Category Archives: liberalism and progressivism

Can Dems Find Their Mojo?

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There were a couple of articles in Tuesday’s newspapers that underscored, for me, how far the Dems have fallen. One was a Washington Post column by E.J. Dionne:

While Republicans believe in their party and in the cause of building its organization from bottom to top, Democratic sympathizers tend to focus on favorite causes and favorite candidates, notably in presidential years. …

… a political party needs to see itself — and be seen by those who support it — as a long-term operation, not simply as a label of convenience at election time.

The other article was a New York Times story by Robin Toner, “Fathers Defeated, Democratic Sons Strike Back.”

In the history of the Democratic Party, the election of 1980 looms large: the year the party lost the White House, the Senate, a generation of Midwestern liberals and, in some ways, its confidence that it was the natural, even inevitable, majority party.

Now, that election has a sequel.

Call it the return of the sons: Chet Culver, the Iowa secretary of state and the son of former Senator John C. Culver, is running for governor of Iowa. Senator Evan Bayh, son of former Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana, is organizing and testing the waters for a possible presidential bid in 2008. And Jack Carter, the son of former President Jimmy Carter, has decided at the age of 59 to run an uphill race for the Senate in Nevada, his first foray into electoral politics.

All of them had their political sensibilities shaped, to some extent, by the election that defeated their fathers and began a generation of conservative dominance.

OK so far. But the article goes on to describe the sons as “careful” centrists who run away from the dreaded “L” word — Liberal. For example:

While Birch Bayh was known as a classic “Great Society liberal,” as Evan Bayh has put it, and as a champion of causes like the equal rights amendment, the son has long been a careful centrist, a former chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council and a founder of the Third Way, a centrist research group.

Visiting 22 states over the past year, he has argued that the way for Democrats to win is to reach out to the middle class, demonstrate credibility on national security and show respect for faith and values issues.

Conclusion: Evan Bayh is a eunuch.

The past couple of posts focused on how the Democratic Party lost itself. This post discusses how the Right, through a long campaign of “hysterical charges and bald-faced lies,” undermined the Democrats’ credibility on foreign policy. The last post looks at how white middle- and working-class voters bolted to the Right when Democrats took a stand in favor of racial equality. Further, the old New Deal coalition was fatally undermined by the New Left. But the New Left did not create a new coalition to take the place of the old one. Instead, for almost forty years American liberals and progressives have been caught up in discrete issues — civil rights, reproductive rights, gay rights, the environment, etc. — that compete with each other for money and attention.

Meanwhile, the Right built an infrastructure of think tanks and media that by the 1980s dominated the nation’s political discourse and agenda.

This is a complex history, and I’ve only touched on a few main points. I’ve left out Ken Starr and the Clinton impeachment, for example, and the pernicious influence of the Christian Right. And then there is the problem of fundraising. With no broad-based coalition to support them, the Dems came to depend on a small pool of wealthy donors for campaign money. Now, E.J. Dionne notes, Dems argue whether they should wage a 50-state campaign or strategically focus on 20 or so “blue” states, conceding the remainder to the Right.

The result: In recent years Republicans have ruled national politics like lords, while the Dems cringed about like court eunuchs being careful not to offend. While the Republicans pushed for broad and radical change in domestic and foreign policy, Democrats attempted little more than minor, incremental tweaks. And when George W. Bush became president, and as we leftie bloggers and other liberals screamed our virtual heads off at the Dem Party to get a spine and stand up to the Right, at first Washington Dems either ignored us or ran away from us.

Dems in Washington are so insular they barely know what to make of demands from the grassroots. At first they seemed to think that if they ignored us, we would go away. Now some of them are catching on that we’re not going away, and they’re becoming more responsive. But conventional wisdom tells the Dems to stick with the Clinton triangulation approach, because we liberal activists have burned the party before, in the 1960s and 1970s.

There’s a lot of distrust and estrangement here. We liberals of the base don’t trust the party to work for our issues, but the party doesn’t trust us, either.

Some progressives argue in favor of a third party. The Dems, they say, are hopeless. Why work to elect them when they’re going to let us down, as they have in the past? This argument suffers from two fatal flaws. First, since the emergence of the first “third” party in the early nineteenth century, in national campaigns third parties at best have been spoilers. This has to do with the way we run elections in the U.S. and is not going to change no matter how sincere and earnest we are.

But the other flaw is even more fatal: Until we heal our toxic political culture, and until we liberals and progressives pull together to create a unified coalition with infrastructure to rival the Right’s — any third party we create will end up being just like the Dems.

The national Democratic Party came to be the way it is in response to the nation’s political environment, which has been so fouled by the Right that real political debate and discourse are damn near impossible. And it came to be the way it is because no coalition of citizens and interest groups support it and defend it, the way the New Deal coalition supported the Democrats from the 1930s until the 1960s. Instead, our myriad single-issue advocacy groups hang back until an election is looming, then issue endorsements. Like anyone cares. And the rest of us tend to focus on favorite issues and candidates, as Dionne says.

I cannot emphasize enough that the Democrats in Washington won’t change until we change. That’s the whole point of the netroots uprising, and I believe we’re having an effect.

Those who advocate abandoning the Dems for a third party are thinking too small. They are looking for the Magic Candidate who will get elected and go to Washington and make it all better. But this ignores how Congress works and how agendas are set in Washington; in fact, individual politicians are only as strong as their parties. Going the third-party route, IMO, would make progressives even more marginalized than we already are.

This is a feeble analogy, but let’s say you have a big aquarium, but your fish are sick and dying because there is something wrong with the aquarium environment. There’s not much point in replacing dead fish with new ones if you don’t fix what’s wrong with the aquarium.

Healing the political environment is not going to be easy. Media reform, which I’ve ranted about in the past, is critical. But I’ve got a couple of other ideas.

First, we absolutely must re-build a strong and broad coalition that will work together to support the Democratic Party and liberal/progressive politicians and issues all the time; not just when elections are looming. This coalition will not necessarily look like the New Deal coalition. It would include unions and minorities, but it should strive to include small business owners, who have been pretty much shafted by the Bush Administration, and workers, and not just workers who belong to unions. Everyone who lives on a paycheck and hopes to retire with a pension or 401K is being hurt by Republican policies these days. Retirees, also, should be our natural partners.

The single-issue advocates should think hard about whether it’s in the best interests of their causes to put all their effort into maintaining big nonprofit organizations that can’t actually do much but make noise, or instead work together through the Democratic Party. I say that if the advocates — for the environment, reproductive rights, civil rights, health care, etc. — could pull together and focus their efforts on strengthening and influencing a single political party, eventually they could have the power to effect real policy changes instead of settling for tweaks. Or, as in recent years, just trying to blunt the damage being done by Republicans.

As commenter JHB pointed out, 1970s-era changes in campaign finance law, which were supposed to make campaigns more democratic, had the effect of empowering pro-big corporation PACs and gave rise to single-issue groups pretending to be bipartisan, but who demagogue on one or two inflammatory issues to help Republicans get elected. It seems every time campaign finance gets “reformed,” new sets of problems arise. And, oddly enough, those problems tend to help the Republicans and hurt the Dems. I am more and more convinced that public finance of campaigns is the way to go. But if we can’t get public financing, we must fight any “reform” that would hinder our efforts at coalition building.

In short, liberals and progressives must completely re-think our way of doing political business. All the time. Not just the way we run election campaigns.

My advice for the Washington Democrats is to figure out who they are in their own right, and stop allowing themselves to be defined by the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy. Dems are so cowed they’ve come to believe rightie revisionist history — that the Democratic Party destroyed itself by their mushiness on foreign policy and association with 1960s hippies and radicals. And that the only way they can prove themselves to be worthy is to be like Republicans. Bleep that. I spent the last two posts explaining why the GOP version of Democratic Party history is bogus. Further, I sincerely believe a majority of voters are sick to death of the Republicans’ act and would respond well to something else.

