From a reader:

I have never heard of “Take Back America” but what struck me immediately is that I can’t, from its name, tell anything about its ideology. The participants could include Jesse Jackson, William Bennett, Rush Limbaugh, Dennis Kucinich, Phyllis Schlafly or everyone who works for National Review, Mother Jones or the Wall Street Journal.
People love to think that they’re rescuing America from some evil group of folks who currently are controlling everything. Which makes me wonder if, in fact, no one’s actually running the store. Or we all are and don’t like to admit it.

Deadly accurate observation there. As I’m typing this right now, some guy from the audience at one of the Take Back America seminars is ranting about how Kerry almost certainly lost in ‘04 because of “voter machine manipulation” — though he seems oddly unconcerned with what shadowy power is responsible for this injustice.

Now maybe I should dismiss this guy as a crank, but just prior to his question the approved speaker on the dais launched into a wildly digressive rundown (the topic is supposedly the 2008 election map) itemizing the sins of particular conservative donors and organizations. But regardless of who the finger is pointed at, it’s pretty obvious there’s something of a shared assumption here that the inability to enact a progressive political agenda is due to the fact that the system is rigged, an assumption that prevents liberals and progressives from focusing on why they don’t have a history of winning elections and political debates.

Now to be fair, I think all hardcore political activists are prone to interpreting failures through whatever prism of self-justifying solipsism is convenient. Conservatives have their own bogeymen (e.g. George Soros, et al.), but conservatives are better equipped in many ways to move beyond conspiratorial tendencies and address practical politics given that they’re not ideologically invested in talking about injustice and oppression at every turn. That liberal activists can’t escape this mentality even at a time when Republicans are extremely unpopular and Democrats are winning elections, well, that’s just kind of pathetic.