We've had 24 hours to process our disbelief, anger, and despair that a president who by most measures isn't simply bad, but one of the least competent in American history, has been elected by a majority of those who bothered to vote.
One of the worst things that we could do now is to retreat to the comforting belief that we understand these people, at least to the point of knowing that it isn't our fault we didn't reach them, because they are unreachable. If you truly believe that, why not just start packing your bags for New Zealand, or buying weapons for your Kamikaze run on the battleship of American culture?
For the rest of us, we need to find out how to reach those who feared things that don't harm them, who believed in things that didn't exist, who despised people we called "friend," and who confused a bull crashing through a china shop with shrewd leadership.
It sure as hell can be done. Religious intolerance has subsided under enlightenment before. Xenophobia and small-minded bigotry have whithered in the face of enlightened self-interest before. Vast ignorance about the historical forces that shape nations and peoples has been stymied and corrected before. So how can it be done this time?
I'd like to make a proposal. Let's use the distributed processing power of dKos to create a thinktank...really, a national brain...to propose and criticize ways to reach the people who found George Bush to be credible, reliable, competent, and working in their interest.
The point is not to engage in recriminations against lame Democrats or vicious Republicans. The point is to become more effective at creating a 21st century worth living in.
I don't have any firm answers, but this is the day after the disaster. We have time to do some public thinking about this, and to start forming the kinds of organizations that can be more effective at changing the way Americans think than MoveOn, ACT, the Democratic party, and all the other organizations we've heard of and participated in over the course of the last campaign.
I'll start with one idea: How important is it to create a new television network to disseminate a picture of world events which breaks sharply from the superficial, myopic pablum we see on American TV? What should such a network look like? How can we create it? How can we make it not just watcheable, but engrossing to someone living in Topeka or Atlanta who voted for George Bush? What could be done with $100 donated from 1,000,000 people? Or maybe we should stop thinking in terms of donations, and start thinking in terms of investments. How about if 1,000,000 people invested $100 each?
Let's think big. Let's start from scratch and see if we can't provide some blueprints worth building from. What do we have to lose?