For those who won't compromise in the GE--here's my problem

[jpgray]

(No candidate mentions, please--don't get my thread locked. :))

We're not going to be able to wholesale change the direction of this country in *one election*, or in four. The demand isn't there for radical change, so it is NOT going to happen.

Why isn't the demand there? Partly because the people aren't *yet* in grave danger--they aren't fighting for survival.

There is poverty here. It can be crushing. But the majority of Americans have their color TV, their love handles, their crappy job and their credit card debt, and will vote as lazily as they scan the headlines. We're no smarter than they are, but they sure are complacent, and they are not suffering on the scale that would bring real change--they are not fighting for survival.

If you want to look at a relatively rapid, and long overdue, shift of wealth in the country, it's easy to look at the New Deal. But as my avatar would tell you, the amount of suffering necessary to BRING this country to that point (the point of real socialist values becoming accepted in the capitalist's paradise) was extreme. Can you imagine whole swaths of a state's population loading up the family and possessions in a car and clogging the interstate to CA due to financial pressure these days? Our suffering isn't that acute yet, and because it isn't, *rapid* change will be difficult if not impossible to effect. The level of suffering needs to trump the innate vulnerability people have to being controlled, by the media or other means. That isn't happening yet.

We CAN do a more gradual change. This isn't as sexy as the rapid change, because the gradual change will piss you off and fail your values 80% of the time and you'll want to walk away from it. But the difference in my mind between those who expect a slog and those who expect rapid change in this situation is as follows: the former is willing to work very hard and thanklessly for any number of years towards the cause, without hope of seeing any results from his labor. The latter is more liable to talk loudly and make visible, dramatic gestures, asking for fulfillment of most of their values and nothing less, and taking their support elsewhere if that fulfillment isn't there.

People honestly seem to beleive that a real reformer, outsider or third party challenge to corporatist politics could survive in our system. I find this belief tremendously naive. The system won't accept a true far left progressive in high office. Everyone knows this--they say the media is against them, that the insider politicians on all sides play dirty tricks to obfuscate the true issues, etc.

No kidding!

So the system won't allow a good outsider candidate to succeed, yet some will only support such a candidate. Think about that for a moment. Do they expect the system to magically be fixed by some benevolent and fantastical fairness gnomes? If people want major leftist change in the country, and the system won't allow it, shouldn't the chief priority be FIXING that system? You can't do that by supporting a candidate, you do that by putting people in power to gradually swing the system back to where it ought to be. You certainly DON'T get the system fixed when power hungry right wingers have control of every flippin' branch of government.

Who can be placed in power? With the FUCKED up system we have, Democrats or Republicans. Who will at least fix SOME of what is wrong with the system? A few good Democrats. You know who is the best on these issues, and who is less good. But even those who are less good will maintain the level of unfairness the system already has. The Republicans will seek ever to increase it--witness Green Party persecution, media consolidation, Diebold, corporate pandering, etc.

So if anyone wants to one-liner me, go ahead, but this I think is at the root of my disagreement with those who refuse to support anyone to the right of Kucinich. You can vote however you want, and ideals are great, but I'm not satisfied with backing a candidate who holds my ideals, I want my ideals to have a chance of becoming national policy. That's why I will vote and work for Democrats I don't match very well with. As you can see, any of our guys is a step in the proper direction, backing away from authoritarianism and shifting to left.