Progressives Have A Choice: Join The Revolution, Or Be Buried Beneath It

The American Spring is coming — and it will be led by the Right. Progressives can help shape, moderate and lead the outcome, or we can side with our corrupt, right-wing government, and watch as the Koch brothers recreate American governance in their preferred vision.

The Right has long been wrong, and vehemently so.

But now, the Right is right, and the public — even a very large segment of the progressive movement — agrees. We can argue the nuances of the IRS scandal, the AP scandal, and even be utterly egregious hypocrites and defend the data mining of the phone records of millions of Americans.

But Joe Public does not do nuance. While Joe has often pointedly rejected the extremism of the Right, he is watching aghast at the growing police state, and thinking, the Right is right.

Joe didn’t like the surveillance state when Bush was doing it, when we were the ones protesting. This national security abuse was a large part of the reason Joe voted for Barack Obama in the first place.

Now Joe has seen these policies retained and expanded by both Republicans and Democrats.  He has seen both left and right equally freaked out (though to different degrees, at different times), and a great spectrum of the media, from Fox News to Jon Stewart to Patrick Buchannan to NPR, finally on the same page about something:  The government has lost its mind, and is creating a police state.

The American Right has been in a state of freaked out for a long time, but usually over phantom menaces: Death Panels, socialism, and the Kenyan Islamist Hawaiian menace.  Their hysteria has been tempered by the rolling eyes of neighbors, and by the fact-finding and myth-debunking of the media (and sometimes helpful friends).

But now, they are right. They are right, they are freaked out, and they are right to be freaked out. They know it, Joe knows it, and progressives know it — after all, we’ve been begging them to be freaked out about this since 2001, when Bush first started re-writing the Constitution in the name of terror.

But Bush was one of them.

Obama, on the other hand is (insert preferred horror here). And while Joe Sixpack may not believe all of the most ludicrous conspiracy theories — he may even still like Barack Obama — the word tyranny doesn’t sound nutty at all anymore.  The government is storing all of your communications, raiding newspaper offices, jailing whistleblowers, sending the FBI to snoop around homes secretly, arresting people without warrants, and killing American citizens from flying machines without a trial. Does tyranny sound so nutty to you?

There is a zeitgeist moving across the face of the planet at the moment, like a global storm. It started with the Arab Spring, and with Occupy and the Tea Party here in America. People are mad as hell, and — and this is a bit of a miracle — it really appears, for the first time, that they aren’t going to take this anymore!

But, like the upheavals in the Middle East, the great question, once the revolution is underway, is: Who ends up with the power in the end, after the old system is torn asunder?

Progressives love the government, at least that’s conventional wisdom. And there is truth to it: We are rightly proud of Social Security and the EPA, the Civil Rights Act and federal food safety standards.

But we don’t control the government anymore — and likely won’t (what true progressive, let alone a majority progressive congress, has a chance of winning? None).

More importantly, we cannot control or deflect this growing storm. It is coming.

It is impossible to say what will be the final catalyst that sends the Right streaming to DC, but the day is fast approaching. Between the irrational fear-mongering of the conservative media, the rational fears of average citizens, the continued over-reach of the Obama administration, and the fact that — and I will just say this bluntly — he is black (Joe Public does not think that he is a racist, and doesn’t mean to be; but just that tiny weight of doubt, the fact that Obama is ‘the other’, is enough, when combined with the rest, to tip his scale towards serious fear), that day is coming. The Right will lead, and millions will follow, including many progressives.

The demands will not be complicated, or nuanced.

Leave Now! will be the chant, reverberating from all of the stone monuments and parapets of DC.

They will paralyze the government. There is likely to be violence.

This uprising may well succeed.  We’ve seen remarkable turns of power in recent years, often against much more brutal and repressive governments. And, in fact, the more fiercely such a movement is resisted, the more likely it is to succeed.

Would Obama turn troops on American citizens? Will American troops turn guns on American citizens?

I think it unlikely, at least in any sustained way. I don’t think that Americans — even in our right-wing government — have a stomach for that in any quantity.  A dozen dead protestors splayed upon the pavement would likely bring an order from the president for the guardians of the state to cease violence.  It is also likely that the troops themselves will side with the people, and that our elected government, under siege and faced with enormous popular pressure, may simply bow to this new American revolution, much in spirit with the old, and offer a transitional path to a new government, from and of the people. Not in acknowledgement of their corruption, mind you, but to preserve their prestige, power and influence, even while appearing to step aside (picture John Boehner, leaving the Capitol in disgust, denouncing his government in a grand speech to the assembled masses — a real man of the people, willing to give up power, by God! This image would cement his power in government).

Government, then, returned to the people.

This is where the rub arises: Who are ‘the people’?

Absent a progressive partner in this uprising, who ‘the people’ are is clear: the Right. The Tea Party. Michele Bachmann. They were the ones, after all, who led the uprising, while all the while progressives were howling objections and defending the government, because their Blue Guy was in office, and he was a nice guy (even if he did maintain the policies of Reagan and Bush).

And, if progressives have taken the side of the government, it will be a given that progressives, also, have been defeated, along with the government.

Therefore,  Progressive = tyrannical government.

Who supported the police state? Progressives.

Who overthrew the police state? Conservatives.

Who then, will we trust to rebuild an America dedicated to liberty? Conservatives.

Joe will cheer his liberators — who are in fact his old captors, without ever knowing that they are one and the same. And, much like the protestors cheered in Egypt when Mubarak vacated, the people, heady on victory, may well be unaware of who is now stepping into the halls of power, and guiding the process.

