Pondering the future for "progressives"

This is a letter from a UW Math professor, posted with his permission. I think it does a good job of asking the hard questions on many of our minds right now. Emphasis was added by me.

Dear friends, The election is over, and I'm stuck. I spent all day yesterday and much of the past two weeks working with MoveOn PAC to mobilize Kerry voters, and we felt we were part of an unstoppable force, so I wasn't prepared for what happened. Since I don't seem to be able to focus on my work very well today, I thought I'd try some keyboard therapy. Where do we go from here? I don't mean "What action should we plan at our next organizing meeting?", but something bigger -- maybe something like "Where can we point our headlights in this darkness?" I have to admit, my first impulse is just to go back to bed and say to the Republicans - and those who voted for them - "OK, you broke it, now you fix it." But then I remember what our local octogenarian radical Abe Osheroff says about focusing on the process rather than the goals. Here's one way he put it: "I've come to a place in my life where to be goal-oriented is building in future defeat. I'm concerned with the road I'm on and the direction in which it goes. Whether it will achieve or not achieve what I would like to see happen is secondary to the fact that I live in a moral and ethical way. I don't need to be assured that someday we'll have a wonderful society. And frankly, I don't think it will happen." (The entire interview, at http://www.ravenchronicles.org/northwest/amerconversation, is provocative and worth reading.) So, what road are we on, we who thought this election could turn America toward something better? I think I'm stuck at a fork in the road. On one path are waiting at least half of the 59 million people who voted for Bush - decent folks, scared folks, people who want to believe that America is a moral place and a safe place and still the greatest country in the world. They don't *want* to make billionaires richer at the expense of their children's health care and their own Social Security checks, or to turn our government into a police state, or to blow Iraqi children to smithereens; but they're convinced that these frightening and uncertain times might require unusual measures, and they're not ready to embrace gay marriages. We lost them somewhere along the road. Down this path, we'll put some of our cherished progressive goals on hold, we'll reach out to moderates and principled conservatives, and we'll try to reconstruct a Democratic party more or less in the image of the one got Bill Clinton elected, twice. One that can regain real power, or at least enough to stem the fearful tide of Bushism. Then there's the other path - the one where we'll finally stop picking candidates just because they seem more acceptable to the moderate swing voters, and instead put our energy into living and working for the country most of us believe America could be: a country that uses its vast wealth to lift up the poor and suffering, that sees universal health care as a right, that spreads democracy and freedom by smart example instead of by smart bombs, and that leads the way to an energy economy that can last a thousand years. On this path, we'll support leaders who are passionate and eloquent about what they truly believe, not about what they think the swing voters want to hear. This is a long, long path, because these leaders probably won't get elected next time or the time after that. But perhaps we'll build a third party that more and more people will come to see as a real alternative to the corruption and paralysis of politics as usual, and if it doesn't get a president elected it might at least insert an authentic and inextinguishable new vision into American politics. I know old Abe would march off down this path without looking back. For my part, I'm afraid that the first path will sap our energy and compromise our ideals so far that we'll become nearly indistinguishable from the Republicans, and in the end we'll inevitably lose to the real Republicans (as we did yesterday). But I'm afraid that the second path will take so long to gain a real political foothold that Bush and his successors will run the country irrevocably into the ground, or turn it into an authoritarian nightmare, before we have a chance to convince anyone but the choir. So I'm stuck. I think I'll just stay here for a while, because I can't see anywhere else to go. Jack