Some Optimism, of a Sort

I don’t know if he is a reliable narrator, but Michael Moore tells a good yarn in The Day I Was To be Tarred and Feathered.

I mention this because it sort of parallels something I’ve been thinking recently: the wheels are really starting to come off the Republican insurgency. It’s only starting, and there’s some considerable momentum left before it collapses. And meanwhile a lot of people are going to be hurt. Indeed there will be a great deal of misery in the next two years due to what the national party does in Congress and to what state parties do here in Florida and in other GOP-dominated states like Wisconsin. But they’ve overplayed their hand. People are going to hate the results, and I think the pendulum will swing the other way so long as progressives are able to clearly explain who is responsible (and so long as most Democrats don’t decide to play along).

Abraham Lincoln is reputed to have said “You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.” Whoever said it, I think it’s true.