billmon wrote up a post just after the iowa caucus that makes some excellent points about the long term view that progressives need to take if we're going to repair the damage that the bush adminstration has inflicted on american democracy:
The task of building a progressive coalition that can turn America in a fundamentally different direction is a vast undertaking -- so vast as to seem almost impossible: as impossible, perhaps, as ending segregation must have seemed to the early civil rights activists of the 1920s and '30s. Under the most favorable conditions imaginable (conditions which we are extremely unlikely to see) the process will take years, if not decades.
... this is exactly what the right did in the wake of Barry Goldwater's landslide defeat in 1964. Conservatives spent the next 16 years building on the foundation they laid in the Goldwater campaign -- exploiting new fundraising techniques (direct mail) establishing new organizations (the Heritage Foundation, the Committee on the Present Danger) creating new media (Human Events, Conservative Digest) and building a parallel political establishment affiliated with, but outside of, the Republican Party. When the time came to reach for power -- in 1980 and again in 1994 -- the right was ready.
the post starts with some interesting speculations on the way the race would shake out in new hampshire and the way the media has continually tried to keep the race open.
Posted by drewish at January 26, 2004 11:18 AMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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