Where Do We Go From Here?

The title asks a question, so here is a picture of The Question.

The last few weeks have, with good reason, worried liberals and others.  Once again, we have seen the only political party that even attempts to speak for any of our concerns fail horribly.  The debt ceiling debate was an inherently winnable policy fight on a number of different grounds.  While the ultimate deal (as we noted in its aftermath) is better than we could expect considering how badly the Democratic leadership failed, it still amounts to a loss in terms of the debate.  It legitimizes Republican bad economics.  It legitimizes "austerity".  None of this is particularly good.

Given all that, it's worth taking a moment to figure out how the Democratic Party can recover strategically from this sort of a failure.  It's a good question.  Fortunately, there are answers.

Live Together, or Die Alone

Thomas Jefferson said, “When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.” While this may have been the case when Mr. Jefferson originally spoke these words, it is no longer the case that those are our only two options. Perhaps a more modern way of looking at it is that our government is the people, & it's time to stop being afraid of each other. The partisan divide has grown so wide in the United States that it’s easy to forget that we’re all supposed to be on the same team, and all supposed to be working together. I would even go so far as to say that the reason that our economic recovery has been so unbearably sluggish isn’t the failure of one policy initiative or another, it’s the failure of us to come together to fix the problem. The American people are too busy trying to secure their own advantage by any means necessary to even notice that doing so is only dragging them even further down.