Digby has a great discussion of the tendency toward passionless, analytical Monday Morning Quarterbacking in the punditocracy and the self-styled pseudo-liberal literati set. 

Humans need to feel part of something, that they have a stake in the outcome. Emotion is what moves people, whether it is demagoguery, fear, anger or inspiration (and there's often tension and similarity among those things.) To get people engaged you have to give them something to care about, to feel connected with, to want to devote some of their precious time and resources to something for which there is no direct compensation except a feeling of doing the right thing or righting a great wrong. Change requires energy and energy is one thing that sophisticated intellectual salons and learned political journals, however important they may be, simply do not provide.

Sadly, liberals are far more difficult to draw in to that for the reasons that Hazlitt cited nearly 170 years ago. It's a temperament thing. We are just more dispassionate as a rule than the rowdy right because they feel they are protecting their prerogatives — and they just get off on the fight. But from time to time liberals simply have to get religion or risk losing it all….

Chait grants that the netroots "instrumentalism" (our "practical interest") is perhaps necessary, but he frets that there is a danger that the movement will devolve into some sort of unthinking know-nothingness that rivals the right. I think that's highly unlikely. As much as we grubby netrooters have a different temperament than the more staid punditocrisy, we have much more in common with them than the other side — and will always be at a disadvantage because of it. We are not, as a rule, drawn in solely for the combat, where the action is the juice and dominance for the sake of dominance is our motive. Indeed, just like the sniffing pundits, we all tend to be vain in our highmindedness, it's only a difference of degree. It seems to be intrinsic to our nature.

So I think we liberals can afford to take at least a little of what Hazlitt wrote back in the day to heart without fearing that we will turn into mouthbreathing demagogues. If the last few years of modern conservative dominance have proved nothing else it proves that we "betray the cause by not defending it as it is attacked, tooth and nail, might and main, without exception and without remorse." The best case scenario is that you get left with the ruins of failed conservatism to clean up and straighten out over and over again. The worst case scenario is that someday they may just break the country for good.

All the high minded, defer the carpe diem, let's just play nice and wait and see just marks more time.  Frankly, all that gets us is more of the same — and I'd like nothing more than something different than George Bush and pals.  If we had sat back and been cheerily going along with the conventional wisdom in the 2006 election cycle, we'd still have a rubber stamp Republican parliament, no oversight, and a whole lot of nothing else.  No thanks. 

And as we are almost halfway through 2007 and headed into 2008, it isn't as though we can just sit back and navel gaze and expect everything to just turn out okay without actually DOING the work that needs to be done and getting up off our freaking butts — because this stuff doesn't just magically get done by citizenship fairies who clean up after all the nasty political messes.  Nope, that job is ours — every single one of us — and it is well past time that the punditocracy realized that they, too, bear some responsibility for calling a lie a lie and a false premise false.  Clearly, without hedging their bets, because facts are what they are and it is well past time that we all stopped pretending some false equivalence where none exists because we're afraid of damaging the President's self-esteem or denting his rose-colored scenarios.

It's my country, my constitution, and my duty as a citizen to stand up and fight for my rights as I see them.  I am not going to allow Karl Rove to tell me what to say or think, and no bourgeouis, pseudo-intellectual, stand on the sidelines and no one ever has to worry about getting hurt wuss is going to tell me how I should think or act either.  Stand up and have a spine or get the hell out of our way — because we are going to pull this country back to its roots and the rule of law, whether the "cosmopolitans and cocktail weenies" set like it or not.  I'm with Digby on this one:  I stand up for my values because it is the right thing to do — for my child and my community and my country.  Standing dispassionately on the sidelines is just a self-justification for sitting it out.  No thanks.

So you can help, or get the hell out of the way.  Because we are fighting for the soul of our nation — with or without you.

(And yes, I know the video really has nothing to do with the post other than the title being a convenient line, but I was in the mood for some U2 this morning.  So enjoy.)

Related posts:

  1. Rikyrah: Opt-Out States Are “Where the Majority of the Black Population in This Country Lives”
  2. Politics With a Human Face
  3. Late Night: Conservatives Are Assholes
  4. Late Night: Beware the Tyranny of the Bitchy and Uninformed.