Merge Left Today!

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

I could quote the entire poem by William Butler Yeats, for all twenty-two lines of THE SECOND COMING still apply to our world, nearly ninety-three years after they were first penned. But those thirteen words seem particularly apt in our time, and they have been during my entire life.

I was born in 1970, a few months before the National Guard murdered four students at Kent State, an event which I believe marks the end of an era when the best possessed both conviction and passionate intensity. There are other notorious events which qualify--you know them; you may even have been there; take your pick--but whenever I see the iconic photograph of Mary Ann Vecchio kneeling over Jeffrey Miller's corpse, I see the death of hope expressed in her young, anguished face.

I've been politically aware since 1980, when I was ten years old. That was the year I read that classic fable of Machiavellian-realism-for-children, George Orwell's ANIMAL FARM. That was also the year of Ronald Reagan's election, a man I despised right from the get-go. I can't credit my parents: Mom was a Republican and Dad was a Democrat, but neither of them were particularly interested in politics, and the subject scarcely ever came up. I no more grew up in a vacuum than anyone else, but I honestly believe I came by my political convictions on my own. Although I have been politically aware for those thirty years, I have never been truly politically active; my energies, then as now, have been chiefly devoted to writing fiction. But the draw of polemic has grown stronger over the years, and I can no longer deny it. I may not be able to change the world, but I damned well am going to say something about it.

During my forty-one years and change on this planet, there have been exactly three Democrats in the White House--which means that the Presidency has been merely conservative, as opposed to blatantly reactionary, for only fifteen of those forty-one years. This has been disheartening, to say the least. Especially since none of them has much risen above the level of conservative. The first of those Democrats, Jimmy Carter, at least made some sincere efforts to improve our national energy policy, but made the critical error of telling Americans what they didn't want to hear; the best that can be said for Carter is that he is by far the best and most useful ex-President we've ever had. Bill Clinton had charm and intelligence (although I at first found him to be smarmy, and he never really grew out of it), and I have to credit him for trying to introduce national health care reform, but he quickly caved in to the Right. It was Clinton as much as Reagan and Bush Sr. who set us down the road we're on--something for which the Republicans, of course, thanked him by impeaching him for utterly meaningless if squalid twaddle. And now Barack Obama, who is the most disappointing President of my lifetime, is shooting his progressive base in the foot and smearing cream pies in our faces. He's done some good, and after eight horrible years of Bush Jr., Obama's manner and intellect are more than a breath of fresh air--he's a whole oxygen tank. But he's still a conservative, a corporatist, and a failure by any reasonable liberal standard. He's also the negative inspiration for the dread Tea Party, which again proves that Republicans can never accept a gift without spitting on the giver.

The Tea Party is what finally inspired me to start blogging about politics. They are "the worst," and they are definitely "full of passionate intensity." I would love to see the Left--call us liberals, or progressives, or socialists, or whatever--build up a head of steam comparable to the one hissing out of the rightwing Teapot these days. Maybe that is a tall order--anger and fiery righteousness seem to be conservative (i.e. reactionary) qualities, while the left is known for its embrace of peace and love and tolerance, not to mention liberal guilt. Well, I am not much of one for guilt, and while I wholly embrace peace and love and tolerance, I also feel pretty damned angry at what the regressive Right has done to this country in my lifetime, especially in the last decade or so. And as for fiery righteousness, what good is a belief without conviction? You'd better believe the Right has it, and in spades. The Left needs it, if we are ever going to get ahead.

That is what this blog is about (from my perspective, anyway--my co-blogger and best friend, Kevin Mergel, will have his own say about what he wants to achieve here). The Left has to get fired up. We are fighting for the future--hell, we're fighting for there to be a future, given that the Right is full of climate change deniers and fundamentalists eager to duke it out once and for all with all the unbelievers and let God pick His chosen people out of the cinders. We may not win this fight. The Right is ruthless, and the Left is not, and in war, those without scruples tend to ride roughshod over those who worry about consequences. We can't change that without changing who we are--the disastrous experiments in totalitarian communism proved that much--but without a more aggressive strategy, we will be doomed to lose.

Some say we've lost already. I think this is close to the truth. The Right has, to a large extent, won the economic and political wars in America. On the other hand, the Left has, to the same (if not even larger) extent, already won the culture wars. Of course, the Right desperately wants to win the culture war, too--and they won't stop trying, because it's the easiest way to energize their political base. By the same token, we progressives must try to win the economic and political war, rather than letting ourselves become co-opted by the Wall Street ethos and the lure of the rightward tug in Washington.

It certainly won't be easy. It's often said that many (though not all) conservatives tend toward a herd mentality, while Will Rogers' quip about not belonging to any organized political party because he was a Democrat, still holds true today. Diversity means each one of us progressives has an agenda all our own, and it is difficult to bring them all together. Like herding cats, they say. Okay. I say, let's try to organize--we've known for decades that this is the best strategy, the route to success. Come together, right now. In addition to my personal rants, I hope to include links to organizations, websites, and movements in an effort to facilitate this convergence of progressive people into a force to be reckoned with. We might even do best to take some of the strategies of the Tea Party to heart--whatever may be said of their goals, they have mostly succeeded in bringing the Republican Party around to their way of thinking. If we work together, we may be able to do the same thing to the Democrats, or to a viable Progressive Party.

There's a lot of smoke on the horizon, and it's hard to see what our destination may be--or if there is one. But we're on the road, and at this point, it may be impossible to slow down. There are potholes and wrecks, oil slicks and road rage in the Right lane. The middle of the road is for yellow stripes and roadkill. But the left lane could be smooth cruising, if we but work to make it so.

Merge Left Today!

--Joshua Hendrickson