History

I love this exchange:

From Andew Sullivan:

Yes, there's nothing so valuable to George W. Bush and the religious right than Daily Kos, Moveon.org and Ted Kennedy. What would he do without them?

Kos responds:

The answer? Exactly the same thing Bush was doing before MoveOn and Daily Kos truly came on the scene in 2003 and 2004. He would be stealing elections, destroying the environment, installing radical right-wing reactionary judges, pretending he had a mandate, pissing off the world, starting wars without international support, ensuring our troops in the field didn't have the proper equipment, denying global warming existed, being cagey about "intelligent design", and so on. In spades:

What idiots like Sullivan don't understand is that institutions like MoveOn and Daily Kos are a reaction to the Right Wing's tactics for the past 20 years. We are a reaction to the politics of personal destruction pioneered by the right's Clinton-hating brigades, the vile and corrosive rhetoric of Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and company, and the politics of demonization which the Right practices against blacks, immigrants, and gays.

To which Steve Gilliard adds:

What bothers the right so much about Move On and Kos? That ordinary citizens participate in politics. It infuriates them that ordinary people can organize and have influence.

They want to be unchallenged. Fuck that noise. We're all free people here and if they don't like our opinions, tough shit.

Thinking back, the politics of division first took center stage, in my memory, with Newt Gingrich. I won't say it didn't happen before, but Gingrich made it a cornerstone of the right's strategy. Bush/Rove, of course, have made it the entire strategy, supported by smear campaigns, manipulating the media, and secrecy -- those are the tools, and they've been very effective. It's actually pretty easy when you have a base that is determined to hate someone anyway -- the far right really does need an enemy to justify its existence, and in a world where their philosophy is marginal at best, it's pretty easy to find plenty of threats.

Part of the approach has now become accusing Democrats, with their history of coalition-building, of being divisive by dividing America up into factions. What utter bullshit. The factions have always been there. The Democratic strategy has been to get them to work together, while the Republican strategy has been to keep them fighting each other.

With the birth of the blogosphere, suddenly the left has a voice again, not subject to the manipulations of the White House or the RNC. Only 2% of Americans read blogs, which sounds like they should be of no influence at all. But it's a matter of which 2% -- it's a percentage that obviously includes the movers and shakers, and even some journalists, not counting the numbers of journalists who blog themselves, such as John Aravosis, Josh Marshall, Atrios, Andrew Sullivan, Kos -- all tremendously influential.

Kos is, of course, completely right: MoveOn, Michael Moore, AmericaBlog, even yours truly, are responses to Republican control of the government and media. (I doubt very strongly that I would ever have thought about blogging if Gore had been elected -- mmm, I mean, if Gore had actually been able to take advantage of being elected.) Bush and the religious right are liars and manipulators anyway -- they certainly don't need us to continue on their chosen path. And the more successful we are in nailing them in their lies and distortions, the more virulent the attacks become. The Democrats' big disadvantage is that they are bound by reality, and they are basically honest. At least until they're in power again, and we can easily see where that precedent came from.

And it's working. Maybe the Ted Kennedys and Howard Deans and Albert Gores are finally taking a cue from the blogosphere and realizing that they have absolutely nothing to lose by telling it like it is. And if people pay attention -- well, what can a party that will spend millions of dollars investigating a blow job, but won't allow investigations of widespread torture, cheating, and embezzlement, expect?

A. L. Rowse, an intelligent and perceptive historian and a masterful prose stylist, said (and I'm paraphrasing): "One lesson from history is that people could learn so much from history, but they seldom do." I find that statement terribly apt, and also a little frightening. The right, with its insistence on divinely inspired truth and its unwillngness to deal with reality in any form, is setting precedents that will come back to bite them in the ass. History, after all, operates as a series of cycles, but the direction of the cycles tends to wander along a midline determined by ever-expanding extremes. It's really a series of lurches from left to right, politically and socially. So the great mass of society gets nudged one way or the other, the strategies and maneuvers become common property, and when those in power lose power, they find themselves on the receiving end of the stick It's sort of a long-term, global "Wash, rinse, repeat."

Fortunately, in this country at least, we still have brakes -- in this case, the very people that Sullivan is denigrating. We do serve a purpose.