In the last post I said Dems should “reconnect to the best of the core principles that made the party strong in the past and reaffirm those principles in the present.” Take, for example, this passage from Franklin Roosevelt’s 1941 State of the Union address:

For there is nothing mysterious about the foundations of a healthy and strong democracy. The basic things expected by our people of their political and economic systems are simple. They are:

    Equality of opportunity for youth and for others.
    Jobs for those who can work.
    Security for those who need it.
    The ending of special privilege for the few.
    The preservation of civil liberties for all.
    The enjoyment of the fruits of scientific progress in a wider and constantly rising standard of living.

These are the simple, basic things that must never be lost sight of in the turmoil and unbelievable complexity of our modern world. The inner and abiding strength of our economic and political systems is dependent upon the degree to which they fulfill these expectations.

Whenever the Republicans go off on tangents about saving endangered stem cells or starting more wars in lieu of an actual foreign policy, Dems should be saying, look, here are the basic things government should be doing, along with national defense and homeland security, and government controlled by Republicans isn’t doing any of them. Instead, we’ve been distracted by fringe issues, most of which amount to government interfering with matters that people could better decide for themselves. Republicans believe in fairy tales — such as starting wars in the Middle East will spread democracy, or cutting taxes increases government revenue, or unregulated business and markets will improve everyone’s standard of living. None of these fairy tales have come true in the past, and they aren’t coming true now, yet Republicans still believe in them. If you’re tired of fairy tales and want government that works, government that does the job government is supposed to do, vote for Democrats.

Is that so hard?

Don’t Blame McGovern

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Jacob Weisberg writes in Slate,

Political analysts tend to overinterpret the results of isolated elections. But you can hardly read too much into Ned Lamont’s defeat of Joe Lieberman in Connecticut’s Aug. 8 primary. This is a signal event that will have a huge and lasting negative impact on the Democratic Party. The result suggests that instead of capitalizing on the massive failures of the Bush administration, Democrats are poised to re-enact a version of the Vietnam-era drama that helped them lose five out six presidential elections between 1968 and the end of the Cold War.

And David Espo of the Associated Press writes:

The challenge for Democrats is that Republicans already are pointing to the anti-war activists who flocked to Lamont, and their penchant for edgy political tactics, as evidence that Democrats can’t be trusted with the nation’s security.

“We’ll soon find out just how significant this election is, but it’s a problem for Democrats long-term,” the Senate’s second-ranking Republican, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, said after Lamont had won.

“The McGovern wing of the Democrat party seems to have forgotten that we’ve been on offense for the last five years and that’s why we haven’t been attacked here at home.” …

… “Republicans are anxious to say the left wing is taking over, the antisecurity wing” of the Democratic Party, the three-term senator [Lieberman] said recently, not exactly rebutting the claim as he repeated it.

[Update: See also Mike Allen’s absurd commentary in Time.]

Let’s dissect this “McGovern / antisecurity” nonsense. First, George McGovern was not opposed to national security; he was opposed to the bleeping war in Vietnam. During World War II McGovern “flew 35 combat missions as a B-24 bomber pilot in Europe, earning the Distinguished Flying Cross,” says this web site from his alma mater, Dakota Wesleyan University. This suggests to me that he supported national security. But the war in Vietnam wasn’t making us safer from anyone; it was pure folly. Like Iraq.

Second, the Democratic Party didn’t falter because of opposition to Vietnam. I realize The Story we’re supposed to believe is that in 1972 people voted for Nixon because he was strong on national security and pro-war, while McGovern was a sock who wanted to turn the keys to Washington over to Chairman Mao. But this is not an accurate picture of the time.

The bare facts are that, as I wrote here, by 1972 at least 60 percent of the public thought the war in Vietnam was a mistake. While a minority of the public remained hawkish, and the Nixon Administration continued military action, the Nixon Administration was not promising to “stay the course.” Indeed, President Nixon kept promising the American people he was looking for a way out.

The 1972 election was not a simple referendum for or against the war in Vietnam Vietnam. Note these items from this timeline:

  • January 25, 1972 – President Nixon announces a proposed eight point peace plan for Vietnam and also reveals that Kissinger has been secretly negotiating with the North Vietnamese. However, Hanoi rejects Nixon’s peace overture.

  • February 21-28, 1972 – President Nixon visits China and meets with Mao Zedong and Prime Minister Zhou Enlai to forge new diplomatic relations with the Communist nation.

  • May 15, 1972 – The headquarters for the U.S. Army in Vietnam is decommissioned.

  • August 23, 1972 – The last U.S. combat troops depart Vietnam.

  • October 8, 1972 – The long-standing diplomatic stalemate between Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho finally ends as both sides agree to major concessions. The U.S. will allow North Vietnamese troops already in South Vietnam to remain there, while North Vietnam drops its demand for the removal of South Vietnam’s President Thieu and the dissolution of his government.
    Although Kissinger’s staff members privately express concerns over allowing NVA troops to remain in the South, Kissinger rebuffs them, saying, “I want to end this war before the election.”

  • October 24, 1972 – President Thieu publicly denounces Kissinger’s peace proposal.

  • October 26, 1972 – Radio Hanoi reveals terms of the peace proposal and accuses the U.S. of attempting to sabotage the settlement. At the White House, now a week before the presidential election, Henry Kissinger holds a press briefing and declares “We believe that peace is at hand. We believe that an agreement is in sight.”

  • November 7, 1972 – Richard M. Nixon wins the presidential election in the biggest landslide to date in U.S. history.

  • November 30, 1972 – American troop withdrawal from Vietnam is completed, although there are still 16,000 Army advisors and administrators remaining to assist South Vietnam’s military forces.

The fact is that the contest in 1972 was not between a hawk and a dove, but between a dove (you could argue Nixon was a hawk in dove’s feathers) trying to save face through a peace agreement and a dove who said, the hell with saving face; let’s just get out. I strongly suspect that if Nixon in 1972 were acting the way President Bush is now — in denial about the scope of the disaster, and with no plan other than “stay the course” — the 1972 elections could have gone the other way.

You want to know what the 1972 elections really were about? Check out Richard Nixon’s 1972 Republican Convention acceptance speech.

The first issue Nixon launched into was not Vietnam, but quotas. He was speaking out against Affirmative Action. He spoke of “millions who have been driven out of their home in the Democratic Party” — this was a nod to the old white supremacist Dixiecrats who were leaving the Democratic Party because of its stand in favor of civil rights (the famous Southern Strategy). McGovern had proposed a guaranteed minimum income for the nation’s poor that was widely regarded as radical and flaky and (in popular lore) amounted to taking tax money away from white people and giving it to blacks. Nixon warned that McGovern’s policies would raise taxes and also add millions of people to welfare roles — another racially charged issue. Then Nixon took on one of his favorite issues, crime. If you remember those years you’ll remember that Nixon was always going on about “lawnorder.” This was another issue with racial overtones, but it was also a swipe at the “permissiveness” of the counterculture and the more violent segments of the antiwar and Black Power movements.

Finally, toward the end, he addressed Vietnam:

Peace is too important for partisanship. There have been five Presidents in my political lifetime–Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson.

They had differences on some issues, but they were united in their belief that where the security of America or the peace of the world is involved we are not Republicans, we are not Democrats. We are Americans, first, last, and always.

These five Presidents were united in their total opposition to isolation for America and in their belief that the interests of the United States and the interests of world peace require that America be strong enough and intelligent enough to assume the responsibilities of leadership in the world.

They were united in the conviction that the United States should have a defense second to none in the world.

They were all men who hated war and were dedicated to peace.

But not one of these five men, and no President in our history, believed that America should ask an enemy for peace on terms that would betray our allies and destroy respect for the United States all over the world.
As your President, I pledge that I shall always uphold that proud bipartisan tradition. Standing in this Convention Hall 4 years ago, I pledged to seek an honorable end to the war in Vietnam. We have made great progress toward that end. We have brought over half a million men home, and more will be coming home. We have ended America’s ground combat role. No draftees are being sent to Vietnam. We have reduced our casualties by 98 percent. We have gone the extra mile, in fact we have gone tens of thousands of miles trying to seek a negotiated settlement of the war. We have offered a cease-fire, a total withdrawal of all American forces, an exchange of all prisoners of war, internationally supervised free elections with the Communists participating in the elections and in the supervision.

