A New Missive From David Van Os

One of Texas' leading progressives, David Van Os, has penned a new missive.   I liked it a lot and repost it here for everyone to read:


The 2010 election turned on the failure of the Democratically controlled White House, Senate, and House of Representatives collectively to do anything big, bold, visionary, or even just different for working class Americans. When a political party claims to stand for the people, but in fact uses the power of government and legislation to bail out the Wall Street robber barons from the disastrous fruits of their own misdeeds, while imposing no serious accountability or consequences; while at the same time the taxpayers who provided the bailout money for the Wall Street royalty get to eat the crumbs and pay 30% interest for the privilege, people can and do see through the hypocrisy, and can and do use their political behavior to punish the party and politicians who had the majority power to fight for the people but conspired with the banker oligarchy instead. When a political party claims to be delivering universal health care but in fact bequeaths to the greedy insurance corporations a huge bailout and unprecedented profit-seeking monopoly power, people can and do see through the spin, and can and do use their political choices to reject the lie and reject the specter of corporate monopoly control over their very freedom to purchase or not purchase a corporate retail product. For some the political choice was to vote for the opposition party and for others the political choice was to abstain from casting a vote at all, but the motivation and effect were the same.

Operationally, the hustlers who hijacked the old Democratic Party rely on tactics devoid of substance and wonder why voters don’t seem to resonate with them. No matter how brilliant their tactics may be in terms of political technology and technique, if a political party is not delivering for the people, then the voters aren’t going to deliver election victories to that party.

The more we grassroots Democrats stay in denial and insist on defending politicians who betrayed our reasons for putting them in office, the lower our party will fall. The more we let the politicians we supported continue to simper and whine about how a party that won the White House with the biggest electoral margin in the last 6 elections and simultaneously won super-majorities in both chambers of Congress – giving it one of the most powerful political majorities in the national government in many decades – just couldn’t get anything done because of those terrible old mean and nasty Republicans, the further we will fall. The more we tell ourselves it is just a matter of better tactics and technologies for getting votes out for our candidates without delivering real, live actions and leadership that motivate the voters to want to vote for our candidates, the further we will devolve into hollow shells of form without substance.

Make no mistake, the GOP will fail too. Boehner and McConnell will no more deliver on the promises to their newfound base than Obama has done for his. But this inevitability provides no cause for celebration. If Democratic leaders, politicians, and strategists continue to think the people are stupid and don’t see through phony spin; if Democratic leaders, politicians, and strategists continue to think the party’s decline is a mere matter of tactics; if Democratic leaders, politicians, and strategists continue to appease and accommodate the greedy banker and corporate oligarchies, the ravenous military-industrial complex, the false Cult of the Market, and the looming totalitarian internal security police state; if they fail to wake up and rediscover their old historical role of standing and fighting for the rights and liberties of working people, family farmers, civil servants, shop-holders and small businesses; then the people will not turn to the ancient and historically noble Democratic party at the inevitable next pendulum swing, but instead will turn elsewhere to fill the vacuum. Our greatest concern should be the nature of what may fill a vacuum left open by failure of the Democratic Party to reclaim its roots. It would be supreme folly to presume that the history of the Weimar Republic cannot repeat itself.

David Van Os, Texas Patriot
Fight ‘em till hell freezes over, then fight ‘em on the ice.