I've been hesitant to blog recently, because I only like writing when I have something to say, and my ability to say something comes from a sense of optimism. I like to hope, I like to believe, and I want improvement and a better conversation. It's what I care about, who I am, who a lot of us are. I lost that, not because of the election, but because of the resigned reaction of the left to the election.

My first sense of genuine disappointment occurred prior to Kerry's loss. It happened as the ABB movement picked up steam, and pointing out deep structural failures in liberalism became impossible and even treasonous in a white hot electoral season. As the bloggerati became irrelevant in the glare of the final days, and organizing that we could not do took over, people sat, fidgeted, and bitched at each other online to get offline and 'do something', echoing the Ashcroftian idea that dissent is unpatriotic, only this time asking me not to dissent against Kerry, a man who refused to stake out a coherent set of ideals to run on, and did so in my name and the name of my party. I realized that the left and the right were each agitating for a screamocracy, not a sense of civic virtue, and not a sense of collective betterment. While the left and the right each approached politics from a similar mindset, the left's newfound immature populism has had less time to germinate, and wore shabby clothing compared to the right's well-articulated critique of modernity and growth.

The loss, and the coming loss of civility in the Senate, dashed my hopes of a pragmatic stoppage of the reactionary agenda. This is not a conservative country - Kerry ran a horrible campaign, and still received 48% of the vote. But it is a country whose ability to pick leadership at all levels is in utter shambles. The depth of the loss brought that home. Democrats are in the opposition, which is tremendously freeing in that irrelevancy allows us to ditch all the special interests who have sank their teeth into our necks. They must go elsewhere, or they perish. But we have not ditched the mindset of corrupt governance, though we are starting to, and the special interests still carry huge weight in our side of the aisle. This is remarkably unnecessary, but it is so.

I cared about Kerry's election for one reason - I didn't want the American people to ratify torture. But we did. So the loss was awful, but I never expected 'everything to be alright' even if Kerry had won. Still, the reaction to what happened was incredibly discouraging. Democrats have still not figured out, and apparently will not figure out, how to act like an opposition. Gonzales, Goss, Rice - they went or they are going through easily, and we still insist on handing the ammunition to our enemies in the name of a reasonably genteel post-war political order that no longer exists. I'm not sure why this is, though I suspect that momentum is an enormously powerful foe. As our country seems to be on the gradual path to police state-light, I worry about a currency crisis and the impact of our irresponsible choices precipitating a crisis that our political leadership can seize to complete the job.

And yet, it's not about all that. It's about people. It's about what kind of citizenry we want to be. The right-wing has a critique that is enormously powerful, but we have something better. In their religiously corrupt idealism, they see man as a malleable creature from whom evil can be eliminated by moral suasion, and failing that, force. Their vision is not racist, or evil, or ignorant, or immoral - it is medieval-modern. It is the answer to a populace confronting forces of globalization, cultural pollution, media-induced linguistic changes, new diseases, new lifestyles, and a new economy. Purge yourself, and police others. It's the transformation of an American citizen into an American subject, an addict to the idea of a wrathful, judgmental God who delegates his powers to anyone who can fundraise, bully or obey. All their infrastructure, infrastructure dedicated to effecting a constitutional reordering away from a liberal democracy, is based on this assumption of man's capacity to change and be changed into a rigid creature.

Our assumption too is that man can change. Unlike their brittle eyesight, which paradoxically asks man to be flexible enough to be changed into a rigid soldier of God (kind of like MagicShell), our eyes see the goodness of humanity and what we might be. This is not wide-eyed, but hard hearted. Man can be good, and a failure to countenance that brings a cynicism and rudderlessness best left for boarding school and theocracy. By contrast, our vision of mankind offers space, upwards, outwards, inwards. It is the vision of the frontier, of the internet, of NASA - we are the dreamers, the ones who know what man can do if asked, rather than coerced. While liberalism is in shambles, and our country will not remain the hegemon for long, Rome cannot really die. Ours is a rolling revolution, across Europe, East Asia, China - we created the tools that allow citizens to take space and make it their own, and though it may not happen in America, what will be modern greatness has come from our greatness, just as we took from the ancients to build our awful paradise of ideas.

Striving to be a good citizen is our duty, and I believe we will break the addiction self-righteous corruption has on many of us. We will figure out how to build a world in which we can mate, look at each other in wonder and awe, pray, eat, express ourselves and love. It will not be easy. It will take a great deal of time and effort, and some of us will not live to see the trends that Dean signified take firm root in our fertile American political soil, just as many Iraqis die today because of our invitation to people we like to cross the Rubicon. But the right-wing is fundamentally a weak historical movement, because the constitutional impasse takes ten years to really acknowledge as real. Americans have decided that everything is basically ok, and don't want to rock the boat. The right knows this, that they cannot legitimately change the constitution, so they put airy rhetoric to the test and claim a mandate to slip in a reversion to Medieval times in the backdoor. It is wrong, but it comes because we have not led. When we do, and when Americans are ready to put their minds to genuine constitutional change, the right will fall, as the Confederacy did before them.

And so for that, I am optimistic. I see the potential for leadership once again, dim for sure, but extant. We have the hunger, we are asking the right questions, and conversations accelerate so aggressively that when the right constitutive balance is struck in any one state or set of institutions, it will spread. Finally, we can redeem our country. We are living in a world where America the nation-state cannot be trusted, but that a new global covenant built on a connective spirit can speak to our common humanity. Our current government is no longer legitimate, perhaps, but the people are still sovereign.