Not exactly “stay the course,” is it? And Nixon doesn’t argue that McGovern’s withdrawal proposal amounted to being weak on national security. Instead, he argued that it would be ignoble and a betrayal of our allies: “[I]t will discourage our friends abroad and it will encourage our enemies to engage in aggression.”

The charge that McGovern is weak on national security comes at the very end. McGovern proposed “massive cuts in our defense budget which would have the inevitable effect of making the United States the second strongest nation in the world,” Nixon said. He didn’t have to explain that the “first strongest nation”would have been our long-time nemesis, the Soviet Union.

Still, you’d think that, as unpopular as the Vietnam War was, and as unlikeable as Nixon and Agnew were, McGovern would have done better. But there were other factors at work.

First, George McGovern was not the candidate the Democratic Party establishment wanted to run. As explained in more detail in this article, in 1972 primaries had just begun to eclipse smoke-filled rooms in the nominating process. Because he had alienated many powerful Democrats during his nomination bid, McGovern received only tepid support from the Democratic Party itself during his general election campaign. Then McGovern’s original running mate, Thomas Eagleton of Missouri, was found to be difficult (officially it was announced Eagleton had a history of mental illness; rumors in Missouri said Eagleton was an alcoholic) and so he was replaced with Sargent Shriver. People around the nation wrote McGovern off as a flake after that. Nixon was creepy, but in many ways he had been an effective president. Nixon won re-election partly on the “devil you know” factor.

As I wrote here, during this Vietnam era the old New Deal coalition fell apart, but not primarily because of the war. Instead, it crumbled because it could not accommodate the social and cultural challenges of the times. I call your attention to another essay by Fred Siegel (scroll down to the American History subhead; emphasis added):

Liberalism in the Truman era seemed to be simple self-interest to most families who benefited from the G.I. bill and veterans’ mortgages. Campaigning in 1948 on the slogan “All I ask you to do is vote for yourself, vote for your family,” Harry S. Truman not only defeated challenges from his left and right, but triumphed despite drawing only limited support from the top tiers as measured by wealth, education, or occupation.

New Deal liberalism’s final political victory came in 1964 when Lyndon Johnson once again defeated Hoover’s ghost in the form of the outspoken economic libertarian Barry Goldwater. Johnson went on, in effect, to complete much of the New Deal’s agenda by expanding its social and health benefits for the poor, the elderly, and African-Americans who had earlier been ignored. …

… By the middle of the decade, New Deal liberalism was in retreat, routed initially not so much by its conservative opponents as by new forms of liberalism, which had emerged in response to the cataclysms of those years. In the next quarter century, its reputation declined until in the 1988 presidential race “liberal” became the “L word,” an epithet.

New issues, such as racial justice and the misuse of a now powerful presidency to fight a morally untenable war in Vietnam, destroyed the New Deal political coalition. At the same time a renewed fear of government as a threat to individual moral autonomy, defined in terms not of property but of lifestyle, undermined the social and cultural assumptions of the New Deal’s mild collectivism and authoritative institutions. Both civil rights and lifestyle liberalism were moral critiques of meat-and-potatoes majoritarianism and both pursued their goals through the courts, the “undemocratic” branch of government the New Deal had, in large measure, defined itself against.

The original FDR-era New Deal discriminated against blacks. This was largely because FDR had to cut deals with the southern Democrats to get his programs through Congress. Fact is, “entitlement” programs were very popular through the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s until they were expanded to include African Americans. By the 1960s many of the same white Americans who had benefited from the New Deal, the GI Bill, and postwar housing and mortgage subsidy programs suddenly decided that such programs encouraged people to be lazy and dependent on government. Race was the elephant in the living room of American politics in the 1960s and 1970s. Although prominent politicians rarely gave explicitly racist messages, racism screamed loudly and clearly between the lines. Nixon’s acceptance speech is a good example.

Back to Siegel:

New Deal liberalism had been erected on the understanding that it was the job of government to protect the virtuous people from the rapacious interests. But, asked the new politics liberals of the 1960s, what if the people themselves were corrupted by materialism, imperialism, racial bigotry, and a variety of other malignancies? Their answer, inspired in large measure by the civil rights movement, was to return to a pre-New Deal definition of democracy based largely on court-generated rights. Denuded of its democratic drive, liberalism had become minoritarian.

Beginning with Richard Nixon, the Republicans picked up the “common man” theme and ran with it to victories in five of six presidential elections between 1968 and 1988. Where FDR had spoken of the “forgotten man,” Republicans like Nixon and Ronald Reagan spoke of the “silent majority” imperiled by crime and court-ordered “social engineering.” Conservatives played on the opposition to social policies like busing for racial integration to argue that government, not big business, was the great danger to the average American. By the 1988 presidential election, twice as many voters defined themselves as conservatives than as liberals. Liberals, members of the party of court-protected minorities, had themselves become a minority.

It was the move away from democratic progressivism and toward “identity politics” that rendered the Democratic Party a shell of its former self, IMO. Consider the 1972 Democratic Convention, in which fights over the party’s platform dominated the floor on the night nominee McGovern was supposed to give his speech. Television viewers saw angry black and feminist delegates in heated argument with labor and party regulars; McGovern didn’t give his speech until about 3 a.m. (A shame, because it was a good speech.) And this scared the bejeesus out of Mr. and Mrs. White Middle-Class American, who flocked to Nixon to protect them.

Meanwhile, as the Left came apart, the Right got its act together. During the 1970s a number of wealthy conservatives began to build the media and political infrastructures that dominate U.S. politics today. This was the beginning of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy, in other words.

And that, boys and girls, is the true story behind The Story.

So while the Weisbergs and the Cokies and other pundits declare that the Democrats are repeating old mistakes, in most ways struggle within the party today is entirely different from what happened in 1972.

An editorial in yesterday’s New York Times called Tuesday’s Connecticut primary “revenge of the irate moderates.” (Emphasis added.)

The defeat of Senator Joseph Lieberman at the hands of a little-known Connecticut businessman is bound to send a message to politicians of both parties that voters are angry and frustrated over the war in Iraq. The primary upset was not, however, a rebellion against the bipartisanship and centrism that Mr. Lieberman said he represented in the Senate. Instead, Connecticut Democrats were reacting to the way those concepts have been perverted by the Bush White House. …

… Mr. Lieberman’s supporters have tried to depict Mr. Lamont and his backers as wild-eyed radicals who want to punish the senator for working with Republicans and to force the Democratic Party into a disastrous turn toward extremism. It’s hard to imagine Connecticut, which likes to be called the Land of Steady Habits, as an encampment of left-wing isolationists, and it’s hard to imagine Mr. Lamont, who worked happily with the Republicans in Greenwich politics, leading that kind of revolution.

The rebellion against Mr. Lieberman was actually an uprising by that rare phenomenon, irate moderates. They are the voters who have been unnerved over the last few years as the country has seemed to be galloping in a deeply unmoderate direction. A war that began at the president’s choosing has degenerated into a desperate, bloody mess that has turned much of the world against the United States. The administration’s contempt for international agreements, Congressional prerogatives and the authority of the courts has undermined the rule of law abroad and at home.

Yet while all this has been happening, the political discussion in Washington has become a captive of the Bush agenda. Traditional beliefs like every person’s right to a day in court, or the conviction that America should not start wars it does not know how to win, wind up being portrayed as extreme. The middle becomes a place where senators struggle to get the president to volunteer to obey the law when the mood strikes him. Attempting to regain the real center becomes a radical alternative.

Further, the “netroots” Left today is keenly interested in the “meat-and-potatoes” issues that the New Left dissed in 1972 — jobs, health care, pensions, and other policies that support the American middle class.

