{"id":5152,"date":"2010-12-07T04:15:50","date_gmt":"2010-12-07T04:15:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/?p=5152"},"modified":"2010-12-07T05:34:31","modified_gmt":"2010-12-07T05:34:31","slug":"addicted-to-activism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/addicted-to-activism\/","title":{"rendered":"Addicted to activism"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/yglesias.thinkprogress.org\/2010\/12\/the-discontent-baseline\/\">The Discontent Baseline<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>I asked this on Twitter yesterday, but I think it\u2019s an important issue. At lunch with a coworker last week talking over the \u201cpay freeze\u201d nonsense and the bargaining over the Bush tax cuts, I was a bit ready to throw the towel in over Barack Obama&#8230;.<\/p>\n<p>Now in political advocacy terms it doesn\u2019t make sense to say \u201cwell, I\u2019ll forgive a misguided pivot to austerity because the Vietnam War was a bigger mistake.\u201d Nor does it make sense to say \u201cI don\u2019t care about claimed assassination powers because the internment of the Japanese was a bigger curtailment of civil liberties.\u201d Nor does it make sense to say, \u201cI won\u2019t complain about cutting a deal with Pharma to get a major expansion of the welfare state because FDR cut a deal with white supremacists to get his.\u201d You need to stand up for what you believe in in politics and complain when elected officials don\u2019t do the right thing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I listen to <i>Slate<\/i>&#8216;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.slate.com\/id\/2276660\/\">political gabfest<\/a>, and last week Emily Bazelon was bemoaning the lack of effectually of the Democratic majority in 2008-2010. David Plotz pointed out the passage of healthcare reform, and Bazelon brushed it off with &#8220;oh yeah.&#8221; Basically, it seems like liberals just want an eternal revolution and deny the reality that change is hard. Conservatives aren&#8217;t the only &#8220;stupid party&#8221; (Bazelon is a Yale graduate,* but that doesn&#8217;t prevent her from behaving in a petulant manner because the Democrats didn&#8217;t dole out all the policy candies she craved).<\/p>\n<p>* No offense to <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Walter_Olson\">Yale<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Heather_Mac_Donald\">graduates<\/a> as a whole of course!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Discontent Baseline: I asked this on Twitter yesterday, but I think it\u2019s an important issue. At lunch with a coworker last week talking over the \u201cpay freeze\u201d nonsense and the bargaining over the Bush tax cuts, I was a &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/addicted-to-activism\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[15],"tags":[1131],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5152"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5152"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5152\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5156,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5152\/revisions\/5156"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5152"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5152"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5152"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}