Remember this scene from Terminator 2?

That’s a visual representation of what progressives of all stripes need to be doing at this moment.

We are all furious at the “compromise” worked by Obama and the Republicans to extend the tax cuts for the wealthy. We have all, at our own different paces, come to realize that Obama never has and never will represent the progressive point of view. We have all, at our own different paces, come to agree that a new movement needs to come together and rise up to assert what we believe is best for our troubled nation.

Whether we believe that this progressive movement should mount a primary challenge against Obama in 2012, whether it should seek to form a third party, or whether it should work in other ways to push the Democrats to the left – we must fight the temptation to fight against one another over small differences, and understand that the real enemy is the corporatist plutocracy that is slowly bleeding the life out of the middle class and siphoning all of this country’s wealth toward the top.

Instead, we should be reaching out to one another and making new friends and new alliances – across racial lines, across generational lines, across class lines, across geographical lines, and across the relatively small ideological lines that make some of us more radical progressives than others.

The Terminator T-1000 was helpless as a bunch of individual pools scattered here and there, but when it allowed itself to draw together into one unit, it was a devastatingly powerful force. (Nevermind the fact that the T-1000 gets melted down by Arnold at the end of the movie – we’ll only push the metaphor so far.)

So let’s get out of our comfort zones. Let’s reach out to other folks and other groups who also realize that Obama is not the answer. Let’s pull this thing together!