Djur was originally going to help me with this one, but when I told him I was writing in favor of more active far-left, beyond-the-base campaigning, he accused me of formenting partisan rancor and class warfare and urged that I refuse to vote for an ‘extremist’ like Clinton. So I’ll be doing this one alone, folks.

There’s a very interesting thesis put forward by libertarian (read: corporatist republican) think-tankers and activists, the Overton Window . Stop right now and read that link; it should be required reading for anyone who cares for the Republic and its future. Come back only once you’re done.

Good stuff, eh? I’m very sorry I had to resort to a link to Daily Kos - or, as some wits would have it, Dago Cossack Queeratorium - but there you go. The right and the left have, since Reagan, been pursuing different political models, and the results of that are pretty much self-evident. As I explored in my last post, there’s a definite influence by the President and how the people treat him, along with any other major political figures. But the wider strategy is still extremely important.

The Republicans got extraordinarily lucky with Reagan; he’s a grotesquely inhuman monster with undeniable charisma, a man who could win elections and push right-wing creep. The Democrats had to face him with two nonentities, and this taught their central leadership the Worst Lesson - the worst falsehood stalking politics now:

The American public is deeply conservative and as such we must pander to their right-wing sensibilities when running if we hope to achieve anything.

The reality, of course, is that no public is deeply anything. Right-wing creep is the result of a massive, decentralized apparatus to pull the agenda in various inhuman directions. It starts with a shot across the bow, someone indicating that yes, civilized (or semi-civilized) people actually believe in whatever extreme position. The media are forced to pay attention, because the story of whatever activist running for whatever office or pushing for whatever is sufficiently juicy - and, might I add, because these people are rich - and eventually, you wind up with the position that was originally unthinkable being around the center.

The example given in the article I linked to is an excellent example of that. It used to be, hard as it is to believe, that people actually acknowledged that ’school choice’ was a detestable oxymoron; The ability of parents with fat bankrolls to ‘choose’ a better school meant that other students, by no ‘choice’ of their own, received less funding and had to deal with larger school zones; the failure of busing meant that you’d wind up with large areas without any social or economic capital with which to further education. “School choice” made the modern inner-city school, and everyone involved knows it, and whatever they might pretend if pinned to the wall on it, they knew it when they started pushing for it. That’s why private schools had strong legal discouraging factors back in the days we were closed to civilized; it’s antisocial and destructive, does injustice to students who have done nothing to earn it, forces the education system to make priorities it has no business making, and generally is the sort of ‘choice’ right-wingers just lurve.

That’s just a single example; the right-wing agenda across the board has followed a similar pattern, with reactionary activists forcing some inhuman idea into the public sphere, the noise machine kicking into high gear, the idea being all anyone ever hears about it, a lot of people accepting it just to make it stop, and eventually something most people don’t even realize the implications of being an accepted and normal part of public policy.

The Democrats’ electoral strategy teaches ideology as a static terrain to be accepted and adjusted for accordingly. The Republicans’ electoral strategy involves dynamite and bulldozers. They don’t always win - although their filthy lucre certainly helps - but even if they lose, they’ve put the Democrats in a position where the next time around they’ll be defending less with fewer supporters.

The amusing thing, to a student of history, is that the situation has reversed itself - that is, in historical American politics, the left was the side doing the idea-pushing. Almost every set of social or economic reforms was preceded by one or two generations of agitation for it by a fringe element, electoral failure - by surprisingly narrow margins - by that fringe element on sole platforms, and the mulling of those reforms as a viable political strategy by liberal higher-ups. It took an Uncle Tom’s Cabin to make the North sympathetic to abolition, it took the Populists and Grange to make the American elite and electorate accept the idea of income tax as a primary modulus of state income and state ownership of public transit as a good policy, it took the Socialists fighting tooth and nail for it to produce Roosevelt’s welfare state - and their moderates argued for less than the Democrats legislated thirty years thence. The example of civil rights is also extremely instructive - the early cases in rights for any group usually came a few decades before those groups were granted full legal personhood. The NAACP started challenging the statues like the one in Brown decades before it; the NAACP, by the way, is one of the most profoundly tactical and brilliant activist groups in history and they had this down pat before Overton was born. So it went for the Indians and other Asians - cases in the 10s and 20s, the tail end of the dead-ball era of American jurisprudence, contradicted each other and forced the press of the time to give coverage of the evident absurdity of a white Japanese national being denied citizenship on account of not being ‘caucasian’ - and then a Brahmin - by all reasonable standards of the day’s science, ‘caucasian’ - being refused full citizenship on the grounds of not being white by ’standard use of the phrase’ or whatever the veiled racism at work was.

And then there’s women’s rights, and here is where we hit the difference between the strategy of the old left and the new.

There was a long and hard but gradually increasing succession of political victories - the end of femme coverture as a legal regime, creeping suffrage in the West, national suffrage, access to contraceptives, Roe, and… then came the ERA.

The ERA failed only because of the national change in tactics; by this point, the left was a dying breed - the activists fawning over tinpot dictators in third-world hellholes and the intelligensia pacified by money and status. Socialization had gone from a gradual process of movement towards the humanitarian to literal social opportunities - it was increasingly the job of the left wing not to stick to their principles no matter the cost, but to hide them as efficiently as possible so as to retain precious front-row space for their paper-mache puppets of Republicans and invites to cocktail parties. Meanwhile, the Republicans - who had previously been forced into the same pigeonhole, obligated to make a ritual of shouting down their radicals and hiding their vile convictions in public to get any support from anyone, were suddenly freed from that - they were surrounded by people who civil society accepted as eccentric, perhaps with beliefs beyond the pale but still decent.

Sclafly and the lot pushed absurdities like unisex bathrooms and single mothers being blasphemy against God; Falwell and company pushed and pushed hard for a Christian theocracy in a country which was Sunday Christian - who were annoyed at best by ‘Jesus freaks’; and the state of Louisiana elected David Duke to its legislature.

We hear a lot about moving the goalposts - changing what the objectives are as you go so you can claim victory even if you fall short. But what the Republicans have been doing is moving the foul lines - they’re in control of what you can and can’t do in politics, what beliefs are valid and what beliefs aren’t.

They won’t stop it -because however tasteless it might be, it’s been wonderful for them socially and politically. Our only choice is to beat them at it. It was our game first, there’s more of us than there are of them, and we’re smarter and more experienced.

I’ve been agitating for support of Obama because I believe that’s the only way the left can get the Democratic establishment’s attention, and that’s something we need on a strategic level. We need a venue that we can be paid attention to through. Nobody covered Ralph Nader or offered to include him in the debates - and he got just under 5% of the vote in 2000. That’s millions of people whose voices were completely written out of the narrative by the media as right-wing activists pushed harder and harder to make the basic tenets of civil society unacceptable to the electorate.

On the other hand, if he starts doing things we can’t accept, we have to make a stink about it. We just have to make a stink in general - fight back, without equivocation, and as far left as you can handle. Think of it as haggling. The Republicans are asking for Somalia, the Democrat leaders think the best position to win elections is in the ‘center’, between their ‘base’ and ours. You work it out: are we more likely to get a functioning welfare state if we demand one like France’s or one like Cuba’s? I’ll give you a hint: the ‘center’ they’ve been making between the right-wing barking dogs and our pitiful yelping has, so far, been to concede to everything except outright breaches of constitutional protocol - and they’re slipping on even that.

We need to get extreme again. The political system in America is not a pendulum; it doesn’t return to the ‘center’ by a magical force of nature. Enough right-wing agitation without a response will turn it into a fascist hellhole; we’re the only ones with the power to avert that.