The Left has a serious focus problem. Which cause is the nearest and dearest to us? Global warming? War profiteering? Social injustice? Education? Health care? Glushawn Limbeckity? Seriously. We're like chickens with our heads cut off. Not only are there bogey men in every direction, but we're shooting at phantoms--we don't really know who to blame for these problems, and though there are identifiable benefits to solving them, the payoff is always deferred, and difficult to measure--like eating your spinach or lowering your cholesterol count. Statistics abound (the Left loves them) but how do you define "a better world?" Furthermore, since just about every Liberal cause depends upon money for a solution, (and money is the Right's department) you have to go through the Right to get there, and the Right gets very annoyed when you raid its coffers trying to pay for stuff it cares little or nothing about.
The Right, on the other hand, has a clear focus--making America a hospitable environment for making boatloads of money. Yes, there are the social agendas, but even those are clear as vodka--get rid of abortion, period...bring (Christian) religion into the schools, and get everybody to conform to a strict set of behavioral guidlelines that are easy to define (even though the Right has as much trouble behaving as anyone...lately it seems like they have more). Get rid of rampant crime, etc.
Now, the last of these isn't easy--crime is a moving target, but the Right isn't concerned with eliminating the root causes. The Right would simply remove offenders from the street--isolate, capture, quarantine. Fairness isn't a concern--the Right just wants "undesirables" eliminated, taken out of sight, buried. That's not hard, really. The only thing standing in the way of the Right achieving THAT goal is the Constitution of the United States. The "evil government." It galls the Right that criminals have rights--as far as the Right is concerned, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to identify, apprehend, and incarcerate the troublemakers. It's just those pesky "technicalities," like the 4th and 5th amendment, the right to counsel, etc, that keep what should be, in their eyes, a fairly straightforward task from being swiftly and thoroughly "taken care of." And as far as most of the Right is concerned, if you get rid of anybody of non-Caucasian, non-European descent, the problem is solved. It's easy to identify the "others," and isolate, apprehend, incarcerate. Or simply send them to Australia (it's still a prison colony, isn't it? Or maybe we can develop the Moon as a place to dump the people we don't want around).
The goals of the Right are easy to identify, and, in their eyes, easy to accomplish. In order to stimulate economic growth, you cut taxes to the bone and get the government out of everything. Simple, easy-breezy. Since they're all about money, and the best of them are very good at accumulating it, they've got the resources on their side. Can any of the same be said for the left?
How do you stop Global warming? We've identified some causes of it, but it's a goal that requires cooperation among all the peoples of the world, many of whom aren't even speaking to one another, much less agreed as to the best direction for the world to take. How do you define "social justice?" Who gets to decide what's fair, and how does it get paid for? Sure, there's a vast wealth disparity in our country, but there's something to be said for the idea that if you have to suck away the gains made by people who are successful in order to fund the lives of people who aren't, the end result will be unsustainable--without an engine, it's kind of irrelevant how well you take care of your tires. So that's a balance, and how does one achieve a balance where the engine keeps running, when its incentive for doing so isn't in its own self-interest? We could go on and on with the analogies, but the point is that the Left is, for all intents and purposes, swimming upstream.
Therein lies the rub--human nature is to take care of ourselves and our own. Altruism is a part of human nature, but it's pretty low on Maslow's hierachy--and once you've taken care of the food, clothing and shelter (which are so expensive in the United States that for most people it requires more than one job to make ends meet) people are exhausted--that 52" plasma screen TV seems a hell of a lot more important than feeding some orphan in a 3rd world country that you'd never even see if her face wasn't plastered all over your screen while you're trying to watch "Lethal Weapon 16."
Are the causes of the Left worth working for? Yes. Are they achievable? Not by organizing demonstrations, no. The Right simply classifies that sort of thing as a nuisance, "civil unrest," and calls out the militia to squash it.
Nope. You'll never get the Right to care about anyone other than itself. So in order to pursue the Progressive agenda, there's really only one solution: follow the money.
