Letters from the Front

I was in Copley Square in Boston on Election Night in 2004. I stayed up all night and then went to Faneuil Hall to watch John Kerry concede.

I had a steno pad full of notes about everything I thought might be worth chronicling about those two days – interviews with people gathered there in the Back Bay, hurried transcriptions of phone calls from my friend in the room at the DNC, gut feelings, what it was like to be there in the sleet and snow and watch John Edwards bust out his signature thumbs-up from the stage and tell me everything would be okay if I could just wait a little longer. Little did I know just how long the wait would be.

These fours years on, I'm not sure why I never really wrote about that night. I wrote a few things in the aftermath. I marveled at the legislative results. I pondered what went wrong, and what the GOP did right. But what I didn't write about was how that night felt, in my gut and my brain – how it felt to be standing there on those cobblestones for an hour after John Edwards went inside and the snow stopped falling and where, somewhere around 3 a.m., some Bush campaign flunkies showed up and started pasting every available surface with Bush/Cheney 2004 stickers.

It made me ill to watch them affix one to the stone wall of the Trinity Church and giggle at each other. They were not here to get out the vote. They were not here for lit drops or organizing. They were here to gloat, passive-aggressively, with no real function other than to aggravate and demean. Here, literally in John Kerry's backyard, the armies of everything I perceived to be sick and wrong with my government and American politics had come ashore and fired the first shots in what promised to be another four years of constant assault.

It was like a metaphor for George Bush's presidency come to life, given tangible form and sent to torment those of us who had stuck around. H.P. Lovecraft said that “...we shall see that at which dogs howl in the dark, and that at which cats prick up their ears after midnight,” and truly, here it was, borne of the black womb of hate, Agents of the Dark, Sounding The Spare Notes Of The Song That Will Rend The Earth.

***

Of course, my perception of these young Republicans is a construction. No matter how much I might like to think so, it is highly unlikely that these young men spawned from the loins of demons, or were attempting, by petty political vandalism, to raise the dead or end the world. I remember them as far more ghoulish than they could have possibly been because they struck a cruel blow in an open wound on an election night I knew was lost before it was over. I defined them as some sort of evil agents because they were essentially and basically alien to me in their joy over the re-election of one George W. Bush.

This type of construction, this projection of sinister evil on regular people, is not strictly the purview of Democrats versus Republicans.

In 2008, more people are identifying as Democrats, and each one has built that identity through a hugely complicated and personal process. Along every line you can imagine – region, race, income, gender – there are divides in the Democratic Party, and those divides are again byproducts of identity, of the version of the ideal Democrat we have drawn for ourselves and that we aspire to be.

There is tension between old Democrats and young Democrats, a generational divide that seems to break over the party's two presidential candidates. Likewise, there is tension between veteran Democrats and new Democrats who are arriving later at the party. My version of What A Democrat Is is different from yours. It cannot be anything other than different because we are built differently, with a vast variance of experiences and lessons that have forged us not only into the political animals we have or have not become, but explicitly into the people we are.

There are no universal truths about political identity, about how you feel about certain issues or candidates, other than the inexorable fact that everyone comes to that moment of decision and dedication differently.

***

That being said, I want to arrive at the point of this exercise: while at your caucus or in canvassing your neighborhood or at your most recent county meeting, you may have constructed the supporters of whichever candidate you aren't pulling for as somehow being less than you. “How can they support Candidate X,” you may ask, “when Candidate X has/lacks Quality Y?” You may have followed that thought up with a “That's stupid/infuriating/pitiable.”

Well, fine. While the primary race is on, if that is how you want to think, fine. But do me a favor. Think about your own personal moments staring down Republican ghouls. Think about The Other Side in that context, and understand that whoever wins this race will have a bigger stage to play on with stakes that are unimaginably high. Do not believe for a second that just because things look bad for the GOP, they will roll over and die like rats in a tunnel. They will not, and the fight for November will draw more blood than you can ever expect to see in the primary, no matter how dirty it gets.

Come the general election, your swords can't be beaten into plowshares and you can't go home. There is no room at the inn for people who can't recognize what has to be done when the fat is in the fire. If you are among the people who say you'll pack it in and stay home (or, damn your eyes, that you will vote for McCain) if your candidate doesn't win – well, in my opinion, you don't deserve either incredible Democratic candidate. You don't deserve to be in politics. You only deserve to have politics happen to you.

Everything we know about Democratic politics, or at least everything we think we know about Democratic politics, is a construction. And for whatever reason, you have reached the place you are in relation to Democratic politics because of your construction – your unique experiences and interactions. But at some point you have to get beyond the identity you have built for Self and Other and understand that there are more things under Heaven than what you have personally seen and done and felt. My construction of Bush's Sticker Team was as horrific, charred agents of some monolithic evil. I was wrong, just as you are wrong if your construction of Democratic politics this year means that you won't let go of the nomination battle when that battle is over and it is time to move on to the real war.