Short and far-from-sweet, as self doesn’t have much time to pen this for reasons too complicated to explain. But the point of the title should be pretty plain to see, since in the last 6 or so months, it hasn’t been a good time to lean left politically, if elections are anything to go by….
After all, if you think back to November and more recently:
(1) November 2014: the Democrats got trounced in the US midterms, losing the Senate, among other things.
(2) March 2015: in Israel, Labor lost – again - to Likud and Bibi the Bigot.
(3) This week in May 2015: in the UK, Labour got thumped, big time (as did the Liberal Democratic Party), with the Conservatives winning an absolute majority, with no need to form a coalition in Parliament.
So even though liberals/progressives/left-leaners are generally smarter than right-wingbats when it comes to the environment, human rights, what have you, guess what: the electorate at large in at least these 3 democracies doesn’t seem to be with us. Remember that democracy doesn't mean a majority of just the voters who think generally like you and me, but all voters. In Israel and the UK, at least, turnout was quite good in terms of percentage, certainly compared to ‘Amurrikans’, so they don’t have our excuse of too many midterm no-shows. If they want to elect right-leaning governments that get it wrong on austerity and Middle East peace negotiations, that’s on the respective electorate’s heads in the UK and Israel.
Of course, here in the USA, too many people who show up in POTUS-year elections go AWOL for the midterms, too busy to take 30 minutes every 2 years out of their oh-so-busy lives to go to the polls to vote in relatively sane people (i.e. Democrats) and keep the whackjobs (i.e. Republicans) out of power; witness 2010 and 2014. Whether the women’s rights-bashing and environment-trashing nastiness of the current all-Repuke Congress is enough to make enough sensible people, who didn’t vote Democratic in the midterms and who should have, wake up in time to vote Democratic in 2016, who’s to say. Turnout will undoubtedly be higher in 2016 than in 2014, which isn’t saying much, to be sure. But:
* After 8 years of a Democratic POTUS,
* which followed 8 years of a Republican POTUS,
* which in turn was after 8 years of a Democratic POTUS
* which had followed 12 years of Republicans in the White House;
(you see the pattern here)…we’re far from a sure thing for the White House in 2016, if patterns are anything to go by, not to mention the politico-financial working of Koch-istan from here on out. But it’s very easy to predict, cynically, that turnout will drop back down again in 2018.
Pointless rant done (but then, very little, if anything, posted on DK seems actually to change the world, so SNLC is no different in that regard), time for the standard SNLC protocol, namely your loser stories for the week….