Spoiled Voters, Real Americans
by digby
Adam Serwer correctly took issue with Eugene Robinson’s assertion today that the American people are acting like spoiled brats. People are genuinely stressed and it’s human nature to want to take it out on the government, which is the only institution in which the average person has a say. But I would take issue with one thing. Serwer writes this:
[I]t’s silly to blame the American people for reacting to the results of Democratic governance. Unemployment edged up to 9.6 percent, the economy losing 54,000 jobs. As Neil Irwin reports today, “The current pace of job creation is too weak to put Americans back to work in significant numbers.” There’s no mystery as to why Americans aren’t dancing in the streets. A better argument might be that Democrats are being “spoiled,” since it’s their lack of enthusiasm about voting that is giving the GOP a major advantage.
But, you know, Democrats are Americans too. And they are also without jobs (or unable to change them) and are losing their homes and savings in this economy. At least the Republicans feel they have a path to improvement; Democrats feel politically abandoned. As everyone constantly reminds them, have no one else to vote for and so many of them feel there’s little point in participating at all under these circumstances.
I don’t think Serwer was endorsing that view, but rather using it as an example. However, there are people hectoring Democrats for failing to be properly enthusiastic and I think it’s worthwhile to remind them that Democrats have lives and jobs and futures that are affected by this economy too and they are scared stiff about what’s happening. As Serwer says, it’s not irrational. After 20 months in office, if this is the best they can hope for and the Republican freakshow on the right is the worst, you can’t really blame them for feeling despair.
I might just add that there are a couple of ways the Democrats could get their troops fired up. The first — making the Reaganesque “stay the course, our policies haven’t yet kicked in” argument, while picking some dramatic cultural/ideological issues to show principled allegiance to the base — is probably too late. They foolishly took premature victory laps at various points that didn’t work out. (Hello, Recovery Summer?) The other is to pick a big fight and engage in a full scale confrontation. They could bring something up in congress or Obama could pick a fight with them on a matter of executive power. Might fire up the troops a little to know that the Democrats are still breathing.
But it doesn’t look like we’re going to see a confrontation. By all accounts we are actually going to see capitulation on the Bush tax cuts and an austerity program going into 2012. It’s pretty hard to get excited about that. But it will probably cure us all of our spoiled attitudes once and for all, so that’s something.
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