It would be no great feat for the robber-barons to direct this process of rebuilding, after the abdication of the seats of congress and the White House.  Except, now, they will not be struggling with bribing officials and sneaking through legislation — they will simply create, through the now-revered right-wing revolutionaries, the government that suits them. It need not be dramatically different from our present government — just different enough to ensure total right-wing, corporate control, permanently.

Keep this in mind, too: This revolution is going to destroy the American economy. Utterly.

Impoverished people do not fight back to prosperity and democracy over oligarchs (see Mexico). If the government falls, yet the plutocracy solidifies total power, the plutocracy will maintain permanent power.

The point for progressives to take, right now, is this:

We are approaching a great crisis: The Right is going to rise, and confront this government. I believe that this will happen very soon.

We also have a great opportunity: The Right will never join us in confronting this totalitarian apparatus when one of their people is in power. They will only do so when one of ‘our’ people is in power — or, at least, a Democrat. If we are smart — smarter than them, as we claim to be — we know that ‘being a Democrat’ doesn’t make someone ‘our’ person. If we can see this, we can, at this rare opportunity, build a coalition to confront this march to totalitarianism.

The Right is no longer a monolithic movement. It is splintered into two distinct factions: authoritarian conservatives, and libertarian conservatives.

Progressives need to be mending fences and building bridges between progressives and (small ‘L’) libertarians (even Republican libertarians), and we need to do that by siding with them against the surveillance state (ergo, against the government, against Barack Obama).

But libertarian economic policies sound exactly like conservative economic policies!, you say.

Yes they do, and yes they are. Again, Progressives have to ‘man up’, and do what we pride ourselves on doing: being able to accept new information, and to alter our behavior accordingly, given a new set of circumstances. ­

How is arguing with libertarians, conservatives or the government over economics working out for you?

It isn’t.

As noted previously, progressives don’t control this government. We have no say, at all, period. There is no point in arguing over free trade, Social Security or any of the rest. If the government falls, all bets are off anyway; if the government continues as is, we’re stuck under plutocratic policies forever. We have already lost this argument. Forget about economics. We will never agree on economic policy.  And we should avoid, at all costs, discussing economic policy with libertarian conservatives.  You can scream, yell, and set yourself on fire; you still will have no say in economic policy anyway.  We are simply mentally masturbating because we are right, and it feels good to be right. Let it go. There will be time for discussing economics later, if we play our cards right (keep reading). 

What can be achieved is a progressive-libertarian alliance on issues of liberty. We all — libertarians, progressives, Joe Public — agree that we don’t want a police state.

Q: Who would want a police state?

A: Authoritarian conservatives. The Tea Party. Michelle Bachmann.  And the Koch brothers.

Although authoritarian conservatives don’t like being the ones under the thumb right now, they’ll happily maintain the whole apparatus if they seize power — and that apparatus would suit the corporatocracy and the oligarchs just fine.

Therefore, allying with libertarians suits a secondary purpose: It marginalizes authoritarian conservatives, and ensures a large constituency in favor of personal liberty — an expansive liberal alliance.

If this government falls, and if we can build this alliance, and if we can maintain the idea of full-participatory democracy, so that we have a seat at the table for restructuring, we may be able to influence the new policies — even economic policy — through a democratic process, and reasoned debate. That is our best hope.

In a scenario that offers a blanket of gloomy outcomes, there is one other bright spot, as well: If power devolves from Washington to the states — a long-held libertarian goal — we can enact progressive policies on a state level, without relying upon building consensus with conservative states, as we must (and fail to) do now.  Denmark is located in Europe, but its progressive policies have set it apart from the rest of the continent. California can likewise be located in the United States, and still develop its own economic and social policy, as could any other state, given the freedom to do so. And a weakened Washington, given the people who now control it, is not such a bad thing.

In summation:

* The United States, as we have known it — a mega-rich, abusive empire, spying upon and persecuting its own citizens while enriching oligarchs beyond their dreams — is failing. It will fail left on the present course, or it will fall to revolution. This will be a very painful process in either case, but it is not necessarily a bad thing in the long run.

How bad it gets — for us, and for America as a whole — may depend upon us demonstrating, right now, that we are not allied with the oppressors — the government, with Barack Obama — but with the oppressed.

Barack Obama is not a progressive. He never was. He, like Bill Clinton, is a clever deception of Wall Street. Joe Public is looking at Obama, and he is thinking: This is progressive. And by allying ourselves with him, we take upon ourselves, as progressives, the mantle of everything he does: We are authoritarians; we favor war and empire; domestic spying, warrantless searches, wiretapping, all of it.

Are those things progressive?

Those things are not progressive, and we need to put as much distance between all of that and progressivism as possible, and in the loudest, most visible way possible.

We must separate ourselves from this corrupt, right-wing government so that when it falls, we don’t get taken down with it.

And we must start building a coalition around ideals that nearly everyone shares: Unplugging the data-mining machines, ending the wiretapping, grounding the domestic drones, shredding all of the unconstitutional laws that they have passed, and returning  to the basic principles of personal liberty and the rule of law.

If we can achieve just that much, it would be a miracle.

And remember, should you choose, wisely, to accept this mission: Avoid discussing economics. You have no say in economic policy at all, anyway.  We can shout and scream about economics at some later date — when our ideas might actually have some chance of succeeding, with liberty and democracy restored. In the meantime, stick to the over-reach of the police state.

Godspeed. And may you (and I, for I love debating economics with libertarians) have the good sense to heed these words.