This was not a defeat for progressives. With a few exceptions such as Russ Feingold, and Nancy Pelosi, there were no progressives on the ballot. This was defeat for the corporate politics that Obama, Geithner, and Schumer represent. No one should mourn for a defeat of this politics.

Obama lost because he made the most elementary mistake that a president can make. He ignored, dissed, and was even ashamed of, his base. He was put in office by people who wanted, not change in general, but change toward peace and away from unregulated markets. Once he became President he ignored them in favor of the bankers and generals, insisting we have to get beyond left and right. As a result, all the ideas, all the passion, all the hard work was on the other side. Very few progressives should be upset to see him rebuked today, even if they are worried about the future.

The tea party is not the enemy. It is a complex, multi-centered phenomenon but there are certainly elements that progressives can work with. Probably the most important current in the movement is the resentment against the bailouts — why shouldn’t people resent the bailouts, at least in the form that they took? Much of the early resentment against the health plan came from people who feared that Medicare would be cut. Well, friends, it was Obama who went around complaining that a huge amount of health care spending took place in the last six months of life, the kind of political insight that surfaces in fascist societies, but not in liberal democracies. Of course, the tea party is dominated by an anti-government, deficit-reducing ideology that is almost completely misguided (though while I can defend the New Deal and the Great Society it is hard to defend the New Democrat’s government). And insofar as there are racist elements, obviously, this is abhorrent and must be opposed. But overall, it is not clear to me why corporate liberals are preferable to tea partyers.

The lesson of the last two years is clear. We need an independent left that knows who it is, has values it believes in, starts developing dialogues about where the country is at and where it can go. We need to start from the ground up. The country’s long slide, its basic loss of values and self-respect, the handing over of its wealth and potential to the rich, most of this began with Democrats like Carter and we have seen that the utter disaster that Bush led the country into was simply replicated by Obama. We have to start thinking for ourselves.


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