> I more or less know how I feel, but I'm wondering how others feel -
> isolated? hopeful? despondent? shocked? confused? regretful?
I'm juiced, actually. I actually think we have the first good chance of moving this country to the left in 40 years. Because this is the first time the left side of the spectrum has been fired up in a context where it could do something. It was fired up under Reagan, but it was swallowed in the long boom. Now it's peaking in harmony with electoral economics. To get things pushed leftwards you need two things: mobilized people in the streets; and someone in government who gives a shit. We have a good chance of getting both.
The war itself was unbearably stressful. At one point I honestly couldn't take it any more. I shut everything off, unplugged and went to sleep, and spent a week reading Proust and Hegel and other useless things. I highly recommend it too everyone who feels beyond crushed. Surprisingly, the world will pretty much the same when you get back. And you'll do it more good if you recharge your batteries.
But the war being over is a great thing for several reasons. In this whole debate, there were two points that were never at issue:
1) Saddam was a horrible bastard; and 2) The US armies could beat Iraq's armies
The only points at issue in that year long rancorous debate was how point (1) could be fixed without making the world more unstable and dangerous than it was in the first place. And while the anti-war forces had many internal disagreements -- ranging from those who thought there was no way (1) could be remedied without making things worse, to those who thought it was possible to build a world in which it could be done, and that would take lots of time, which we had -- all of us, from Chirac to ANSWER, agreed on one thing: that the way it finally was done had positively the lowest probability of a good outcome. And now that the war is over, although we are still in the early stages, everything so far confirms what we believe. Riots, looting, assassination, infighting -- a vast unruly and needy country that seems to be a great surprise to the administration -- absolutely nothing has gone the way the adminstration hoped or predicted. This is a mess.
This of course won't win the argument for us. As I've said countless times before, reality won't win our struggles for us. Political victories can only be won politically. But insofar as reality weighs in, an extended period of ungovernability is ten times better for our purposes than an extended war. (It's also 100 times better for the people of Iraq. A mess is a bad thing. But it's vastly better for the civilian population than long counterinsurgency war.) It also means, that once the fog of war reporting passes -- and it will as the rating drop precipitously -- that the points that everyone agreed on will -- and which the right kept insisting in bad faith that we didn't agree on -- will vanish into irrelevance. In six months, when it's still a mess, no one will be able to call you a Saddam lover for pointing it out, or say you are chicken to use force. At that point, it will only be about our issues -- about what it takes to make a better society, and what makes it worse.
During the last election the right cared a lot and the left didn't care at all. During the next one, the left will care. We HATE these guys like we haven't hated anyone in 20 years. But there is also enough mass out there for it to keep on going. Unlike Clinton, who wormed in without anyone caring, a democrat who gets elected by a movement will be someone who quickly disappoints expectations and stimulates the movement to continue. And I think things like F15 have blooded a broad swathe of people to want to be more activist than they've been -- well, ever, if you just count this lifetime.
Michael