I say again, today’s political struggle bears little resemblance to the Vietnam era. It ain’t 1972 any more. We liberals and progressives must challenge The Story. We need to clarify what happened then, and we must not allow rightie propaganda to deter us from our purpose now.

I want to close by linking to this article written by George McGovern in April 2003, just a month into the disaster of Iraq. He saw more clearly than most exactly what was happening. McGovern is a good guy, and the way his name is evoked to call shame upon Democrats is a damn injustice.

See also: Digby.

UPDATE: More historical background by a diarist at Daily Kos. My one quibble is that I’m not sure how much the Democrats were seen to have embraced the counterculture in 1968, especially after the Grant Park, um, protests during the 1972 1968 Democratic Convention. Certainly by 1972 the counterculture and the Democrats seemed an old married couple to most of the public, even though the New Left and the old establishment Dems weren’t entirely on speaking terms. (Hat tip: Digby)

Reactionaries

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A commenter who labels himself “r4d20” left comments to the “Being Liberal Doesn’t Mean Being a Patsy” post, here and here, and I want to answer these comments at length because the writer brings up some important points. Beginning with:

Not to be a pendant, but the first step in elevating the culture is to at least get some terms more specific than “righties/lefties”, or “the right/the left”. I understand that its a quick and easy reference point, but I think that excessive use of generalities does interfere with clear thought.

I am a big proponent of using words and phrases with precision, but in our current political culture attempts to define various factions by standard political nomenclature will fail, IMO, because the partisan forces tearing us apart are not fundamentally political forces, but cultural ones.

Once upon a time I referred to righties as “conservatives,” because that’s what they called themselves, but whether they are or are not conservative depends a whole lot on how you define conservative. And that’s a perilous thing to do, because if you go by the bare-bones dictionary definition, “One who strongly favors retention of the existing order; orthodox, traditionalist, etc.,” the next thing you have to do is figure out what “existing order” is to be retained, and that can change over time and from place to place.

According to The Reader’s Companion to American History (Eric Foner and John Garraty, eds. Houghon Mifflin, 1991),

A uniquely American form of conservatism first arose in opposition to the nation’s sense of boundless optimism about human nature under democracy. And for roughly the first two hundred years of the Republic, conservatism was defined politically and culturally by its fears of the political excesses, economic egalitarianism, and cultural vulgarity generated by a democratic society shorn of any aristocratic restraints.

This is from an excellent overview of conservatism in America by Fred Siegel that can be found on this page, but you have to scroll down to get to it. It’s under the “American History” heading, and begins “The Reagan presidency has been hailed as the high point of twentieth-century American conservatism.” To understand fully where I’m coming from here it would be helpful to read the whole thing, but I’m just going to quote a little more, skipping to the 1920s —

According to what came to be known as “constitutional morality,” legislation supporting the right to unionize or limiting children’s working hours was an un-American form of group privilege. Laissez-faire conservatism reached its intellectual apogee in the 1920s. A critic complained that by 1924 you didn’t have to be a radical to be denounced as un-American: “according to the lights of Constitution worship you are no less a Red if you seek change through the very channels which the Constitution itself provides.”

In Europe conservatism was based on hereditary classes; in America it was based on hereditary religious, ethnic, and racial groups. The GOP, a largely Protestant party, looked upon itself as the manifestation of the divine creed of Americanism revealed through the Constitution. To be a conservative, then, was to share in a religiously ordained vision of a largely stateless society of self-regulating individuals. This civil religion, preached by President Herbert Hoover, was shattered by the Great Depression and the usurpation of the government by an “alien” power, Franklin D. Roosevelt, in league with “un-American,” that is, unexceptionalist ideas.

Conservatives were traumatized by their fall from grace. Diminished in place and prestige, they consoled themselves with bizarre conspiracy theories and cranky accusations of communist infiltration. Overwhelmed and resentful, they did not so much address the disaster of the depression as yearn for the days when they were able to run their towns, their businesses, and their workers in the manner to which they had been accustomed. Then, in 1940, just when it seemed they had Roosevelt on the ropes, World War II revived and extended his presidency.

At war’s end conservatives unleashed their frustrations. On the one hand, postwar popular conservatism was based on an anticommunist hysteria that antedated the antics of Senator Joe McCarthy. Politics for the McCarthyites was not so much a matter of pursuing material interests as a national screen on which to project their deepest cultural fears.

From here, Siegel goes on to describe the conservative political revival that began with Barry Goldwater’s presidential bid in 1964 and the conservative intellectuals and activists of the 1960s who called for a “restoration” of pre-New Deal America.

But this new conservatism did not so much win the country over to its perspective as board the empty ship of state vacated by a 1960s liberalism that had self-destructed. Conservatism triumphed because New Deal liberalism was unable to accommodate the new cultural and political demands unleashed by the civil rights revolution, feminism, and the counterculture, all of which was exacerbated by the Kulturkampf over Vietnam.

I agree with Siegel that New Deal liberalism, along with the New Left, had self-destructed by the 1970s, although the New Deal itself has yet to be entirely dismantled. But while “identity politics” and other factors splintered liberalism into thousands of ineffectual pieces, the Right got its act together. Some extremely wealthy right-wingers — Richard Mellon Scaife, Joseph Coors, Lynde and Harry Bradley, and Smith Richardson, among others — provided the seed money for the mighty right-wing think tank-media infrastructure, which you can read more about here. This infrastructure has put control of most of the federal government and news media safely in right-wing hands.

Yet, weirdly, the Right continues behave as if it is a desperate fight against a mythical “liberal elite” that runs everything, in spite of the fact that it doesn’t exist, and that progressivism itself has been cast out of power and left wandering in the wilderness for at least 40 years.

Today you’ve got the “social” conservatives, who want to return to 19th-century cultural mores; the “free market” conservatives, who want to return to the Gilded Age; the “Christian” conservatives who want to return to a theocratic America that never actually existed except in their imaginations; and the neoconservatives, who have taken the notions of American exceptionalism to new and more demented heights. And variations thereof.

Somehow these diverse groups have formed a coalition they label “conservative”, in spite of the fact that they advance contradictory agendas. Contemporary conservatism, for example, advocates restricting civil liberties in the name of freedom and extols small government while building the mightiest military-industrial complex the world has ever seen. About the only thing the various elements of the coalition have in common is that they all hate liberals, meaning not actual liberals but a cartoon straw man that represents liberalism in their minds, but which has little resemblance to those of us who are still foolish enough to call ourselves “liberals” in spite of the fact that we’re asking to be rounded up and shipped out on the first bus to the re-education camps.

This conservatism, IMO, isn’t all that conservative. It’s far more radical, revolutionary even, to label conservative. I think reactionary gets closer to it, although the standard dictionary definition of reactionaries — people who vehemently, often fanatically oppose progress and favor return to a previous condition — only works up to a point. Aggressive imperialism is a bit hard to square with returning to a “previous condition,” for example. To make that work you need to understand their urge to impose American hegemony on the rest of the world as a pro-active isolationism — eliminating the “threat” of foreignness by gettin’ it before it gets us.

In other ways, of course, reactionary works quite well — the stubborn refusal to admit that global warming is really happening, for example.

But ultimately, to paraphrase Siegel, I think the current American Right is all about politics as a national screen on which to project their deepest cultural fears.

And, since we’ve got to call these people something, I say “rightie” works as well as anything else.

In its extreme forms, rightieness is just hate. I mean, what are Michelle Malkin’s or Ann Coulter’s political principles, other than that they hate large groups of people that they associate with “the Left”? The hate comes first; whatever political principles they claim were adopted as props to justify the hate.

The commenter r4d20 continues,

While I choose to register Republican, like many/most people I straddle the line, which means that hardcore lefties call me “right” and hardcore righties call me “left”. According to the current “talking points” I am both a jingoistic warmonger, and a pro-Al Queda traitor – but at least both agree I should be shot 🙂 .

Even as a “Rightie” I have more in common with a “moderate” leftie than with a Christian Conservative. As a “leftie” I have more in common with a moderate rightie than with almost any Anarchist or Socialist.

