The noise machine and its soldering engine

I was talking politics (surprise surprise) over a bottle of wine last night with some friends in the city, when a girl I’d just met said something that gave some real insight into the despair plaguing the left. She told us she was too overwhelmed and too disgusted by conservative tactics to even join the conversation. “You can’t win,” she said.

It was just so indicative of what’s been going on with the broader movement—we’ve been attacked on all fronts by a pervasive messaging machine, and all we’ve resorted to is (at least what comes off as) reactionary bitching. I think everyone knows what the right is all about--though having lived at their policy nerve center, it could just be that I’ve been conditioned to pick up on their arguments. Still, it's never ceased to amaze me how consistent and easily recognizable right-wing, particularly free market messaging is. And the fact that I unwittingly ended up at Heritage alone proves how effective they are at drawing people in—even though their hosting me had the unintended effect of pushing me further in the opposite direction.

Ironically, the people with the most regressive politics have maintained this facade that they've got the most coherent and visionary ideas--proof that the left’s lagging on positive messaging (hopelessly abstract as that is) that all we've done is either rail against them or throw up our hands in disgust after seeing how far we've gone in the wrong direction. The fringe has had absolute control, and solid Frankian backlash rhetoric to convince everyone they’re the ones who are marginalized. With strategies that rival the Chewbacca defense, and it’s enough to make any lefty's head explode.

But all this is changing—in spite of themselves, in spite of democrat’s shortcomings as an opposition party, and even with all the republican’s catch phrases and law-bending strategery and corporate funding, they’re losing it:

The approval rate for Mr. Bush's handling of Iraq plunged to 34 percent in last weekend's Newsweek poll - a match for the 32 percent that approved L.B.J.'s handling of Vietnam in early March 1968...

Paul Hackett, a Democrat who called the president a "chicken hawk," received 48 percent of the vote in exactly the kind of bedrock conservative Ohio district that decided the 2004 election for Mr. Bush...

Only someone as adrift from reality as Mr. Bush would need to be told that a vacationing president can't win a standoff with a grief-stricken parent commandeering TV cameras and the blogosphere 24/7.

And polls show some serious disapproval across party lines. Now isn’t the time for silence or infighting. There needs to be focus on helping their self-destruction along.