What Liberals Once Understood

Liberals once understood that negotiating with morons only emboldens and legitimizes the morons. Team Obama didn't understand that lesson in 2008 and they still don't understand it today. Here's the instructive quote from Rick Perlstein's article in The Nation last year:

"Ironically, liberals of previous generations understood this better than we do now, despite decades more experience watching how the right’s game is played. For a Partisan Review symposium in 1962, Harvard sociologist David Riesman advised that the Kennedy administration “can gain the leeway on the domestic front…only by combatting the radical right rather than seeking itself to move onto rightist ground—an illusory operation since the right can always go still further right and will.”

Read that last part again. The administration “can gain the leeway on the domestic front…ONLY BY COMBATTING THE RADICAL RIGHT, rather than seeking itself to move onto rightist ground—an illusory operation since the RIGHT CAN ALWAYS GO STILL FURTHER RIGHT AND WILL."

And that's where we are now- successive centrist Democratic administrations have sought political support from dittoheads, conspiracy theorists, libertarian ideological sycophants, and Jesus freaks. At what point were these people ever going to vote for high capital gains taxes, abortion rights, and environmental regulations?

The #GOP just keeps drifting to the right, leading us down a path to their version of an economic utopia- austerity, which could never pass without support from misguided Democratic Party members, convinced bipartisanship is the electoral elixir that will keep them in office. It might, until the #GOP decides that individual health care mandates are suddenly socialist and now you're no longer an "independent minded, middle of the road small d."

We can take this country back, but we have to be aggressive in our progressivism to do so.