We say that the Democrats would rather lose than cede power to a progressive. Well, I think Americans would rather lose their shirts than give power to a Democrat.

The Democrats Need a New Message
After another demoralizing loss to a monstrous candidate, Democrats need a reboot

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/taibbi-the-democrats-need-...

And I like your way of framing the issue (as energy).

There are two problems: visibility (and who has it) and the military might of our opponents, in which I now include both their surveillance technologies and their weaponized financial system. In other words, Bernie Sanders could, because he was a US senator running for President, get people's attention and get them to give him money. Lots of it. Now we know that the people are capable of raising a pretty tidy monthly sum, considering the economic blitzkrieg that keeps raining down on them. But if I came up with an idea for an organization and put it on Kickstarter, would I get the same response? Would I get half the response?

Being famous counts for a great deal. Visibility. Very important, that's why they control it and that's why they have a shitfit when a visible person, like Susan Sarandon, doesn't obey the rules.

Further, as an activist, to me it seems discussion always falls down around the in-between steps: all the non-glamorous, small steps that are required to build an alternative political infrastructure capable of taking up energy and using it. Which we don't currently have because of 45 years of cultural destruction being waged on the Left, yes, but more importantly, on the fundamental political and social structures of the culture itself. The refusal to believe, or accept, that there was once an infrastructure people in (for instance) the 60s and 70s relied on without even thinking about it (communities, political parties that were more permeable to the average person, a press that wasn't a constant Pravda-fest of propaganda and character assassinations), and now that infrastructure's gone is a serious obstruction to any effective action on the Left. The Left keeps acting either like all that infrastructure is still there, or that it never was. The refusal to acknowledge the loss and integrate it into our strategic thinking is maddening.

Lewis Powell figured out something so obvious that few had thought of it before: in order to have a political movement, you have to have social connections and cultural institutions--or, at least, without those things, political movements are difficult to create and extremely difficult to sustain. So he, and his cronies, made a plan to take it all down.

That's why the current descendants of Lewis Powell didn't like Occupy. It was essentially creating a network of little villages throughout the country where people of all sorts came to talk. It was re-creating the culture. They didn't like that, so when ordinary means (media blackout, character assassination, police harassment) didn't work, they suppressed them with paramilitary force.

My three shitty questions about any idea are Who is going to do this work? and If you can't manage to keep up a weekly potluck, how are you going to manage a revolution? You have to answer the first two, and have a solid, persistent answer that will keep working over time, in order to get started. Then, once you get started, you have to start considering the third: how will we deal with this massive asymmetrical military force confronting us? Obviously, not by picking up the guns we bought at the local gun show and firing at it.

At this point in the discussion most people I talk to say that it sounds hopeless, and check out. Later they show up again talking about elections.

I understand why, but it is, again, maddening.