Sitting Quietly in the Corner

Dear George,

One simple fact characterizes politics in the United States: there is no viable progressive movement. Progressivism is America’s problem child who is forced by the teacher to sit quietly in the corner. Oh, there are the occasional tantrums, but a quick and vigorous caning is enough to silence them.

Over time, progressives have reached the delusional conclusion that if they sit quietly in their corner, the teacher will notice their good behavior and will reward them by inviting them back to join the rest of the class.

Little do they realize that the teacher has not only forgotten about them, but fully intends to keep them in the corner until class is dismissed.

In a classroom, the teacher frames the issues. Reality is refracted through the cracked lenses in the teacher’s glasses, and should progressives be bold enough to argue, they do so on the teacher’s terms.

The right’s favorite pastime is scamming progressives. The most salutatory effect of the Atwater/Rove approach to electioneering is that both Democrats and progressives have bought into the belief that the American public is both stupid and easily manipulated by lies and deceptions.

Political operatives are fond of pointing to the success of this approach in previous elections. However, they overlook one small detail. Prior campaigns were conducted during an era of fictitious prosperity that concealed the declining political fortunes of America’s middle and lower classes. Rather than stupidity, you had a public that wasn’t paying much attention because it found itself so distracted by all the toys and baubles its plastic could buy.

That little bubble has popped right along with the housing bubble. There’s nothing like a sudden fall off the economic ladder to fire up the public’s attention span. But, as the poet said, habit is a great deadener, and both the right and the left continue to treat America’s citizens like children.

As one writer put it, “As long as progressives continue to teat ‘ordinary’ Americans as stupid and irrelevant, progressives will find themselves largely irrelevant in U.S. politics. And that’s stupid, because it doesn’t have to be that way.”

So, progressives continue to prattle on in terms set by your minions, and in doing so, they kill any chance that they might come up with a viable alternative narrative, one that an anxious and unsettled public is ready to hear.

The above writer elaborates on this when he says, “If too many of the voters are still trapped in simplistic caricatures of patriotism and national security created 40 years ago—or if you fear they are—that’s because no one has offered them an appealing alternative narrative that meets their cultural needs…They’ll abandon one narrative only when another comes along that is more satisfying.

Who would have believed that Obama would fall for the same scam as Kerry and Gore.

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones