Bowers:

I am a progressive, and I joined the Democratic coalition because that is where progressives belong. Just one look at the opposing coalition should make that clear. Fighting for progressives and fighting for Democrats does not in any way seem like a conflict to me. That goes for every time I support a conservative Democrat in a general election. As long as we all follow the guidelines I laid out above, it shouldn’t be a problem for centrists and conservatives in our coalition to see no conflict here either. I desperately wish that lack of conflict is something more non-progressives in our coalition would come to understand, because as long as we are selling each other down the river for personal gain, our coalition stands no chance of governing to the benefit of the American people, winning elections, or even functioning as an effective opposition to Republican rule.

The actions of the progressive movement over the past several years have made it clear that we know it is our party. I hope those New Democrats and LieberDems who denigrate the progressive movement and the party’s left wing at every turn will come to realize that it is their party too. It has been a long time since many of them they acted like they knew that, but we would all be a lot better off if they knew and acted like they did.

What Chris is talking about here, the fear of the established Democratic coalitions versus what’s called the “netroots” but what I like to call ordinary Democratic voters, is all just one more symptom of the disease of entrenched party activists who really, deep down, don’t want all that much to change.

We’ve got a week, and that’s it. And I don’t know about you, but I want a hell of a lot to change. I want my party to oppose that which its platform dictates it oppose. I want my party to speak for those of us who voted to put it in power. I want my party to make good on every fevered nightmare of the radical right, becauseI want them to know what it feels like already, and most of all, I want my party to give me an accounting of what has happened to my country.

I want to know who we’ve detained, and why. I want to know who we’ve sent away, and to where. I want to know who we’ve killed, and what we plan to do about it. I want to know who wants to hurt us, and how we’re going to stop them. I want to know who doesn’t have enough to eat, and how we’re going to feed them. I want to know who isn’t safe, and how we make them so. And most of all, I want to know that what has happened in the past six years will never, ever, ever happen again.

I want the fear of God put into those responsible for the neverending stream of hatred that comes out of our radios, and I want a government that stops pandering to the most bloody-minded among us and starts doing its job. I want leadership that sees people wading through chest-high water dragging their possessions in garbage bags and does not shrink, does not shrug, does not go back to its breakfast. I want a country that can turn as much of its attention to its fellow citizens as to its video games and I want politicians who I pay and who I elect to stand up and start shouting about that kind of country until somebody fucking hears it and starts paying attention.

I want a Democratic majority. I’m under no delusions that this will accomplish all of the above, but it will, at the very least, stop me from adding to the list of dissatisfactions, crimes against democracy, egregious stupidity and financial gluttony.

And so I can see where some of the people Bowers describes in his post don’t want me to feel like I have any voice whatsoever. It’s going to be a lot of work. I’m not going to be satisfied with more of the same. I’m going to be the boss from hell, in fact, so I can see where they’d wish I’d stop telling them my vote counts same as theirs, and I have one word for them.

Tough.

A.