This Is Why We Have To Win, Part III

"The horror, the horror." Echoing Kurtz's final lines in Conrad's Heart of Darkness, the Wall Street Journal editorial board contemplates the catastrophes that a Democratic-supermajority Congress and a Democratic President would bring. Blogging at the Campaign for America's Future, Robert Borosage sums up the fears of the fatcats at the Journal:

Voters will be registered. Workers organized. Banks regulated. Health care provided for all. Government investment will drive a green revolution that generates millions of jobs. The wealthy will pay more in taxes. Guantanamo will be shut down; torture will end. Net neutrality will be mandated. Citizens may even be able to sue corporations that negligently do them harm. They don’t even mention the war in Iraq ending.

In addition to these horrible possibilities, the Journal's plutocrats also sounded the alarm for the possibility of DC residents finally gaining representation in Congress, "national, election-day voter registration...a long-time goal of Acorn, windfall profits tax on oil companies, prescription drug price controls," and other liberal evils.

Oh my Gawd, health care for all?! Banks regulated? The wealthy paying higher taxes?! It's SOCIALISM, I tell you! The sky is falling!! Borosage goes on to note that the Journal offers to frightened plutocrats the hope that

Perhaps Democrats will divide. Perhaps the entrenched lobbies, the interest of the corporations and the wealthy will buy enough support to stand in the way of the tumbrels.

And that defines our job pretty clearly: to organize engaged citizens to hold Democrats accountable to the promises that have been made and the agenda the country needs.

Yes, that's exactly what we need to do. We need to repudiate the failed policies of the last eight years--no, the last twenty-eight years, ever since Saint Reagan propagated the false and destructive idea that government is itself the problem. We need to restore the true American Dream: not the fascist nightmare of "small-town values" and small-minded prejudice that Sarah Palin yearns for, not the false, failed "trickle-down" economics that rich Republicans have foisted on the middle class and the poor, not the divisive apartheid fantasies that demagogues like Limbaugh and O'Reilly have spewed across the airwaves for far too long.

We need to restore the promise of America that is embodied in its Constitution: "to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity." We need to truly work towards becoming the "Shining City on a Hill"--one image, at least, that Reagan got right. But Reagan and his successors were and are wrong in thinking that America was already that City. We're not yet; we've come far, but we still have a long way to go. With a progressive majority in Congress and a President Obama, we might come closer still to that promise.