Yet, somehow, politics on the blogosphere has divided itself fairly neatly into “right” and “left” camps, and all (except, these days, the purer libertarians) know extinctively in which camp they and everyone else should be sorted.

Here on the Left Blogosphere, you’d have a hard time finding an anarchist or genuinely socialist blogger. Most of us bloggers are the political heirs of New Deal Democrats. Most of us hold political positions that would have been considered “centrist” or even moderately conservative years ago. Yet today we’re painted as a radical “leftie” fringe utterly beyond the pale of decent, Gawd-fearing American politics. Much of the Right Blogosphere has utterly slipped its tether to reality, yet it gets called “centrist.”

And these days, a “moderate” is someone who doesn’t know what the hell is going on. If you want to preserve long-established American political processes, if you believe in the rule of law and the Bill of Rights and separation of powers and all that old stuff, you’re a leftie. Unless you just say you believe in those things even while you are trying to destroy them, which would make you a rightie.

But if the moderates on each side have been conditioned to think of all the people on the “other side” as extremist stereotypes then they will naturally choose the extremists of their own side over those of the other. The only winners are the wingnuts who maintain their support out of hyped-up fear of possible doomsday alternatives.

Yes, but the wingnuts really are going to bring about doomsday if we don’t stop them. Fence-straddling is not a sustainable position these days.

Still Decompressed

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This is an addendum to the post on the YearlyKos and Take Back America conferences I published yesterday at Unclaimed Territory, in which I complained that there was much talk of building progressive media infrastructure but no real plan for doing it. Robert Perry writes at Consortium News:

Some e-mailers and friends have asked why I didn’t attend some of the recent progressive conferences – like “Take Back America” or the “Yearly Kos Convention” – where media was on the agenda. The short answer is that I have been to progressive meetings in the past where media was discussed – and almost nothing gets done.

As the Right has built up a vertically integrated media infrastructure that stretches from newspapers, magazines and books to talk radio, cable news and well-funded Internet sites, wealthy liberals mostly have sat on their hands. Even now, as the Right expands that infrastructure horizontally down to state, district and local levels – with ominous portents for Election 2006 – well-heeled liberals remain mostly passive.

And this pattern has been going on for years.

In the 1990s – after I left Newsweek over internal battles about what I viewed as the magazine’s mis-reporting of the Iran-Contra Affair – I talked to executives of leading liberal foundations about the desperate need for building honest media in America. I often got bemused looks. One foundation bureaucrat laughed and announced, “Oh, we don’t do media.” Another liberal foundation actually banned media-related proposals.

It’s as if American liberals and possibly some tribe in Borneo are the only groups on earth who don’t understand the transformational power of media.

I believe we have progressed to the point that American liberals — the ones at the conferences, anyway — now understand that in the long run “building honest media” is our biggest and most essential task. Without this, even though we might win elections here and there, liberals cannot expect to take back any real political power or have any influence in American policies. But how do we do this?

Perry explains the steps taken by right-wing think tanks and foundations to build the Wingnut Echo Chamber that would assimilate most of the “MSM.” He continues,

Indeed, in the treatment of Clinton during his presidency and Gore during the pivotal Election 2000, it was difficult to distinguish between the hostility from the right-wing media and the venom from the mainstream media. Yet, wealthy liberals – including many who made their fortune in the entertainment media – just couldn’t get their brains around the need to build strong media outlets for honest journalism.

There were always reasons why that couldn’t happen. One plan was too ambitious; another plan wasn’t ambitious enough.

Other times, perfection became the enemy of the good. There were esoteric debates about how media outlets should maintain their purity by not taking commercials, even though that guaranteed that under-funded operations couldn’t pay professional salaries or achieve necessary technical standards.

Or there were self-absorbed discussions about how liberals don’t need media the way conservatives do because liberals are more free-thinking. Or there was the defeatism about how liberal talk radio couldn’t succeed. Some activists even thought one answer was to get Americans to stop watching TV (after all, the strategy to get Americans to turn off their radios had worked so well).

There was also a strange embarrassment on the Left about the importance of money in achieving what needed to be done. The reason we put the word “consortium” in our title was to stress our view that the only hope for achieving the honest media needed to address America’s political crisis was to pull together substantial resources for building strong media outlets and producing quality journalistic content.

But whenever I’d attend one of those progressive conferences, I left with the feeling that the people who had the money were not serious about doing anything with it, at least not on media. Or maybe they just didn’t see media as all that important.

Even in the past year when some liberal foundations have told me that “oh, we now get the media thing,” what they really wanted to do with their money was put it into activism on media issues, such as organizing demonstrations to oppose funding cuts at PBS.

When I spoke to two foundation officials a year ago and made my pitch for the need to support journalistic “outlets and content,” one of them responded, “oh, those are just words.” What they decided to do with their money was to support “media reform,” i.e. organizing around media issues.

After this year’s “Take Back America” assemblage of liberal activists had ended in Washington, I sat down with a West Coast friend who had attended the conference. He had been there pushing the need for investments in media and had concluded, “All they care about is organizing.”

Yeah, pretty much. That said, I think the YearlyKos media panel, which consisted of real smart people I had actually heard of — Jay Rosen, Christy Hardin-Smith, Jamison Foser, Duncan Black, and Matt Bai — was way better than the TBA media panel, in which some polling consultant took up most of the time. But without money there’s not much we can do but organize.

Booing Hillary

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I mentioned this morning that Sen. Hillary Clinton was booed for saying she did not support setting a firm date on withdrawal from Iraq. I was sitting on the opposite side of the ballroom as the boo-ers and didn’t see anything amiss, although I heard at lunch that some of the boo-ers were escorted from the hall by security.

Now there’s an article up at Common Dreams that says the boo-ers were from Code Pink.

Fearing that CODEPINK would openly confront Clinton on her pro-war policy, the organizers of Take Back America entered into negotiations with CODEPINK a few days before the conference. “We had lengthy discussions where they pleaded with us not to protest during her keynote breakfast address,” explained Gael Murphy, one of the cofounders of CODEPINK. “Instead, we were told that we could distribute flyers explaining Hillary’s pro-war position to the crowd inside and outside the hotel, and we would be called on to ask her the first question after the speech. We agreed.”

However, when CODEPINK showed up on Tuesday morning in advance of Clinton’s speech, the security guards refused to allow them to pass out flyers, even outside the hotel. “Take Back America violated the agreement from the moment we arrived,” said Ms. Murphy. “Even though we had a table inside the conference, burly security guards blocked us and informed us that it was a private event, that we were not welcome, and they escorted us out of the building. We telephoned the conference staff who then told us that we couldn’t enter the hotel, couldn’t leaflet the event, the hallways—anywhere. They went back on their word and tried to quash even peaceful, respectful dissent.”

A few CODEPINK women did manage to get inside the breakfast, however, as they were legitimate ticket holders. Once inside, the CODEPINK women soon realized that they had been deceived about the second part of the agreement: They would not be allowed to ask the first question, or any question, because Hillary Clinton would not be fielding questions from the audience. “We were really upset that we had been lied to by Take Back America, and that there would be no space at this ‘progressive conference’ to have a dialogue with Hillary Clinton about the most critical issue of our time—the war in Iraq,” said Katie Heald, DC coordinator for CODEPINK. “We got up on our chairs holding up our hands with the peace sign, and were pulled down from the chairs. We tried to take out our banner that said “Listen Hillary: Stop Supporting the War” and it was grabbed from us. And when Hillary started talking about her Iraq strategy, criticizing Bush but not posing a solution, we shouted ‘What are YOU going to do to get us out of Iraq,’ but she ignored us.”

The only banner I saw said “impeach Bush,” but as I said I was on the other side of the ballroom. The “impeach Bush” banner was a product of Veterans for Peace.

Ann Wright, the army colonel and diplomat who resigned over the war, was appalled by the actions of the conference organizers. “They took away leaflets supporting Jonathan Tasini, the anti-war Democrat who is running against Clinton in New York. They searched people’s bags for banners; they even took away an ‘Impeach Bush’ banner from Veterans for Peace. Free speech needs to be upheld by progressives and trying to curtail dissent undercuts the whole purpose of this conference,” said Wright.

