Wisconsin Protest (Justin Ormont, Wikimedia Commons)

The philosopher Michel Foucault built much of his career elucidating the degree to which individuals and societies define themselves by firm boundaries of exclusion, in the seemingly arbitrary and artificial negative space of a concocted Other, such that they can know themselves not by who they are but by who they are not. That these boundaries and definitions sometimes seem arbitrary and artificial is not itself arbitrary and artificial. According to Foucault, while radically breaking from the standards of the past, and while adhering not to logic or common sense or the results of research aspiring toward the betterment of the common good, the still-prevailing standards actually were created to serve, enforce and justify structures and systems of power in an industrializing world. Once assimilated into mass consciousness, the seeming arbitrariness and artificality of these standards are so taken for granted that most analysts focus on their intricacies rather than on how they came to be in the first place.

To extrapolate examples from the early 21st-century United States, the imposed (if not agreed upon) standards defining who is fit for an asylum, or to be locked in prison, or who is sexually deviant do not necessarily accord with social or scientific research or promoting the common good. Our sexual standards remain largely puritanical, yet we have higher rates of rape, AIDS, and teen pregnancy than does the much more sexually permissive society of the Netherlands. A common thief will go to prison for stealing a few thousand dollars, but bankers who fleece billions remain free to enjoy lives of luxury. People can be arrested for self-medicating with marijuana, but they are encouraged to use alcohol and pharmaceutical drugs, and the two largest private contributors to the Partnership for a Drug Free America were the alcohol and pharmaceutical industries. We are the wealthiest nation in the known history of the world, and we have its largest prison population, and that prison population is disproportionately comprised of people from minority demographics. Insomnia and depression run rampant as people stress to survive an increasingly labyrinthine economy, often in jobs that are in no ways personally fulfilling, but as long as people manage to plug themselves as cogs into the corporate machine, they are considered healthy contributors to society.

The often maddening machinations of a broken political system thus become a little more clear. We define ourselves by what we are not, and our politics defines itself by what it is not, and inhabiting such negative spaces perhaps necessarily creates a chronic politics of negation. A couple quotes this past week aptly summarized the state of our current political environment. The first summarizes the field of candidates for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination:

This is my 10th presidential campaign, Lord help me. I have never before seen such a bunch of vile, desperate-to-please, shameless, embarrassing losers coagulated under a single party's banner. They are the most compelling argument I've seen against American exceptionalism.

If you're thinking those words came from a liberal blogger or a Democratic firebrand, you will be surprised to learn that the source was consummate Villager Joe Klein. Of course, Klein being Klein, he then proceeded to urge Jeb Bush or Mitch Daniels to enter the race, if only to provide the Republicans with a candidate who isn't a clown. This perfectly summarizes the state of the Republican Party: Their most promising potential presidential candidates may be comprised of the latest heir of a failed attempt at political dynasty, or the former White House budget director who oversaw the evisceration of a rare federal budget surplus and the creation of the largest federal deficits in human history.

But the second quote comes from a New York Times report on what is generously described as Congressional budget negotiations:

Both parties remain uncertain about which of them would bear the brunt of public anger if Congress cannot agree on financing federal operations for the final half of this fiscal year and government agencies shut down or drastically scale back the services they can provide. Even many Democrats believe that House Republicans have gotten the better of the antispending, antigovernment argument. But Democrats insist that is because much of the public does not appreciate the impact the Republicans' $61 billion in proposed reductions would have on spending for popular social programs if those cuts were to become law with just half of the current fiscal year remaining. Polls provide some evidence for the Democrats' contention; while majorities of Americans favor cutting spending, nonpartisan polls show that by large margins, they also oppose cutting particular areas like those on the chopping block. Yet on Capitol Hill, the Democrats still seem to be on the defensive. Led by President Obama, they argue for "smart cuts," saying Republicans would slash spending arbitrarily and so severely that the sudden reductions could threaten the economy's recovery.

There you have it: One party is groping in vain not to be a collective embarrassment and catalogue of human failure, and yet the other can't manage to beat them at the most basic political games. In this dynamic, we all suffer.

In 2006 and 2008, the Republican Party was so thoroughly defeated that it appeared to be going the way of the Whigs. Its entire antedeluvian agenda had failed. Republicans had proved not merely dangerously incompetent but endemically mendacious and corrupt, their agenda not aspiring merely to 19th-century Gilded Age abuse and excess, but to 18th-century standards of aristocracy and 13th-century standards of social control. When Barack Obama drubbed decrepit former Republican hero John McCain, it was more than a mere change of political leadership, it was generational, and it seemed to signal an epochal maturation of the electorate. Polls showed that people truly wanted transformational change. They were ready to reject a known past and embrace an unknown future.

That just two years later the Democrats received their own electoral drubbing would seem absurdly incongruous. That the very people so decisively defeated would be returned to power would seem to defy both logic and common sense. But that assumes that most voters are as politically aware as are most activists, that most people have the time and energy and make the effort to steep themselves in the intricacies of policy. We know that isn't the case. And with people having to struggle harder to make ends meet, to find jobs in a depressed labor market, to earn adequate wages as income disparity and home foreclosures shatter record levels, it's little wonder that so many are angry and restive and end up falling victim to political narratives concocted by manipulators and charlatans, from right-wing PACs to traditional corporatist media hacks. People know something is fundamentally wrong and demand change. Things don't improve enough and they demand change from the change. And now just months into the new Republican House and a slate of new Republican governors, the polls show that the electorate already wants change from the change from the change. And it actually makes sense.

What this means is that the enormous political opportunity of two years ago, which was seemingly lost just months ago, remains viable. The Republicans learned nothing from their electoral disasters of 2006 and 2008, and if anything, have grown even more ridiculous and dangerous. They are now open about it: They are waging war on labor, on women, on immigrants, on the environment, and on people in general. They are wholly owned tools of a corporate oligarchy, and democracy itself is in their crosshairs. But among the people, the spirit of democracy and opportunity and the goal of a bolder modern future are very much alive and well. They only need a champion. The Democrats still need to decide if they want to be that champion. The means are there. The opportunity is there. The public support is there. The question is about political will. The question about will is not about strength or boldness, it is about ideology.

Will Democrats seize this unlikliest of historic moments, seemingly lost but still awaiting to be seized? It's not enough to be better than a political party that is ludicrously inept and deliberately destructive, it's a question of who the Democrats want to be. Do they want to stand with the people now taking to the streets by the hundreds of thousands? Do they want to do more than acknowledge these immediate political crises and take it that critical step farther, to an agenda that confronts the elite special interests that are so intentionally toxic to the functions of democracy and justice and to the very idea of broad economic security? The Democrats are better than the Republicans. That's a given. The Democrats are capable of accomplishing greater goods toward which the Republicans not only don't aspire but of which Republicans can't even conceive. But do Democrats want merely to be better than Republicans? Do they want to continue to define themselves mostly by which increments of extremism they have managed to block or delay this time, or do they want to try being habitually and ideologically proactive and positive?

Nearly a century later, the words of T.S. Eliot, using Dante's Inferno to describe the urban workforce, still haunt and resonate:

Unreal City,

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many.

Climate change. Weapons proliferation. Poverty and hunger and homelessness. Economic security. War and war and more war. Religious extremism. Bigotry. Justice. Fairness. Social responsibility. These are among the key issues and on every one of them the Democrats can prove that they are not merely better than the Republicans, they can prove that they stand for what is right. Our political system so often is defined by the capacity for human greatness to succumb to so many lesser human capacities. The Democrats need to stop defining themselves by what they are not. They need to prove what they can be. And doing so, they not only will be right, they will be gloriously victorious.