That's not easy. The Right makes it as difficult as possible, by obscuring the pathways through which money travels, and hiding ownership (read: control and power) of the more obvious targets. Is your local bank a free-standing entity? No. It's dependent on larger and larger fish in the food chain, leading up to the giants in lower Manhattan. Without the approval of the big fish, your local bank can't do diddley to assist YOU. You can't get a loan if your local bank doesn't have capital to lend, and the savings accounts of a few middle-class yokels isn't going to cut it. They need big infusions, and they get them from people farther up the food chain.
Still, if the Left hopes to accomplish any of its objectives, that's what's going to have to happen. You fight fire with fire--research like hell, find the money pathways, and (and here's the hard part) organize the masses to make choices (often at the expense of their own hard-won comforts) which hurt the big fish in the only place they truly give a damn about--their own wallets.
In the end, even the biggest fish need customers, and though a few of them are able to cater only to wealthy clientele, where do these wealthy clients get their fat bankrolls to spend? Big businesses depend on economies of scale. Wal-Mart makes its billions by selling trillions of trinkets at $12.34. We could bankrupt them in 6 months if we simply stopped shopping there.
The problem is we, most of us, can't do that. We are dependent on discount retailers simply for survival, because we don't have the resources to wait them out. We can't survive the winter without heat, and I wouldn't be typing this without electricity to run my computer (and an internet connection to spew this forth to the world) so utilities pretty much have us by the short and curlies.
So we implore the government to help. Is it any wonder that the Right sees the government as the enemy? It may not actually BE an enemy, but it represents the collective will of the enemy, which is US. The Right doesn't want to share. And it's pretty easy to buy off politicians, since we are all, at our cores, creatures who crave comfort (and comfort is bought with money, big piles of it).
The bottom line is that as long as the Left continues to resort to organizing verbal protests, the Right wins. We can shout all we want--the Right can just close the windows, call the SWAT team, deploy the sound cannons and the tear gas, and get back to its business of dismantling the U.S. economy (at least that part of it which provides an income for the middle class), opening up overseas markets, and providing goods and services using cheap labor from countries where the population is huge (like China) and poverty is widespread.
The only language the Right understands consists of five words: Franklin, Grant, Jackson, Lincoln, and Washington. Those are the only words we can use to bend its collective will toward solutions to the myriad, unfocused, ill-defined problems we face. Any collective action must be VERY focused on making those words a problem for the Right if the Right doesn't pay attention to the goals of the Left.
Don't be distracted by the Bible, or Gay rights, or the Gun lobby. Those are red herrings. The more we shout about those things, the easier it is for the Right to keep our eyes off the ball. The Right uses those things to energize its base, which it uses for one and only one purpose--to provide enough of a base vote that, with a little arm-twisting, it can recruit enough swing voters to achieve its agenda. As heinous as those concepts may be to us (and who doesn't want to see Gay people happy and prosperous, or the shooting war on our streets brought to a minimum?) they are distractions, if there's really any will on the Left to achieve lasting change.
The attack needs to be two-pronged, and both prongs are extremely difficult to realize, which makes it all the more important to focus. One, the Left needs to become more economically empowered in its own right. Two, the agenda of the Right (making the most money possible) must be used against it. Both goals have to pass through the Right in order to be achieved, unfortunately. As Willie Sutton famously said, "that's where the money is."
Wanna talk about a "Long War?" This makes "The War on Terror" (our struggle against a verb) look like a 10-second sound bite. We've been fighting The Long War for centuries, with little success--little victories here and there (America was supposed to be one of those, before democracy became a tabloid joke).
If there's a hope for the Progressive movement, it lies along the money pathways.
I'm no expert (far from it), but I can see that much. No amount of energy expended on shouting at the rain will stop it from falling. I don't know how, (wiser heads than mine will have to provide the research and the ammunition) but I do know that it will only be possible to affect lasting change by focusing collective action in the one place where it will have any effect--follow the money.
