There's a great pressure mounting on the Left right now regarding Obama's commitment to strip retroactive immunity from the House FISA bill. The problem is, he's stopped short of promising to filibuster the bill.
According to the Washington Post's The Trail:
Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) today announced his support for a sweeping intelligence surveillance law that has been heavily denounced by the liberal activists who have fueled the financial engines of his presidential campaign.
In his most substantive break with the Democratic Party's base since becoming the presumptive nominee, Obama declared he will support the bill when it comes to a Senate vote, likely next week, despite misgivings about legal provisions for telecommunications corporations that cooperated with the Bush administration's warrantless surveillance program of suspected terrorists.
Obama missed the February vote on that FISA bill as he campaigned in the "Potomac Primaries," but issued a statement that day declaring "I am proud to stand with Senator Dodd, Senator Feingold and a grassroots movement of Americans who are refusing to let President Bush put protections for special interests ahead of our security and our liberty."
Some on the Left are opining that this will affect Obama's contribution levels (which we may already be seeing, as in Patrick's post on McCain nearly outraising Obama in May. Others are much more agitated, such as LivinginReality on the Daily Kos:
More and more, I do not believe that "change" can really happen through the ballot box in this country.
There are other ways that change can happen. But I've pretty much lost all faith in our electoral system ALONE to bring it about.
Rather, our electoral system is designed to take the desire for change, absorb it like a lighting rod, and then channel it into nothingness as it dissapates into the ground. Without some sort of mass movement that exists outside of the electoral system--like militant labor unions, organized civil rights boycotts, or massive anti-war protests that shut things down--the electoral system will, at the most, promise change . . . while changing little or nothing in so far as furthering the interests of the "little people" it is supposed to represent..
In the 1960's, this type of dialogue was discussed openly on camera in the latest technological medium of that time: television. Most famous for his "Ballot vs. the Bullet" speech was Malcolm X, who was no stranger to exploiting the media to communicate his message. In his wake came the 60's radicals preaching revolution on a sliding scale from relatively non-violent "community organizing" to all-out terrorist nihilism (with examples like Saul Alinsky on the forward end and Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn on the rear end of that spectrum).
Eric Hoffer, in his book The True Believer, sees Marxism as one of the chief examples of a mass movement which offers The True Believer a glorious, yet imaginary, future to compensate for the frustrations of his present. Such movements need people to be willing to sacrifice all for that future, including themselves and others. To achieve this aim, such movements need to devalue the past and present. This is not only a criticism of communist tenets specifically; Hoffer's other chief examples are Fascists, Nationalists, and the founding stages of religions.
Marxism has been described as a closed system. Closed systems, like certain re-emerging fundamentalist religions, have several common threads: they claim to represent a universal truth which explains everything and can cure every ill; they can automatically process and reinterpret all potentially damaging data by methods of case-based reasoning. While a principle-based approach might claim that lying is always morally wrong, the case-based approach would argue that, depending upon the details of the case, lying might or might not be illegal or unethical. Closed systems are emotionally appealing and beyond common logic; and can invalidate criticisms by deducing what the subjective motivation of the critic must be, and by presenting this motivation as a counterargument. An example of this last feature might be the disregarding of such concepts as the free market or self determination as instances of false consciousness engendered by bourgeois [or infidel] ideology.
In the Wall Street Journal's Potomac Watch, Kimberley Strassel laments the death of the [culturally conservative, free market economist] New Democrats. Efforts are visibly afoot in Open Left and other "Progressive" websites to eliminate the Bush Dogs in 2008. There can be very little doubt that those left holding the reigns in the Democratic Party will constitute Hoffer's True Believers. And if the ballot does not fulfill their perfect vision of a glorious future, what will they be capable of? If the chilling possibilities do not galvanize the Republican Party to reform and reinvent itself, who will meet their challenge? Young Conservatives, it's time to read your history. Older Conservatives, put aside any differences and align together against a very real potential threat from within the two most dangerous True Believers allied together within and outside the country: Fundamentalist Marxism and Fundamentalist Islam. I truly think that if we underestimate any aspect of this partnership for any reason, it will be a very grave error.
