What I wanna know is…how did Democrats win last year?
How is it that Democrats now lead nearly all trial heats for the Presidency, that far more people now self-identify as Democrats than Republicans?
To read the blogs of Left Blogistan, this could not possibly be true, because the Right absolutely controls all media, all forms of communication, they have Astroturf everywhere, and they’re constantly demanding that liberals be ignored, denied their rights, tortured, or killed, all in the name of God, Mammon, and Imperialism.
So how is it possible? Can these two points be reconciled?
They can, but only if you look at history. Because 40 years ago the shoes were on the other feet. I was there, and I know. Back then it was conservatives who truly were oppressed, ridiculed, ignored, questioning themselves, yet they were in the ascendancy, and they would triumph absolutely, holding power for a generation, from 1969 to the present day.
Until reality intruded. Until they stretched their myths beyond the point where reality could take them. Until their absolute control of all levers of government started pulling stupidity out of its ass. Until bankruptcies and foreclosures began rising to the sky, and tens of thousands started coming home without eyes, legs, arms, and sanity from a war they insisted had barely cost 3,000 American lives. Until whole cities started disappearing. Until the birds stopped singing in our backyards, and all the kids started coming to soccer practice with inhalers, and the summers got longer than the winters, even north of the Mason-Dixon line.
Despite the Right’s absolute control of the American media, despite
everything that media could do, Americans saw through it in 2006, and
elected Democrats. Often liberal Democrats, Populists, women, even a
Muslim. They still see through it. All the money in the world won’t
keep Republicans in power after 2008 if reality continues on its
present course. And the government is doing nothing to change course. They’re just advertising. They think that with enough marketing we’ll buy anything.
The fact is that all of us live in many times and places at once, in
our minds. We live in the past as much as we live in the present. We live in the
future as well. We don’t "consume" media so much as we interact with
it, measuring it against the reality of our own lives, and those of the
people close to us.
This was true before the Internet. That’s how conservatism triumphed
in the 1960s. It’s how the hopeful experimentation of the New Deal
triumphed in the early 1930s, how Progressivism and Populism got their
start, how the North came to dominate the South. (That’s police going after the Bonus Army in 1931.)
Always, in absolutely every case, the people living in those times
of crisis saw and heard nothing but negativity, nothing but change can’t
happen, won’t happen, let the elites handle it. And every single
time, the elites were wrong, a new set of myths and values was emerging
despite their opposition, and we moved forward. In high school civics it’s called the genius of democracy.
My point today is simple. Don’t listen to the media, don’t
listen to your fears, don’t give in to the feeling that you’re alone,
that nothing good can possibly come out of these evil times.
Listen to your heart instead. Talk to your neighbors, and listen to
them. Talk to your extended family and listen to them. Then do
something about it, something small, something you can handle. It adds
up.
Change is coming, and it’s coming from the same place it has always come from.
Within.
