Recently, a fellow movement liberal gave me his impression of my criticism of victory-lapping, partisan Democrats:

“As I see it, we have two choices left:

1) Change riding on the back of a snail with severe arthritis.

2) Going back to the dark ages.

I don’t believe that this was the best congress ever or even the best congress in 40 years.

Many things finally got started with this congress.

You seem to have an all or nothing approach which seems very impractical to me.“

This was my response:

It’s not “all or nothing” to acknowledge that change for the worse (continuation of SS-undermining payroll tax “holiday”, permanent estate tax exemption of $5 million, etc) is change for the worse.

I’m not saying that change is too slow in coming, I’m saying that much the change that has come out of New Democrat-led Democrats has been bad for the country.

On the issues where centrists and liberals (finally, it wasn’t always like this) agree, like repeal of DADT, they made it happen. On the issues where centrists and conservatives agree, like the defense boondoggle-budget hitting new highs, they also made it happen. On the issues where centrists and conservatives disagree, like expanded FDA powers, they made it happen. On the issues where centrists and liberals also disagree, like leaving unsound financial system structures fundamentally unaltered, they made it happen.

Centrists made centrist policy and politics happen all over the place. They got a whole bunch of policy in their preferred direction enacted. They were productive as hell, even though being highly productive in that manner doesn’t help and often hurts the country.

And what they did not do, which makes the victory laps of partisan Democrats so revolting, is the kind of liberal policy that matters a whole heck of a lot more than repealing the law they, themselves passed 16 years ago allowing the military to discriminate against gay people: they didn’t stop the foreclosure crisis, they didn’t embark on New Deal 2.0 jobs-creating infrastructure campaign, they didn’t end the hemorrhaging occupation policies, and they didn’t bring accountability in any way to elites and institutions that continue to fail the American people.

It’s not that Obama and the Democratic leadership believe in those policies, and just couldn’t overcome hardcore GOP resistance, it’s that these policies aren’t a part of their program, period.

It’s not that they desire or welcome obscenely high foreclosure and unemployment rates –don’t get me wrong– but it’s that they don’t agree that New Deal-style policies to help ordinary people are worth the cost in terms of shifting government into an adversarial relationship with finance and industry. They don’t want the kind of government that has the kind of responsibility we’re talking about, and so they’ll tolerate and even excuse double-digit unemployment and the banks’ rampant fraud rather than accept that role.

I’m not looking for “all or nothing.” I’m very happy that these Democrats finally repealed their own sh*tty law that enshrined discrimination into statute. Maybe they’ll even make good on repealing the other sh*tty law they passed back then that also codified discrimination: the “Defense of Marriage Act.”

Remember those bad laws these Third Way Democrats passed? These type of Democrats did victory laps back then about passing DADT and DOMA!

It’s just not “all or nothing” to look at what Democrats with Obama’s ideological persuasion get done, and to conclude that, on balance, their kind of governance makes the country worse off than if they had done nothing.

It’s not “all or nothing” to be able to recognize a net loss, in other words.

And only the most dishonest or foolhardy sort of partisan Democrat can look at what the country is going through, and conclude that the past two years haven’t amounted to a net loss for ordinary people. That’s why the victory-lappers with their “I’m so proud of Congress!” cheering are so offensive –and so tone-deaf and stupid, in purely political terms.

I don’t see this as a choice between “going back to the dark ages” and “extremely slow change for the better.” In terms of the things that really matter, in terms of economic, political, social and military structures that can keep our country from forming a new, darkly undemocratic and middle class-less, socially immobile age, we’re not getting a choice –this regime is being forced on a mostly unwilling or uncomprehending population.

When they move on “modernizing” Social Security, and put through the same sort of “compromise” elites in the capital all love (for which the Republican-Obama tax deal represents another step), then you’ll have to concur, I think, that the choice isn’t between “change at a snail’s pace” and “a return to the dark ages”. Combining Social Security and general revenue, which is what the payroll tax “holiday” effectively does, is the precursor to drastic change in a different direction, one that will satisfy neither pre-New Deal advocating conservatives nor New Deal 2.0-advocating liberals. It won’t be the conservative “dark age,” but it will be extreme, and it will look like something else entirely.

We need to stop this radical “saving Social Security, and modernizing entitlements” program from happening. If we liberal Democrats fall into the same traps again, we’ll find ourselves voting for what would obviously be unconscionable, incompetent, terrible consequence policy, because otherwise it’s the “dark ages” program of the GOP side. We can’t let the choices be between bad and worse, or we’ll get bad –and then it will get worse.

On one very important thing we can agree, I believe. When you write:

“I don’t believe that this was the best congress ever or even the best congress in 40 years“

you are, of course, correct. That’s reality, and we, in the reality-based community, are not the rank Bushists who denied that there was a civil war in Iraq, or that New Orleans was drowning and starving. We’re capable of reality-based politics.

But the partisan Democrat victory-lappers are increasingly following in the Bushists’ dangerous footsteps.

They’re increasingly demanding that we liberal Democrats ignore the unemployment and foreclosure rates, ignore the continuing occupations, ignore the partnering deals with big finance and industry, ignore the increasing descent into an authoritarian and accountability-less state, and that we clap louder for whatever they call “victory.”

They’re demanding loyalty, in other words.

Unearned loyalty in return for dangerously incompetent government is the definition of Bushism. It’s not like the Medicare Part D-passing Bushists were even terribly conservative, but they demanded loyalty, anyway, since traitorous, God-hating, “Party of Death” Democrats were waiting to pounce on the levers of the state, in order to usher in a new era of Soviet oppression in America.

We must be a different base than that –and we are, which is why you and I can agree about the non-bestness of this Congress, and say so, unlike the admittedly water-carrying Limbaugh and his dittoheads.

That’s why partisan propagandists must be treated as such, and why partisan Democratic happy talk can’t be accepted in silence by the reality-based community.