The Left's Great Challenge

Without looking like a defeatist, odds are good that Obama is going to win in November, despite McCain's possible resurgence. If he does, then the left has the white house and maybe the congress, and something else that they haven't had in eight years, and I'm going to go right ahead and say that they won't know what to do with it.

They'll have legitimacy, and with legitimacy comes responsibility, which the left has been abjectly averse to for the past eight years, preferring to trade it for bitterness and overt intolerance. As long as they were a minority, they had an excuse for it as far as political considerations go; parties lacking power tend to resort to methods of gaining attention that are outside the official system; protests and general activism. The left has been all about it for the past eight years, by no means rivaling the social upheaval surrounding the Vietnam war but emulating it in many respects and going beyond it in others.

Over the past eight years, these people have been in their own narrative element. Conspiracy theorists have reigned like no other time in history. Violent leftists from third-world nations have been glorified on a baffling scale (and stylistically have even merged with Obama's merchandise). Antiwar protests have been prominent and occasionally actively violent. Participants have claimed everything from governmental suppression of their 1st amendment rights to, just occasionally, full-tilt physical abuse at the hands of what they saw as Republican cronies and operatives. This isn't the culture that's driving all of Obama's constituency by any measure, but it is a foundational culture on the left that will have newfound legitimacy come November.

They'll be facing a fundamental problem in being an insurgent party: because they will be responsible, they can't rely on the same old tactics of misinformation and minority tactics. Their credibility will matter, their maturity will be expected, and their moderation will be needed instead of their typical triple-dose of bile. If they can't deliver on those expectations, they're going to keep having problems and their success might be short-lived. But that all remains to be seen.

We'll have to see if there's going to be any truth to Obama's claims to being "post-partisan". Personally, there's nothing I'd like more than to strip politics of the unabashed division and supercharged, fuel-injected rhetoric that has gripped it for so long. I just have my concerns as to whether Obama and the Left are the people who are going to usher in a new era of reasonability and a decent respect for the opinions of mankind. They haven't really established a history of it.