Dear Anti-Bush Voters,

Yeah, I'm depressed, too. But some perspective may be helpful.

Imagine if a few hundred thousand Ohioans changed their mind and voted Kerry yesterday. Kerry would have won the Presidency, but would the fundamental conditions of our country have changed overnight as well? No. We learned yesterday that there's still a long way to grow for the reality-based community. Of course, had Kerry won that would have made this growth quite a bit easier, but it would not have been any smaller of a task.

A quick glance at history and social movements is also instructive. For example, in a previous post on alternatives to capitalism, I described Gar Alperovitz's approach to creating such an alternative:

Gar Alperovitz noted that, as a historian, he knows that economic systems do not last forever and he can foresee, not in this generation, but in the future, a new economy emerging. He said that his heroes are the civil rights activists in Mississippi not in the 1960s, but in the 1930s. He compared our role today with their role. The activists in the 1960s didn't just pop up out of nowhere and succeed, but they utilized the groundwork that had been established by previous generations. We can work to lay the groundwork today for future revolutionary change in our economy, and we can do so by working on the beginnings of that new economy today.

So social change is a long, hard process. This is true for the right as well. As I mentioned yesterday, the conservative movement did not spring out of nowhere, but was a result of a conscious effort to build institutions and a movement that would stick around and influence politics. This movement too, by the way, is often traced back to a defeat: Goldwater in 1964. The moral? What you do after defeat can be just as important as what you do after victory. Personally, I'd hoped that the defeat(s) in this case would've been 2000 and 2002, but we can't let that discourage us: our movement is a very young one. As Alperowitz reminds us: these things take time. The conservative movement didn't become dominant until over 16 years after it began and the process took even longer for the civil rights movement.

And in our short history so far, we have accomplished something. It's easy to look at the numbers and think that nothing changed between 2000 and 2004. But that's not true. The 48% that supported Gore in 2000 is a very different 48% than those who voted for Kerry this time around. We're informed, passionate and organizing more and more every day. Now we just have to grow, one by one.

This will not be a pretty four years for Bush. The scandals are out there already. His failures are apparent to a near majority, if not an outright majority, of the country. Remember, a few posts back I mentioned Nixon. I described how people on the Left often point to all the good things that happen under Nixon as proof that Democrats are no better than Republicans, and I argue that this isn't true. The lesson of Nixon is not that Republicans can be better for social movements than Democrats. The lesson of Nixon is that, to paraphrase Howard Zinn, it matters much more who sits outside the White House than who sits inside. And we're not just going to sit through this four years.

And if that doesn't cheer you up a little bit, pictures of our cute kittens might.

Sincerely,

Jon