Carpe Diem, Progressives — by David Michael Green

November 29, 2005
Common Dreams

Can you feel it? This, finally, is our moment.

We may not have spent forty years in the desert, but the twenty-five since Reagan the cardboard cowboy rode into town have been plenty long enough. And, anyway, the last five have been like five hundred for anybody with a brain or a heart.

But the good news is that today, without question, the movement of regressive politics in America (also known – wrongly – as conservatism) is crashing up against the shoals of its own inanity, and the American public is finally beginning to sober up after cutting loose on a quarter-century’s bender, fueled by the frightening fantasies of the right. Just the last two weeks alone feel like an attitudinal sea change in America. [...]

Yes, this is – finally – truly our moment. However, it is a moment to be seized, not to be passively received. For everything is at stake in how progressives handle the meltdown of the right.

What is crucial is that current developments not be recorded in the public consciousness as a failed presidency alone, but rather as a disastrously failed ideology. Progressives must make sure that what is now happening is understood – that is, framed – for what it in fact is, not for what a desperate right will try to spin it as, once they too have thrown the plummeting Bush overboard in a scramble to save their own skins. This is a once-only opportunity for us destroy the cancer of regressive conservatism in America for a generation or more, and we must not miss this train. [...]

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