It’s Time For Pollyanna Liberalism To Die

It’s going to all work out. Ultimately. No need to worry too much. Things will straighten themselves out, eventually. The arc of the moral universe bends to justice, etc.

I think liberalism, which by nature is optimistic about the future, has gotten way too high on it’s own supply.

It feels like there’s a shared world view, from Democratic leaders like President Biden, Speaker Pelosi, and Leader Schumer, all the way down to average voters on the street, that things will just — somehow — all work out.

After eight years of George W. Bush, launching wars, drowning New Orleans, and collapsing the economy, we got a tsunami of votes and the election of Barack Obama.

Nothing would go wrong from November 2008 and it was all smooth sailing.

Of course that wasn’t true. Two years into Obama’s presidency, Democrats sleepwalked into the midterm elections and while Obama was elected in 2012, the Republican majority in Congress certainly hobbled things.

Then came Trump.

More death, more negligence, more failure.

And along comes Biden, soundly beating Trump and winning both the popular and electoral vote.

Everything is great, nothing will go wrong, — stop me if you’ve heard it before.

This has to end. Biden’s win was a net good for the country and the world, for sure. Again there is leadership that will respond to a pandemic with science and install people in charge of multiple government agencies who are truly qualified to be there.

The current President of the United States is not calling up Sean Hannity every night for leadership tips and he won’t tweet us into war with North Korea or Canada. Great.

But things aren’t magically just going to work themselves out. The minute Democrats got control of the Senate after the special election in Georgia, the clock began to loudly tick.

Yet instead of understanding that the window is rapidly already closing, Democratic leaders appear to once again be sleepwalking. After the passage of the Rescue Act, Congress has seemingly run into molasses.

Things aren’t happening and when they do happen, they aren’t happening fast enough. Republican narratives — completely false — are taking hold and the mainstream media is very clearly bored with the normalcy of Biden (look how quickly they gave up on airing Jen Psaki’s press briefings on cable).

Meanwhile the Republicans have not taken their feet off the gas. The party is getting more extreme, more racist, more sexist, and more thuggish. Along with the attack on the Capitol, we have seen a constant drumbeat of right-wing violence and attacks, fueled by outlets like Fox News and beyond.

Contrary to the frequent assertions from Democrats – I heard it directly from President Obama himself in 2010 – the fever is not anywhere near breaking.

This can’t hold. Democrats, the center left, progressives, or whatever the left of center world is calling itself these days, has to get out of this delusional state (yes, in part inspired by utter fiction like The West Wing) in which things just get better on their own, without any initiative.

That will not happen, and it isn’t just because of the absurdist assertions of Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. If both of those senators fell in line with the most progressive wing of the Democratic Party immediately, there would still be considerable institutional inertia preventing necessary action.

We’ve lost thousands of people under the rule of Bush and Trump. It’s homicidal and just stupid to once again lay the groundwork for their style of rule to seize power. But that is the path we’re on.

Stop thinking it will be all right. Kill Pollyanna and start acting like it’s all about to crash, before it really does.