Many of the attendees agreed with the position of the protesters, and as Hillary Clinton left the podium, they joined in chanting “Bring the troops home; Stop the war now.” The next speakers, Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi and Senator John Kerry, got thunderous applause when they called for the troops to come home.

Schmoozing in the hall with other attendees, one senses a lack of interest in a Hillary Clinton candidacy. The MSM has been telling us for years that Hillary is a “rock star” with party activists, but I’m not seeing that here. “She can’t win” seems to be conventional wisdom. Yes, she got an enthusiastic standing ovation at the beginning and ending of her speech, but so did Pelosi and Kerry. And, as I said, the crowd got a lot more fired up by Kerry’s speech than by Clinton’s.

Back to Code Pink’s gripes with the convention — I’d like to hear TBA’s side of this before I get too riled up. It’s very possible the Hilton people, not TBA, were the ones who didn’t want Code Pink handing out leaflets outside the hotel. On the other hand, I don’t see why Code Pink wasn’t allowed to hand out leaflets in the convention area. And I can’t see tossing ticket-holding attendees out of the room for holding up a banner.

Update: See also Hit and Run.

Oh, those silly kids

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One of the comments to my post about the HPV vaccine mentioned that it was nice to see a “younger” voice on this blog, so that’s what I want to post about now, while the maha-in-chief is still in Washington.

A few links. Sadly, some of these are behind subscription walls.

My mother has said to me that the feminist movement is effectively dead, but, although I think the movement has lost some of its oomph for sure, I like to think it’s still flailing and kicking somewhere. Perhaps on college campuses: Salon’s Broadsheet reports that an organization of anti-feminists is opening up chapters on campuses all over the country:

These young women read Danielle Crittenden and Christina Hoff Sommers, attend conferences key-noted by Ann Coulter and Elaine Chao, spread jittery but false gossip that Lynne Cheney is a donor, and host 80’s dances in honor of Ronald Reagan’s birthday.

Kinda sends shivers down your spin, dudn’t it?

Broadsheet crows that this is a sign that women’s movements are enjoying a “a vibrant, exciting renaissance” among college-aged women. I hope that’s true; certainly when groups emerge to oppose you, it’s a sign that you’re doing something right.

But, so, young people. There’s a vicious cycle at work wherein young people don’t participate politically and therefore their interests aren’t represented or talked about and therefore they don’t want to participate. It means us 20-somethings get slandered a lot for being lazy or entitled.

Young women in particular are left out of the conversation. A friend of mine recently pointed to MoveOn‘s most recent campaign as an example. Ten issues were voted on and narrowed down to three big ideas: “Health care for all, energy independence, and restored democracy.” Worthy goals, certainly, but of the ten issues originally presented to us, not one of them dealt with the eroding rights of women — access to abortion and birth control, which you may think is a pet issue, but which I think is key to women’s autonomy and equality, and that’s a hell of a big deal to me. Or equal pay, for that matter. Or better family policies, like access to childcare and better maternity/paternity leave… and these are “women’s issues” in the public discourse, I guess because “family” still falls in the women’s sphere — that’s some progress, eh? All that is right up there with health care for everyone and whatever “restored democracy” means, for me. (Energy, too, insofar as I’d like for us to find sustainable and renewable alternatives before we all bake, but I don’t own a car, so “gas prices are too high” is not really a motivation for me to advocate anything.)

Ah, but how do you get those pesky kids to vote?

One last link, while we’re talking about gender issues: Everyone’s favorite cabbage argues that girly books make boys not want to read. And we’re back on the whole “male and female brains are wired differently and so boys and girls excel in different subjects” nonsense debate. Last I checked, Brooks was not a scientist, so I don’t see how not liking Jane Eyre gives him the authority to make suppositions like that. And the whole debate ignores how kids and their teachers are socialized. But why am I so angry? I should not expect so much from the produce aisle.

Kerry Wants a Date

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Is the Senate ready to set a “hard and fast deadline” for U.S. troops withdrawal from Iraq? This morning Sen. John Kerry said that this week he will submit a resolution to the Senate asking for an up or down vote on such a resolution.

Senator Kerry spoke in the ballroom of the Washington Hilton as part of the Take Back America conference, at which I am an exhibit. Right now I am back on display in the Exhibit Hall, sitting next to sister exhibit Liza Sabater.

The morning speakers were Sen. Hillary Clinton, who was 15 minutes late; Rep. Nancy Pelosi, and Sen. Kerry. All of the speeches were good and enthusiastically received, but Kerry’s speech clearly beat the competition on the fired-up voltage meter.

I’m not going to hazard a guess on audience size. The Washington Hilton ballroom is a huge room in serious need of redecorating. The ceiling reflects a retro-Jetsons-space age look, the walls are mauve (aka “baby shit pink”), and the carpeting is a style I call faux baroque — ornate, but disconnected from any known historical period. Or any known color palette, for that matter. If you can visualize that, add some styrofoam coffee cups scattered on the floor and rows of conference attendees in gilt, scrollworked chairs. Now you’re as good as there.

Senator Clinton spoke first, and she launched her speech on the topic of voter rights. She called for a returning integrity to voting systems and taking voting away from Harris, Blackwell, and their ilk. She also touched on the topic of “fiscal sovereignty,” which is something I want to blog about at some length in the future.

Not to give short shrift to the Congresswoman, but I am about to run out of blogging time — Senator Kerry’s speech focused Iraq and was the speech he should have given during the 2004 campaign for the Democratic nomination. He argued that if indeed the President means it when he says “as Iraqis stand up, we’ll stand down,” then the Iraqis need a firm deadline for standing up. The White House gave the Iraqis firm deadlines for elections and adopting their constitution, so why not a deadline for taking responsibility for their own security?

Earlier, Senator Clinton had also spoken on the subject of Iraq. She is opposed to an open-ended commitment of troops, she said, but does not support setting “a date certain.” This inspired some boos, as well as applause.

Eye of the Storm II

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Now I have more blogging time, mostly because I really, really need to rest a bit before dinner and the evening program, which will include a speech by Sen. Harry Reid. So while I’ve got a few minutes I’d like to respond to some comments by Marc Schulman left on my post from this morning.

I, too, regret the right/left war. For what’s it’s worth, it may surprise you to learn that I blame the Republicans for starting it — the Clinton impeachment was partisanship carried to an extreme. Although it’s mostly left unsaid, it seems to me that the left wing of the Democrats and those even further to the left are partially motivated by payback.

I haven’t taken a survey, but I think the Clinton impeachment is water over the bridge for most of us now. First, we progressive netroots types are hugely ambivalent about the Clinton Administration. Righties seem to think we worship the ground the Big Dog walks on; this is far from the truth. Second, we have much bigger and more dangerous problems facing us now than to spin our wheels over the Clinton impeachment.

However, most of us are angry over the way the Right has smeared, slimed, demonized, marginalized, and misrepresented liberalism over the past 25 or so years. Well, I should clarify — this goes back more than 50 years, really, to the age of Joe McCarthy. And the Nixon/Agnew administration engaged in liberal baiting as well. But it was really in the 1980s, especially after Reagan abolished the Fairness Doctrine, that rightwing talk radio and media like Fox News began a coordinated campaign to brainwash America about the nature of liberalism, rendering the “L” word into a pejorative, as part of their campaign to take control of the federal government.

(That and the fact that many of us believe sincerely that the Republican Party — which in my childhood was associated with the centrist Dwight Eisenhower and “Republican” cloth coats — has been taken over by an extremist, hard right faction that Eisenhower would not have associated with. We progressives are closer to the center than the so-called “conservatives” who run the Republican Party, yet somehow we’ve become the extremist and the extremists are called the center.)

