You're right, religious arguments are phoney; however, one can still appeal to biblical philosophy. There are many values in the New Testament that speak well to a progressive political philosophy. I wouldn't argue for a secular agenda based upon Jesus' teachiings, but I don't see any problem with pointing out that the two not only aren't incompatible, but might even parallel. After all, Jesus was all about Social Security.
We've been pandering to the right's conception of what Middle America is like for too long now. I thought that the "heartland values" were self reliance, "don't tread on me," independence and equality. But then these so called "conservative" voters voted in a guy who just announced that, under his federal government, the State Constitutional Amendments that have just been passed banning gay marriage aren't good enough. Not only does he want the states to have the right to ban it, but he wants no states to have the right to allow it.
I think it's about time to stop being such dicks about pandering to the right, and start sticking up for America. If we lose, well, so be it, but then all it will prove is that America really is a country full of dicks.
I'm no fan of a bigger government, but maybe we'd be better off if we had a license to act politically rather like driving licenses. Along with learning to use one's turn signal and parallel parking, one could learn that politics involves working with, persuading and occasionally even defeating social constituencies and interests unlike one's own.
I prefer to wait for defiant proclaimations that it is better to die standing than live on one's knees for the actual moment at which I am found kneeling with a gun to my head. There's no hurry to get there, except for people who have an overly indulgent sense of the dramatic.
In the meantime, the actual work of politics calls. If one loses, then figure out a way to win. If one loses because one insists that every single part of one's political agenda must be enacted exactly as envisioned or none of it enacted at all, then one has no agenda in the first place. Remember the Twilight Zone episode where Burgess Meredith is the last man on earth, and is happy because of it until his glasses break? That's the kind of political vision that insists on all or nothing at all.
If one loses because one insists that every single part of one's political agenda must be enacted exactly as envisioned or none of it enacted at all
Timothy, I'll bet if you kick that strawman in the nuts just once more, he'll go down for good. Probably half of the Democratic coalition is closer on the issues to the Green Party than they are to the Democratic platform. Do you think Kucinich really only represents the beliefs of 1% of the Democratic Party? Of course not. Was Clinton in the center or the right of the national party? Nobody, but nobody, has compromised more on their agenda than what passes for a left in this country.
I don't see Democrats anywhere refusing to compromise on their agenda. What I am seeing is some backbone that, dammit, we have to stand for something besides a marketing campaign designed to eke out 50% plus 1.
Got a bulk deal on black-and-white paint, TB? We're all just trying to figure out where to draw the line. You agree that there should be a line drawn, I hope? I agree that there's actual politics to be done, but there's also the bigger work of dismantling the institutionalized bigotry that makes that political work nasty and nation-rending. You're an academic historian -- which kind of work will you be engaging in over the coming years?
Second-guessing people who are already dead and can't fight back, of course.
In fact, like many historians, I'm generally pretty pessimistic about what it is actually possible to accomplish through short-term politics, and generally believing that many long-term issues get resolved only at levels of social conflict and negotiation that lie deeper and more subtly in the foundations of everyday life than elections and parties and government policies. So maybe I should get my panties tied in such a twist anyway.
But basically, I'm saying that when you come up against a rock wall, it doesn't do much good to tell it is wrong and bad and damn it, we're going to find a way to push it back a couple of inches. It doesn't matter how much the Democrats have already compromised--they're going to have to give something else up.
The problem is that "compromise" is the wrong way to think about it. It's too piecemeal, and everyone's right to say that's just a slower trip to defeat. What I'm saying is that the Democratic coalition is going to have to take some huge, honking part of their conventional poltical project and give it up in a way that is deliberately designed to sway some signficant social constituency to break with the Republicans. Not as a small policy compromise, but as a major, consistent, deep transformation of political conviction.
