<...> And last things last: where do progressives go from here?
Don't believe for a second any Beltway nonsense about Kerry running a poor campaign. The man got hit with some of the slimiest, foulest garbage ever thrown by the Vicious and Deranged Right, and he kept coming at 'em, pulling 55 million votes and nearly unseating an autocratic "war president" backed by a fanatical following notable for its chants of allegiance to Dear Leader and its purges of schoolteachers wearing "protect our civil liberties" T-shirts. Above all, watch where the critiques of Kerry are coming from: don't let Al From and the DLC back into the fray so that they can deliver us all into the hands of Lieberman or Bayh next time around.
It should be clear by now that progressives cannot win the presidency by being reality-based. The reality-based appeal works only in isolated areas of the country with high population density. Reality-based campaigning draws in highly educated voters, voters who are likely to consult a wide variety of news sources inside and outside the US, and voters who tend to be swayed by demonstrable empirical evidence about the age and the current disposition of the planet and its resources. These voters are, however, a fringe element of the electorate that we must now cast aside.
Instead, we must devise a "wedge issue" that is as powerful and compelling as the campaign against gay marriage. And just as the campaign against gay marriage draws its deepest support from conservative rural areas hundreds of miles away from the nearest actual cohabiting gay couple, so too must progressives-- especially urban-identified, "metro" progressives-- seek to mobilize an energetic Democratic base by inventing a chimera that none of us have actually ever seen and cannot imagine anyone actually caring about.
the funny part at:
http://www.michaelberube.com/EE/index.php/weblog/what_next/
"We live under the Confederacy. We're a podunk bunch of swaggering pious hicks."
--Bruce Sterling