Progressives lose on their issues because they haven't been willing to fight.  Having been beaten back by the demagogues of the right wing time and time again, on every issue from the Red Scare to unions to health care reform, they're afraid to push too hard because getting beaten up hurts so much.

They're afraid to get hit.

The reason that they lost on those issues was not because the right was so strong, it was because the left didn't fight back.  Too many lefties simply can't believe that the right wing is controlled by a large number of people who respect no morality and who will stop at nothing to gain power.  They are thieves and liars, and if the left is to beat them, they must be treated that way.

But too many progressives want to believe that all people are fundamentally decent, even when the evidence contradicts them, and can't muster the will to fight back against an enemy who cheats.

Giving in to the right, therefore, becomes the easiest path.

Unlike Cenk, I am not willing to cut Obama nearly as much slack.  I am convinced that he is, at his heart, a corporatist schill.  Having won the election, the first thing he did was to dump all of the progressives on his staff and hire establishment corporatists, and he did it almost overnight.  You don't make 180-degree turns on so many issues so easily and quickly as Obama has unless it's what you really wanted to do in the first place.

But I agree with Cenk when he says that in order to force Obama to the left, we have to hurt him.  Obama has to lose when he tries to increase the power of the finance industry over the country.  He must be defeated, and it must be clear to him that it was the left that defeated him.

And if an active campaign against corporatist Democrats in the upcoming elections results in Democratic losses in Congress, then we can't say that anything has truly been lost.  If a corporatist Democrat is replaced by a corporatist Republican, nothing has really changed.

The left must get as loud and vociferous as the right has been, and we can't back down any more.  We're fighting a vicious, unethical, and deadly enemy, and we must never forget what they will do to us if they win.

by EveningStarNM on 12/24/2009 08:32:48 AM EST