warming, the message I enjoyed most was relayed by my honey, who is on the Straight Dope message board, where there are a number of members from other countries. The foreign members basically said, "Oh, good for you - Welcome Back!" America can now re-join the world, rather than being the pariah hated by the ROW (for those not in the lingo, "Rest of the World," i.e. that seemingly small and powerless part of the world that is not the United States).

So, as the Republicans must, so must we also now move past all that. Lots of things got put off in the fury of getting a better candidate into office, and now that we have, it's time to move on and look at our problems, why we needed a better candidate, and what we and our new President will have to do to solve our problems. We have our work ahead of us and we need to start looking at that work with a realistic attitude towards erasing the stains of eight years of Republican misrule and restoring honor and dignity to the White House.

One thing that concerns me greatly is how much the media is congratulating the country for its "New Liberal Order" (as Time magazine called it in a recent article). Yes, we did manage to put our mutual differences aside and get a fairly competent and compassionate candidate elected who has also continuously demonstrated an interest and ability to get to work on our toughest problems, domestic, foreign, and international. But the problem here is that it seems by itself to solve our problems and let us get back to watching American Idol and worrying about Britney Spears' Palinesque breeding woes. What all this ignores, though, is that the Republicans have for over a quarter of a century controlled the political dialogue through a variety of means that are still very much a factor of our social and political structure. Our "revolution" is not over, complete, and forever safe. Our "revolution" has barely even touched our consciousness as a possibility. If we simply sit back and watch from a distance, our "revolution" will never happen. The conservative revolution, on the other hand, remains as strong as ever.

Over a quarter of a century ago, the conservatives realized that in order to get any work done over the long term, they needed to put aside their internal differences, and also to form a new constituency by finally swallowing their pride and reaching across to the religious right. They did both, as well as finding a new level of internal discipline with which to overcome their internal disputes and march in accord. They have also exploited some of the violence and uncertainty of the 1960s to paint many of the ideals of the Left in a somehow un-American light, to the point that liberals are almost afraid of the word "liberal", while "socialist" means dirty, wrong, unholy, and almost criminal.

Yet "liberals" led the American revolution, the campaign towards the abolition of slavery, women's suffrage, and the civil rights movement. Socialists pushed the national agenda towards the establishment of the 40-hour work week and the minimum wage, the illegalization of child labor, and the legalization of union organization and a multitude of protections for the workers. Almost everything that our nation stands for, and for which Americans have to thank, are results of the Left pushing for the rights of the citizen against the rights of the corporation, the church, and the established social classes which were in turn supported by the Right. The Right's principal legacy is in arguing that these reforms were "too much, too fast," or weakened our nation and economy (by which the Right mean the right of the rich to stay rich, and the obligation of the poor to stay poor), and in protecting the right of a minority of religious thinkers to control how the rest of us should live our lives.

The Right has been able to sell their image of the world to the people, through the control of much of the media. They even label their own, corporate-controlled and carefully stifled, conservative information machine as the "liberal media," which allows centrist information (which comes closer to portraying the basic views of the American voters) to appear as "tainted" with liberalism and all things bad. This also allows Right-wing and far-Right propaganda to seem more centrist, or even "liberal." Pundits like Rush Limbaugh come to seem almost reasonable and acceptable to the very people whose interests are directly harmed by the Right, while those pundits and politicians trying to keep the dialogue open and fight for the rights of their fellow citizens are lambasted for being somehow un-American. This massive and well-organized machine is still in place and still in operation. Many of the facets of the conservatives' control of our language are still very much in place, and accepted as fact by members of Right, Center, and Left alike.

A telling example of this is the abortion debate. We on the Left continue to call right-wingers fighting against women's reproductive rights as "Pro-Life," which they aren't. "Pro-lifers" have supported the war efforts, and fight against aid to poor nations trying to legalize abortion in order to reduce famine and disease problems; the "pro-lifers" are very much a factor in the dissemination of both deliberate and circumstantial death. Nor can "pro-lifers" be distinguished from their opponents as being "anti-abortion"; the majority of pro-choice activists are themselves anti-abortion, but don't see it as their call to make for other women or their families. The only thing that distinguishes the two sides are whether they feel that their views should be dictated to others or not; "pro-lifers" feel that their views should become a legal obligation for everyone, whereas the "pro-choicers" feel that it should be and stay a personal choice and an individual's moral obligation. It is just a question a whether one believes in freedom or not. The "pro-lifers" are against freedom, the "pro-choicers" are for it. Our language should reflect this, rather than implying the opposite of the truth by calling those against freedom (and, largely, against "life") as being nonetheless "pro-life", which of course also falsely implies that the pro-choice side is somehow "against life." The opposing sides of any argument are pro and con; and so our language should indicate. The "pro-life" movement is Anti-Choice, and that is all that distinguishes them from their opposition. We should stop giving in to the Right's language and call these activists against freedom what they really are.

Another issue of concern is the organizational capabilities of the Right. For decades, they have been organizing and moving in unison, often putting aside their petty differences in order to march forward together on the big issues that they agree upon. The Left, on the other hand, has spent more of its time criticizing itself for (and purging itself of) the merest hint of "socialism" in order to come closer to the Right than some members of the Right are. The Left has wallowed in its petty quarrels, and focused on the individual pet projects at the expense of combined activism, and has lost most of the ground won since the 1960s, and most of the elections. We have not formed a "movement" the way the Right have. We have carefully dismantled the very machine we built up, severing our connections with labor, with minorities, and with the elderly and poor who need the support structure we have conspired with the Right to eliminate. We have become "conservatives with a conscience," and have betrayed most of our central beliefs. We need to get back on track, or the conservatives will be right back in 2012 (and 2010 in the Congress). They are as strong as ever, and while riding on our wave of victory, we have barely scratched the surface of what is required to build a long-term movement capable of taking on the conservative army in our strategic war of culture.

We need to mobilize, and to commit ourselves to the battle. We need to understand that we are in fact at war, and are under heavy fire from a well-armed, and regimented host. The first priority of the moment should be recruiting and organizing our own forces. Now is the perfect time to do this on both sides of the spectrum, Left and Right, because those on the Left are starting to feel their power again, and because some of those who have been supporting the Right are having second thoughts about the machine that thought Sarah Palin could possibly have been a good candidate for a job she knew nothing at all about. The smart Republicans are now second-guessing themselves, and the stupid ones are looking for leadership. Now is the time to appeal to their patriotic impulses (because, misled, misguided, and mistaken as they are, they don't feel that their policies are destructive or evil; they think they're doing the right thing). But we need even more to appeal to the Left and rediscover our Leftist and socialist values, the values of social justice and collective organization, the values of democratization of both politic and economy. We need to stand up and be proud to be Leftists, to accept this title with the honor and dignity it commands, and to embrace its values and objectives. Then we need to start working on recruitment, organization, and information, so we can fight the war with the Right that they have been fighting, and winning, for almost three decades.

Obama's election should not be the final result of our labors; it should be simply the first step on the path toward national and social redemption and a better future for the generations to come. It can be this if we all work together, and not simply spectate and criticize from the sidelines.