Righties just love to comb through leftie blogs and commentaries and pick out insults of conservatives, so that they can whine about how mean lefties are. But I sincerely believe that the Right has us beat in the hate department tenfold. And you can’t see it. You excuse the extremism and hatespeech on your side, but pounce on every squawk from our side as justification of your hatred of us.

That said, in any group of people there will be some with bad judgment and poor impulse control who will react to insult and abuse with retaliatory insult and abuse. I think such reaction is not just misguided, but plays into the Right’s hands; the Right baits and slimes lefties until somebody reacts in anger, and then the Right can point to the reaction as an example of how angry the Left is. We talked about this in a panel discussion today. To a person, the panel counseled not taking the bait.

I see the wisdom of turning the other cheek, as do most of us here. Several speakers today urged the attendees not to stoop to the level of the Right, now or ever. The Republicans have been practicing Scorched Earth politics for 25 years, and it hasn’t just hurt the Democrats, it has hurt America. We’re angry, yes, but I’ve heard no one here talk about retaliation. Instead, we want it to stop. We want a politics of unity, in which people across the political spectrum understand that just because we disagree on some points of political philosophy or policy doesn’t mean we all don’t want what’s best for America. And we want political leaders mature enough to understand that compromise isn’t surrender.

I was in my 20s when the Watergate scandal broke. I was never more proud of my country than I was when I watched the Senate and congressional hearings. People of both parties put aside partisan politics and just went after the truth. No excuses, so whiny “the Dems to it too” crap that is the Right’s usual response when they’re caught doing something unethical these days. The Republicans of that time put the United States and the Constitution ahead of their party. Few Republicans seem able to do that now.

On the other hand, many of us believe the Bush Administration, or some elements thereof, have engaged in criminal activity. We think it is vitally important to thoroughly investigate this. If we are wrong, then investigation should show us we are wrong. But if we are right, this must not be buried and forgiven the way, for example, Iran Contra was buried and forgiven. This is not about retaliation; it’s about the rule of law and the integrity of government. Future administrations of either party must be put on notice that they will be held accountable for crimes.

Whatever the reasons are for the verbal civil war, I can’t help but be concerned about the reality denial and vindictiveness expressed in many of the quotes in my most recent post and earlier ones on the same topic. Using Haditha as a rationale for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq is an example.

Believe me, there’s nothing I’d like more than a meeting of the minds. If you, and others, would like to engage in a conversation to that end, count me in.

I will not engage in any such conversation until you are able to fully admit to the denial and vindictiveness of the Right. Even though I choose not to retaliate, I ain’t about to just lie down and let you kick me in the head and call it “discussion.” Especially not on my own blog.

As far as “Using Haditha as a rationale for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq is an example” — I’m not passing judgment on something I haven’t read for myself. You might want to read my take on this — the enormous pressure placed on the troops in Iraq pretty much guarantees that some will snap, and some bad judgments will be made. This, I argue, is a big reason why a military invasion was the wrong tool to use to achieve the Administration’s goals in the Middle East. It shouldn’t have been done at all, in other words. (Please read my entire argument before you try to argue with me about this; if I see you making assumptions about what I think that is not what I wrote, you will be banned from this blog.)

The Middle Way

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I got up this morning determined to find something political to blog about, because I’ve spent most of the last couple of days first writing and then defending the religion post at Unclaimed Territory. By last night, after repeating the same couple of simple points for the five hundredth time, I had a throbbing headache and was veering perilously close to the “kiss my ass” stage of Rogerian argument.

The most frustrating part of the effort was that a great many people did not base their criticisms of the post on what I actually wrote. I don’t mind — well, maybe I mind a little, but only in an ego-attached way — those who expressed disagreement with something I did write. But a large part of the criticisms were from people who assumed what I must think and attacked me for opinions I do not have.

For example, a couple of self-described atheists attacked me for being anti-atheism and opposed to the separation of church and state. In fact, I have on occasion chided the religious for their intolerance of atheism. (I wish I could say I have defended atheism a lot, but the fact is most religious people don’t exactly, um, respect my opinions, either. I don’t belong to the majority tribe.) And there’s no other civil liberties issue that I care more passionately about, on a personal level, than protecting the separation of church and state.

I was both fascinated and frustrated by the commenters who assumed I am Christian even though I explicitly said I am not. Obviously, something in their heads caused the adjective religious to override “not a Christian.” Several complained that I didn’t understand how dangerous religion is, even after my rhetoric about “warring religious whackjobs” and “a genuine threat to civilization on this planet.” Others were dismissive of the post because I didn’t address their pet religious agendas. In some of those cases I actually agreed with the agendas, but they were way outside the scope of the points I was trying to make in the post.

And then, of course, my defenses of the post pushed buttons, too. Although I hadn’t wanted to write about my personal religious adventures, when one commenter complained that he didn’t understand what religion I followed, I provided a simple explanation as devoid of proselytizing as I could make it. Then another commenter complained because I was making “religious declarations.” I wrote that not all Christians are James Dobson zealots and was called a “Christian apologist.” When I expressed alarm at the dangers posed by James Dobson zealots I was told I was bashing religion.

I suppose now I’ll be told I’m whining.

If there’s one point that was driven home to me, it’s that some (adj., a portion or an unspecified number or quantity of a whole or group: He likes some modern sculpture but not all) on the Left really do harbor a palpable hostility toward religion per se. I know this is not true of the entire Left, but until this weekend I would have said the hard-core religion haters were a minority and not representative of the Left. I still think they’re a minority. Probably. But they’re sure as hell a big and assertive minority, and representative of something.

Bloggers before me have hit the same flame wall. This post by Steve Waldman at Washington Monthly discussing hostility to religion on the part of some liberals drew complaints that he was spreading GP talking points, interspersed with comments that were hostile to religion.

I’d like to clarify that I did not make a request for tolerance of religion because I’m worried about the rightie mythos that “The Left” hates religion. You know that righties are going to claim “The Left” hates religion as long as they can find even one leftie who hates religion. This doesn’t have anything to do with their concern for religion; they’re just looking for reasons to hate lefties. One stumbles onto rightie bloggers who admit they aren’t religious themselves but who still beat lefties over the head with the “they hate religion” meme. Libertarians tend to be unreligious, yet the Right thought the Libs were just peachy until the Libs turned against George W. Bush.

On the other hand, many UT commenters who denied there is a liberal bias against religion would, in the next paragraph, make some knee-jerk, narrow-minded comment about religion. I’d find you some examples except that I’m afraid to go to UT today. By now they’ve probably got me pegged as a paid agent of Jerry Falwell.

In an ideal America, voters wouldn’t care about a political candidate’s religious proclivities. Well, unless those proclivities involved human sacrifice or a belief that URLs are coded messages from another galaxy, in which case some concern might be warranted. But a vast body of empirical evidence shows us that just because a politician says he’s found Jesus doesn’t mean he can find his ass with both hands. And I doubt, sincerely, there’s even a slight statistical correlation between public declarations of faith and private virtue. Even Jesus told his followers that displays of devotion do not constitute quality assurance. (See, for example, Matthew 7:15-23.)

But many Americans live a culture that combines a crass religiosity with jingoism and nativism and several varieties of bigotry, simmered together in a toxic, psuedo-fascist soup. And appeals to reason, tolerance, social betterment, prosperity, or good government do not get soup-dwellers to the polls nearly as well as waving the Bible and promising to uphold God’s Law. (God’s Law being a nasty, repressive business that no god worthy of respect would have any part of.)

This culture has existed in one form or another throughout American history. However, in my lifetime I’ve seen it get worse. The marriage of the GOP and the Christian Right, combined with the power of mass media, has made it both more powerful and more widespread.

The power of the Christian Right has hurt the Dems, no question. Political pundits tell Dems they have to get “more religious” to appeal to Christian voters if they’re going to win the White House in 2008. Maybe, but there are good ways to do that, and there are stupid ways to do that. The stupid way is for candidates who are uncomfortable with Bible Belt culture to try to “fit in” by talking about Jesus. Even if the Jesus talk is sincere, the politician will still transmit the message “I’m an alien to your world” in a thousand subtle ways. Trust me on that.

