Get Opinionated: A Progressive’s Guide to Finding Your Voice (and Taking a Little Action)

I put together the proposal during the election season, and as I wrote it, I thought one thing was for certain, which is that after November 2008, things were never going to be the same for liberals. Sitting at my desk in fall 2008, I thought two things: a) it seems there are a lot more self-identified liberals around now than there was 8 years ago! and b) our unity as a movement is deeply threatened by this upcoming election. The reason for both of these things can be summed up in one word: Bush. Bush was really good at destruction, taking out entire nations, and the worldwide economy as part of his path of destruction. He destroyed aggressively and passively, as in the case of New Orleans. But he did a great job at building up the liberal movement, especially online. It’s easy to be a liberal when that’s the word you use for the people that are against Bush. And perhaps if McCain won, we would have continued to hold together in opposition. But if Obama wins, I thought, we’re going to be faced with a scary prospect of being for something instead of just against something. Winning’s the hard part. You can’t just rest on your laurels. You have to have goals and the will to act on them. To make it worse, conservatives tend to be really energized, even more so than liberals, by being the opposition. Hating and pouting is their natural state, and we have to react by being even more strenuously for things.

I just got my copy in the mail last week, so I plan on reading it and you should too.