The other day I was arguing with a lefty--not a liberal or a progressive, but a real lefty, the kind that actually believes in revolution and all that crap, the kind that would rather frag Democrats 'reformists' than ever get anything positive done--and after describing his lovely dream of a classless society he added, as an afterthought, one sentence that encapsulated the fantastical nature of his political leanings:
How this is accomplished would remain to be seen.The Republicans have been very adept at spreading the 'Democrats have no plan' meme--so adept that a lot of Democrats actually believe it. What drives me completely nuts about this is that, like so many Republican memes ('liberal extremism', 'liberal hate speech', 'liberal elitists') it is the exact opposite of the truth: Democratic circles are full of serious discussion about serious foreign policy, and the Republicans are the ones without a plan. What they do have are fatuous platitudes and belligerent posturing. A plan would require a whole lot more operational detail than that.
Their original 'plan' for Iraq (for example) was 'overwhelm them with our military superiority, and then everything will be fine'; their current 'plan' for Iraq is 'let the next president deal with our mess'. North Korea? "Remind me why I should care"--that says it all, doesn't it? Iran? Simple-minded belligerence is not a plan. (Nor is 'let's just bomb their nuclear sites--that'll solve everything!') Al Qaeda? Torture plus mass wiretapping do not add up to a plan. The Middle East in general? Rewarding leaders who suck up to us and punishing leaders who don't: not a plan. Nowhere have they had anything remotely resembling a plan, and that's why everything is such a catastrophic mess.
(And call me crazy, but I think the actual planlessness of the people who are actually supposed to be in charge is rather more pertinent, more newsworthy, than the putative planlessness of the people who aren't. I think the Democrats have to hammer on Republican planlessness and keep hammering on it until eventually people like Rice and Rumsfeld start getting questions like 'no, really--do you even have a plan?'--and then they need to hammer on it some more.)
They're revolutionary dreamers, these people, filled with visions of radical transformation, blithely dismissive of the practicalities of getting there and the consequences of trying.
Here's a rule of thumb that I would recommend to revolutionaries of all stripes, from the starry-eyed innocent left-wing dreamers to the ruthless right-wing ideologues: if you can't describe a logical, plausible, adaptable, excruciatingly detailed step-by-step scenario for how what you want to happen could happen, it ain't gonna happen. They aren't going to greet us with flowers, whether we're the Valiant People's Revolutionary Democratic Congress of Revolutionary People coming to them full of benevolent plans for a classless society, or the army of Gringolandia trying to impose democracy at gunpoint.
[That's all, folks]
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