Retake Liberal

Well, now that the depressing news is beginning to sink in we can begin to think about what happened. According to an excellent analysis in Asia Times, the so called youth vote, never materialized. The number of new registered voters in the youth category only accounted for 10% of the vote. It seems that all of those cell phone users were, as to be expected on their cell phones and not in the voting booths.

In fact entertainment for the young has trumped moral politics and led to their defeat. Also the 30 something age group was also absent in much of the voting data. What was present was the extremely large and well organized Christian evangalical vote. The Republicans have done an excellent job in mobilizing their forces using cultural wedge issues. Part of the failure can be easily traced to the lackluster nature of Kerry as a candidate - after all more people were probably against Bush than for Kerry - a loosing proposition. The second aspect is that we simply ran out of time.

The Democratic Party and the Left has learned too late that in order to capture and hold power there must be a systematic attack on the dominant hegemony and its replacement by your own positions. The Right has done this through well funded thinky-tanks, foundations, deregulation of media, etc for some 20 years.

The Left and the DNC have been sitting on their hands or in the streets but not actively establishing the social institutions required to alter the hegemonic nature of established power. Now we are paying the price for that.

Michael Moore, Air America, and other alternative (the problem is that they are "alternative" and not mainstream) are great but not sufficient to challenge the dominant hegemonic structure which is church based and Christian. What is required is placing large amounts of capital into think tanks, foundations, political operatives, media outlets and other organs which can work to contest seriously Conservative assumptions. It means asking the question what do Liberals stand for? Forget Marxists like ourselves we are dead meat on this highway - the best we can hope for is to offer comfort and aid to our Liberal and Progressive friends in this long term struggle, at least until social conditions change in our favor.

We can also put the blame of all of this squarely on the backs of the DNC andtheir croonies, at least in the short run.

Time for a house cleaning. It is time to bury postmodernism, bring back Elightenment reason and celebrate our species being as people who are most concerned with equality, fraternity, and liberty. It is time to take back Liberal as a term of respect and tolerance and time to call the Republicans for what they are racists, classist and sexist pigs.