After years of failure and increasing frustration, enough people joined the effort to succeed in shifting vote fractions decisively through most of the country. The Democrats gained six of fifteen Republican Senate seats while losing none, an unprecedented feat. (The Republicans in 1994 picked up a slightly smaller fraction: 8/22.) Victory has many parents; with some partiality, I credit the Net and its bloggers, alternative-media sites,
MoveOn, and so forth, a virtual world created since about 2000 that gave the disaffected urban middle class a forum and mirror for their opinions not afforded by the mainstream media and provided an avenue for hardworking and unaffiliated people to contribute time and money to campaigns - one that paralleled and came to rival the Republican Party's church and corporate networks for effectiveness. Howard Dean, as presidential candidate and more recently as Democratic National Committee chair, has excelled in connecting the rage felt by the educated middle class with on-the-ground promotion of Democratic candidates, with far-reaching results.
The curiously conciliatory response of Republican leaders to defeat suggests to me that they are subconsciously happy to give up the reins; they have run out of aspirations and out of hope. The party's ideology has devolved into a mere blend of fear and hate - of blacks, of queers, of secularists, of violent Muslims and foreigners generally - with not a positive message in sight. Freedom has become, as in Orwell, a freedom
from undesirable elements, not a freedom
to do anything worth doing. The idea of smaller government, an at least potentially hopeful negative idea (insofar as less government can suggest more liberty), has under Republican auspices been replaced by continually increasing spending and greater government hubris intrusiveness. The Democratic message this year has also been negative, with the important difference that the threat it pointed to was at least a concrete, believable and manageable one - the insane obsessions of Republican hegemony.
While the leftward momentum that has been created is powerful in itself (especially since media attention and corporate money flow to the ruling party), the two-party system tends to small, regular oscillations that change the pubic agenda only slowly. To lead the nation in the right direction beyond 2008, progressives will have to restore hope, and act on positive steps to build community at home and lead constructively abroad.
Initially, the most difficult challenge for congressional Democrats will be to insist on prompt (meaning as-fast-as-logistically-feasible) withdrawal from Iraq. In almost every respect, Iraqi people today are much worse off than they were before the US invasion. The Bush administration's current argument for continuing is that Americans owe Iraqis help with restoring a stable government; in fact, this objective, however morally justified, is beyond American capabilities and resources, and US forces are simply making the current civil war longer and more bloody. Few Democrats have forthrightly called for withdrawal, but that is exactly what, for lack of an alternative party,
they were voted in for; and if they do not withdraw our troops before many more die, voters may not give Democrats the chance to pursue much else of their agenda.
