"unity" and "change"

Just for the record, I don't want unity with the far-right. I wouldn't mind seeing a little more of the whole checks & balances thing. I like checks & balances.

But I think a little more unity within the Democratic party is a-comin', ready or not.

I don't mean unity in the sense that once Our Savior Obama is done explaining to all of us what's wrong with us, we'll all just agree to change our ways and conform to the Prophetic Vision (you know, of how we ought to be).

For the first time ever, the term "liberal fascism" starts to make sense to me. People complain that Obama is anything but a "unity" candidate, but he really is unifying. Don't you see it? He appeals to a weird and very narcissistic combination of self-righteousness and presumed superiority. With an Obama victory, he'll take control and impose that Prophetic Vision, to which everyone will just magically submit. Things won't be out of control anymore.

If everyone would just cooperate, it'd be so beautiful.

If everyone will just follow him, he'll straighten everything out. That really means he'll straighten everyone out. In Obama's divine plan it's always someone elses' fault and it's always someone else who ought to and has got to do the changing. Obama's role is to tell us where and how and maybe even why.

Really: find anything Obama has said - anywhere - and go through and look for the part where he lectures the rest of us about what has to happen. It's always there, because that is all he has to talk about: what is wrong with all Americans (except him and his).

Look at what he does when his outrageous comments are questioned - he turns it back onto him making grand pronouncements about what's really wrong. That works far too well with Dems. Fortunately, it doesn't seem to work so well on conservatives.

(certain lefty blogs) seems to have turned that around to where, if you don't worship Obama, you are therefore by definition a "Republican". That's the dirtiest word they can think of, and it conflates all the ugliest stuff they can think of - and it is so dirty and so ugly to them that not only does it justify crossing the normal lines of civilized behavior, it actually suggests it's somehow virtuous to do so. (Defending a nation from its true enemies is a noble calling, isn't it?)

That's not the sort of unity I want to see. To me, unity has to be based on respect.

And it has to involve us learning how to fight back against the noxious runny stuff left over from Jesse Jackson's Democratic party. I don't care how good it tasted when it was fresh - it is time to clean out the fridge, and yeah, that means all the way to the back.

We must reclaim what is good and throw out what is rotten. (The fact that it's glowing doesn't make it holy. It's just radioactive.)

We must particularly confront our party's disturbing tendency to justify the unjustifiable, which means we must confront those barriers which have kept us from discussing freely those things which need to be talked about.

We must stop allowing people to avoid responsibility by pointing to how someone else is worse, as if that makes things all good. I don't care if Clinton is worse than Obama. I don't care if Republicans are worse than Democrats. We must learn how and when to stay on topic.

We must ask why Dems are so peculiarly vulnerable to arguments that involve deliberately conflating things:

If you attack this idea you are attacking all people of that race.

If you attack that person you are attacking the very spirit of our beloved hero.

If you attack that proposal, you are attacking the very idea of making progress.

And never mind that the idea is not related to the people, or the person is not related to the hero, or the proposal is not related to anything progressive at all. The point is, "you're not supposed to say that. It's insensitive."

And to think I have always defended 'political correctness'...but being sensitive isn't the same as being manipulated. There needs to be a boundary marking that difference. The fact that there isn't one now is being exploited in a very bad way.

We can't really progress until we confront moral and intellectual failures within the Democratic party. We must separate it from the stuff that is genuinely good stuff. Our ideals are better, our goals are better - and our methods and policies have not been adequate to meet the challenge.

The end goal of the in-fighting we're experiencing right now should be a new consensus - on racism, sexism, classism, failed liberal policies, what we can and can't talk about, what makes rules fair, and what's really wrong with Kansas.

Looking around the blogosphere, I see the "division" as America having a dialog about all the stuff that we haven't been allowed to talk about for the past thirty years, starting with the very idea of liberal orthodoxy itself.