The last 8 years of the Bush Administration taught us one certainty: There is always a backlash to extremity. Hence the historic election of Barack Obama as President of the United States.
Those who voted to elect George W. Bush in 2000, and most significantly in 2004, enabled him to push this country so radically to the right it made rebellion inevitable.
At Bush's behest, we ended up with a botched war in Afghanistan, an unnecessary war in Iraq, wrong sided tax-cuts, Katrina, warrantless spying on American citizens, a crippled economy, overwhelming job-loss, and over 10 trillion dollars of deficit.
Is that why the vast majority of Americans didn't vote for John McCain? Ya think?
Of course the minuscule remainder of unrepentant Bush supporters will never accept this reality. Rather than give Obama a chance to activate his positive visions of change, unity, and hope for America, these sore losers manipulate their own minds to create irrational scenarios they dread -- oh how they love to abuse themselves. I've heard the whining; "We're going to become a welfare country," "Obama is going to empower all the minorities," "There will be nothing left but section 8 housing and affirmative action," and "We're going to lose in Iraq." Talk about a circular firing squad.
This element isn't unique to the far-right. They're prevalent throughout the far-left as well.
Ralph Nader received 696,728 votes, Bob Barr with 510,177 votes, and Cynthia McKinney managed to garner 152,111 votes. These 3 nonviable candidates received over a million votes combined -- a total of 1.1%. I support Americans voting for 3rd party candidates, but it's so obvious those votes went right in the wastebasket. What is the sense in that?
The ultra-left is against any establishment candidate. They're absolutist and will not negotiate. They make no distinction between those who voted for Obama and those who voted for McCain. They unfairly view Democrats and Republicans to be complicit with many of the disasters created by the Bush Administration.
The best examples to cite are the A.N.S.W.E.R. coalition and The World Can't Wait organization. They marched on the Pentagon in March 2007 demanding the impeachment of George W. Bush and an immediate withdrawal of our troops from Iraq. Someone must have forgotten to tell them that the Department of Defense, our military's headquarters, doesn't hold impeachment hearings nor do they dictate our foreign policy.
Even worse, they accuse police officers who stop them from wreaking havoc on property of government agencies of holding membership in a modern day Gestapo or being direct proxies of Bush creating a police state -- total lunacy.
Every time they conduct an event they plan for maximum impact. If they don't achieve the desired outcome, they'll continuously up the ante. This causes them to appear even more extreme than they already are -- if that's even possible.
They contributed significantly to the decreased credibility of the anti-war movement by alienating the silent majority. What middle-of-the-road American wants to participate in an anti-war protest only to find themselves in an anti Semitic mob scene chanting "free Mumia," "overthrow the government," while wearing Che Guevara t-shirts and waving the Palestinian flag? Not me.
There are far right extremist groups to counter them such as the Free Republic and Move America Forward. They have no ability to look objectively outside the box. They pledge undying loyalty to George W. Bush and neoconservative ideology. If it were possible they would imprison or deport all those who disagree with them -- only they are allowed to be American and support the troops. I've personally been on the receiving end of their vileness. The Freepers (on many occasions) have called me and my fellow Iraq veterans who oppose the war cowards, phonies, and traitors. They even told us we should be sent to Guantanamo.
Eventually these types of groups (on both sides) will fade away into obscurity. They are socially destructive, politically irrelevant, and a speed bump to progress. Hopefully the recent election will hinder their circus act.
If there is any advice that I could give President-elect Obama and members of Congress (of both parties) it's this: Learn from the last 8 years of George W. Bush's failed presidency. His extreme right-wing policies caused the Republicans to self-destruct and emaciated the size of their party in both chambers of Congress.
Now that the Democrats have the White House and a sizeable majority of Congress they should not focus on pushing a leftist agenda (as their predecessors did on the right) that will certainly cause partisan political gridlock. Instead, they should work together with their collegues from the other side of the aisle to get things done for the American people -- it's to their benefit and ours.
OTOH, the infighting among the Green Party must be reaching epic proportions by this point seeing as McKinney finished behind Barr AND Baldwin.
I'm surprised Barr didn't get some of the 'we can't deny reality but we can't vote for the other party' votes that Anderson got in 1980 (he was strongest in usually Democratic states.) I guess the 'ZOMG a Black man will make everyone get gay abortions!' rhetoric was too strong.
However, with that said, the status quo is pretty right-wing, given the past 28 years of Bush, Clinton (he was centrist), Bush I, and Reagan. Obama won a fairly convincing electoral win and a fairly large popular vote win. The American people have declared they want some change -- maybe not the full laundry list of what folks here, on DKos or HuffPost might want, but they do want the basic direction of this country changed.
As Obama said, it won't all get changed in a year, or maybe even a single term. But work will begin.
The first one, and the one that I find the most important one, is that there is no ideological play book for the left. Unlike the right, which had a nice ideological created and polished with ready-to-enact bills, the left in the U.S. lacks that. At this point, the U.S. left is just a collection of socially positive causes (health care, economic protection, education, etc.) without a single narrative that can join them together. The left doesn't have a clear goal such as the right with their reduction of government, imperialistic foreign policies, religious fundamentalism, and hysterical tax hatred.
In brief, Obama lacks the script that Bush mindlessly followed to bring the utopic Reagan Republic into life. Unfortunately for all of us, he actually did deliver the full Reagan world into our nation. As many of us predicted, it has turned out to be a disaster.
The second reason why I don't see Obama trying to advance a leftist agenda is that he has already proven a lot of pragmatism during the race. We must remember that he was relatively unknown, yet he was able to win over very experienced politicians and survive several attempts to swift boat him. And he won formerly solid red states. So he obviously knows what he is doing.
And his cabinet announcements also shows a lot of pragmatism.
So I don't see anything to worry about.
And this was the big disorientation moment for the left. The right said that the reason why the Soviet Union fell was because a society built on making sure that everyone can have a dignified life was meant to fail. Capitalism had won. A society driven by greed gave a better life than one driven to grant everyone a home, a job, and food.
This was nonsense. The Soviet Union was a war-economy party dictatorship that wouldn't grant political freedom. Their rhetoric was egalitarian, but their main goal was to survive and spread out communism. A combination of political repression and getting bankrupt by their senseless war spending brought them down.
And the "greed wins" narrative was bogus as well. The right in the U.S. forgets that FDR saved capitalism, and he did so by granting the basic safety nets that made it possible for the lives of most of the modern "middle class" to come to existence. Reagan wouldn't have been able to win without the society that FDR created.
In any case, after the fall of the USSR only crackpots kept on uttering Marxist or pseudo-Marxists narratives.
The closest thing that we have know is the Nader rhetoric. Bush's presidency has tarnished a lot of the good will that people had for Nader, and most people simply don't adopt his narrative and solutions wholesale; at this point, even people who voted for him in 2000 are uncomfortable with him.