I'd like to think so, but...

I have my doubts that Kevin Drum is right when he says that a Democratic victory is likely in 2008. My skepticism stems partly from last year's failure. That George W. Bush could win re-election after having failed in so many, many ways struck me as inconceivable. (Vizzini echoes in my head even now.) Kerry's defeat indicated to me that something very bad had happened to the electorate, the media, and our political life. If we could not defeat Bush in 2004, then who can we beat?

The essence of Drum's argument is that things haven't gotten bad enough yet. Sooner or later, sooner he thinks, the stench will rise so high that no one will be able to stand it and voters will go for Democrats in huge numbers. Forces of political nature, tidal gravity and so on, will usher Dems into the White House and Congress.

Let's leave aside for a moment that the horrible economic conditions Drum expects (and I'm not knocking his thinking there) would be incredibly bad for me. I'm already without health insurance, in hock, and scraping by. I can't afford for things to get worse than they are right now. And if that's what it'll take to put a Democrat in the White House, I say to hell with it. But we'll leave that aside for the moment.

The real problem here is that it's a bad idea to rely on tidal gravity to produce your political victories, just as it was bad for the Communists to rely on historical inevitablity to produce theirs. The pendulum theory, that things will swing back to the left once they've gone far enough to the right is an interesting one, but I have to ask why, if the pendulum's backswing results when a party has gone too far, George W. Bush still has a job. He already went too far. He shifted the tax burden from the wealthy to the working to a degree that no one else would have dared. He lied us into a war against a nation that posed no threat to us in the name of defeating terrorism. His administration has tortured. It has jailed people without giving them recourse to the courts. It has given away billions to big pharma in the name of reform. We're already so far past too far that the light from too far will take millions of years to reach us.

Now in the long term, it's likely that the American public will tire of their government treating them in this way, and it's possible that this is already taking place (given the slippage in Bush's approval ratings). But Bush's approval ratings were crummy last year too, and he's still here. People like Rove are very skilled at playing the anxieties and bigotries of the American people to ruin the prospects of any Democrat who faces them. It's hard to believe that crap like the Swiftboat vets works, but it does. These guys have a hideous gift for campaigning, and geniuses like Bill Clinton don't come along every four years. (I think what really pissed the right off about Clinton wasn't his policies, but his maddening ability to escape their most carefully constructed death traps. Think of Newt Gingrich as Ernst Stavro Blofeld and you'll get the idea.) Bush's minions will tell any lie, distort any fact, concoct any fantasy to put their man in office and keep their party in charge of the boodle.

The Democrats, if they're to have any chance at all, have to change the nature of political discussion in this country so that the Republicans' tactics no longer function. Otherwise, they may not win a Presidential election until the Bills win the Super Bowl. And once a Democrat takes the presidency, the right will whip up the same shitstorm that consumed much of Bill Clinton's time in office. The media will say the President is crippled, his policies will founder, and in a few years we'll hand the country back to another right winger who will promise to "change the tone".

Changing the way we conduct our political dialog so that it is more rational and intellectually honest seems to me a decades long project. We've damaged ourselves badly, not just in the last four years, but really in the last thirty, and recovery looks like it'll be a generational affair. I don't know that it'll work out at all. I do know that if it doesn't work out, the United States may one day, like the Soviet Union, fall from one of the world's most powerful to one of the world's most pitiable nations. A nation can only lie to itself for so long before the truth, like a barbarian, pounds at its gates. I'd rather not test our limits, but this nation does a lot of things I'd rather not do.

In the shorter term, though, the Democrats need to start winning political battles, not necessarily at the Federal level where victories will be mostly in stopping Bush from doing this or that thing, but at the state level. It is there where we can do something to prove that liberalism's greatest virtue is that it gives people the freedom to live safer, more secure, more prosperous, and generally more congenial lives than faith in the Laffer curve and George Bush can offer.

Long story short: it is not enough for the Republicans to fail; the Democrats must succeed.