The smart way, IMO, is to enlist the help of native religious moderates to persuade other religious moderates that it’s OK to vote Democratic.. See, for example, “When Would Jesus Bolt?” by Amy Sullivan in the April 2006 Washington Monthly. Even better, right now the Dems should be searching for presentable and articulate liberal evangelicals (not an oxymoron, believe it or not), to take guest bobblehead gigs on political talk shows. The public face of Christianity doesn’t have to be a right-wing one.

As I said, the hard-core Right is a lost cause, but they aren’t the only voters in red states.

We must break the grip of the Christian Right’s political power, but the way to do that is not for secularists to wage war against religion. The way to do that is for the non-religious, and the religious who want to maintain religious liberty, to make common cause against the theocrats.

I’d like more religious Americans to understand that a “secular society” is not hostile to religion. Rather, a secular society is one in which citizens are free to explore many religious paths, or none, without coercion or interference from government. It is a society in which religion can remain free of the corruption of worldly political power and flourish according to its merits.

Maybe someday we’ll see a society in which an atheist can be elected President of the United States. Well, I don’t expect it to happen in my lifetime, but eventually.

And in the far distant future, maybe secularists will stop spouting knee-jerk, narrow-minded views about how all religious people are knee-jerkers with narrow minds. Needless to say, I’m not holding my breath on that one.

[Cross-posted to The American Street because I lack the nerve to post it on Unclaimed Territory. I’m not into martyrdom.]

Defending Jesus

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Jesus didn’t ask me to defend him, but sometimes I do anyway. He gets picked on so.

Today’s potshots come from Barry Seidman, who describes himself as a humanist and secularist. In response to recent advances by the Christian Left, Seidman writes that he’s happy the Christian Left is “joining the good fight against Christo-fascists like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Tim LaHaye and President Bush.” However,

… the coupling of religion and politics is as dangerous for the left as it is for the right, because absolutism, authoritative supernaturalism and the actual tenets of the Abrahamic religious texts can never be reconciled with democracy and freedom.

In my experience religious liberals tend to respect the principle of separation of church and state, so it’s not clear to me what worries Mr. Seidman. I infer he thinks religious people will always try to impose their doctrines on others and thus cannot be trusted in politics, liberal or not.

Seidman bases much of his opinion on a book by Hector Avalos titled Fighting Words: The Origin of Religious Violence. Avalos is an anthropologist and biblical scholar who teaches at Iowa State University. I have not read this book, but Avalos states his basic thesis in this interview:

In Fighting Words Avalos looks at the role religion has historically played and continues to play in violence in the three main Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam).

“Most religious violence is the result of real or perceived scarce resources,” he said. “When people believe that there is not enough of something valued, they may fight to acquire it or to maintain it. When religion causes violence, it does so because it has created new scarce resources.”

Fighting Words focuses on four scarce resources that can be created by religious beliefs – inscripturation (sacred scriptures), sacred space, group privilege and salvation. The book shows examples of how each of these can be seen as scarce resources that have precipitated violence in Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

The “scarce resource” of inscripturation can look at religions who say that God communicates to us in only one text (the Koran or Bible for example) and access to God is available only through the one text the religion believes in.

This explanation seems thin to me. I am inclined to think most religious violence occurs when religion (any religion) becomes tribalistic or gets mixed into struggles for political power. As I said I haven’t read the book, and perhaps Avalos makes a good case. But the “Abrahamic religion” thing bothers me. One, we’re back in the same old trap of defining religion as monotheism, when most of the world’s religions are not, in fact, monotheistic. And as I sort of argued here, even within the monotheistic religions the occasional genius or mystic has broken out of the God box — Spinoza comes to mind.

It has long seemed to me that there are two basic ways to approach religion — legalistic (or dogmatic) or mystical. All three of the major monotheistic religions — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — have mystical traditions as well as legalistic ones. It is true that the legalistic and dogmatic approach is far more common. The dominant sects of all monotheisms tend to treat scripture as law and assume that theological and moral questions can be answered by referring scriptural statute.

On the other hand, most other religions (there are exceptions) more often take a mystical approach and treat sacred texts as guides to truth, not truth itself.

His Holiness the Dalai Lama was once asked what he would do if science disproved something written in a sutra. He said that he would revise the sutra. Westerners sometimes don’t know how to take this, but even the Buddha told his followers they shouldn’t accept anything he taught them on faith. Believing the sutras is not the point of the sutras, any more than believing in science is the point of science.

Christianity may be the most dogmatic major religion on the planet. (Judaism is much less dogmatic, and I don’t know enough about Islam to judge.) In most denominations the follower is presented with an elaborate belief system and told he must accept these beliefs absolutely; doubt often is considered weakness. Since the West is overwhelmingly Christian, even the nonreligious assume this must be what religion is all about. But it can be argued that Christianity’s emphasis on literal and rigid belief in doctrines is an aberration among religions and is not even true of all schools of Christianity.

Further, the notion that a Christian must accept the entire Bible without question is not as rigidly a given as Seidman and, apparently, Avalos believe. I have had lovely discussions with liberal Christians who understand the Bible was written by people with limitations and prejudices, and that ideas about God have evolved over time. They can even accept historical evidence that the Gospels were not, in fact, written by Apostles but by second- and third-generation followers who didn’t know Jesus personally. Once you accept that Jesus’s teachings may have been imperfectly recorded in the Gospels, then disregarding the parts that seem out of whack or are of questionable provenance (e.g., most of the Gospel of John) is not “cherry picking,” but critical thinking. (See also the Jesus Seminar.)

Seidman writes,

Even apart from his discussion of religious-created scarcities, Avalos uses a close reading of the Bible to reject the view that Christianity essentially espouses love and peace. He argues that in Romans 12:14 we do not really see an example of Christians loving their enemies at all, though this section is often cited by Christians for this very reason. The section begins, sure enough, “Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them.” But what most liberal Christians then ignore is the rest of the section, “If your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads” (Romans 12:20). Heaping burning coals on their heads? Avalos suggests that read as a whole, the commandment to be nice is a way to build up the potential for violence against an enemy. The nicer one is to one’s enemies, the more they will deserve the violence done to them in the end.

To which a liberal Christian would say that the book of Romans was written by Paul, and reflects Paul’s understanding, which may not have been the way Jesus saw things. Look instead at Matthew 5:43-48, which possibly had a eyewitness account as a source:

Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same? And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? do not even the publicans so? Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.

I submit that to love others requires not wishing to heap burning coals on their heads, the authority of St. Paul notwithstanding. Seidman snorts at Christians who “cherry pick,” then does some pretty selective cherry-picking himself.

Whatever Jesus was about got buried pretty quickly under the interpretations of lesser teachers and dogmas that arose in the centuries after his death. The Doctrine of Trinity itself didn’t become the central doctrine of the church until the 4th century; many biblical scholars doubt very much that Jesus saw himself as God. (As a Jew, he might have been appalled at the idea.) And although most Christians don’t question doctrine, there are some who find their true spiritual quest in digging through the doctrinal minutia of the ages to get closer to the authentic Jesus.

Dogmatism and mysticism struggled with each other throughout Christian history. Great Christian mystics like Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross lived in the shadow of the Inquisition. Dogmatism prevailed, but mysticism didn’t die altogether. And in a time when the light of science makes dogma seem absurd to thinking people, some Christians are working to restore the mystical traditions to their former place of respectability. Even though I ducked out of that struggle to take up the Buddhist path instead, I heartily wish them well.

My point here is that secularists like Mr. Seidman should not prejudge the religious and assume we’re all enslaved by ancient superstitions or even believe in God. Clearly, Mr. Seidman has a narrow and limited understanding of what religion is.

Thomas Jefferson said “it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” Likewise, Mr. Seidman need not concern himself with the religious views of others who aren’t concerning themselves with the secularist views of Mr. Seidman. Instead of worrying that the Christian Left will contaminate democracy, I recommend that he, like Jefferson, swear “eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” That’s the enemy of us all, religious or not.