One example that lots of people are now talking about is federalism. Maybe we should seriously consider allowing states to decide on things like aborition rights--we'd still have the rights that we believe in in the blue states. Yes, that means tossing poor women in central Alabama to the figurative wolves. That's where I think we're at right now: deciding who gets hucked out of the lifeboat. I'd rather preserve the right to choose in some places than lose it everywhere, and I'd rather preserve it in a way that was philosophically coherent and likely to sway some critical social constituencies to rethink their own political loyalty to the Republicans. I'd rather come to some kind of stable consensus than be locked into an endless war of political attritition with the religious right.
That's what I hear when I hear all the macho-bullshit stuff about how we really got to fight back now, and not give any more and never surrender, never give in. Whatcha gonna do, heroes? What does all that stuff really mean? You going to show up with protest signs in small-town churches in Mississippi? You going to promise to call talk radio more often? I'm just not clear on what it means to fight back more strongly when the very best-case scenario means, "We'll win the Presidency back and stuff the 25% of the voting population that believes in cultural conservativism back in their box". They'll still be there, guys, even if we actually win an election or two. If you can't figure out a strategy that either permanently marginalizes them from the national consensus or that makes a stable truce with them, then what's the point? Then it really does amount to just empty defiance.
Well, I think the issue that could be heaved overboard with the least opposition on our side to the greatest potential gain would be gun control. And I say that because it's an issue that I personally don't give a rat's ass about on either side, so maybe I'm just fooling myself.
shrug.
Whatcha gonna do, heroes?
My pet strategy would be reverse their strategy: make an all-out push to label the GOP as the party of Pat Robertson, Hal Lindsey, and Lou Sheldon. Force the McCains and Lugars and GOP-voting libertarians to defend their bedfellows at every opportunity. Framing, framing, framing. Pull out the articles advocating banning birth control and executing obstetricians and jailing homosexuals.
That's the strategy they have used to bludgeon the Democrats for four decades now. How many times during this campaign did you hear Michael Moore invoked - a guy who isn't even a registered Democrat?
1) What makes you think greater federalism in the Democratic platform will help the Dems gain votes? GWB has chunked federalism, and it hasn't hurt him.
2)The abortion issue - how could that be up to states? If it's murder, then it's murder. Unless I am deeply mistaken, this would be an impossible legal problem.
3) If the Democrats become Alternative Republicans, why should a) Liberals vote for them anymore and b) Real Republicans choose the imitation brand? Do you really think there are many voters out there whose single-issue is increased federalism, and who won't think that Democrats will increase big government in other ways?
4) I don't like caching out fighting-back goals in political terms. The best-case scenerio for fighting back is that in 4 years the vast majority of voters go to the polls with an adequate knowledge of the two candidates' and parties' positions. That plainly didn't happen this year with respect to Republican voters; it was the reverse, actually, according to certain polls.
5) Do you not admit a possibility that a truly-liberal agenda, properly conveyed, could find popular support? It certainly has before. I hate to say it, but it's really all in the marketing. Anyway, this muddly, we're-like-centrist-republicans party platform isn't working.
Best I can tell, mentioning it at all. But then I live here in NC where everybody in both parties pledges allegiance to the 2nd Amendment (and you're in Louisiana, right?), so I think it's largely a perception of the national party.
One of the people I (sort of) live with said to me before the election that she like Kerry, her only qualm was that he wanted to ban guns. This was something her dad had told her. So, I think you're right, the whole gun issue as far I can tell is a myth started and perpetuated solely by the right. Whatever gun control laws democratic politicians actually do purpose, ones I've heard at least, are moderate and generally popular. (ex. gun locks, assault weapons ban, waiting period)
2)The abortion issue - how could that be up to states? If it's murder, then it's murder. Unless I am deeply mistaken, this would be an impossible legal problem.
Not necessarily. The issue would be whether or not Roe v. Wade had overreached in declaring that categorical bans on abortion were unconstitutional. If it were overturned, it would most likely along the lines of, "Yes, Roe v. Wade overreached by straying too far or inferring too much from the text [ie, the constitution]." This would then open the way for states to ban abortion or not, as their legislatures saw fit.
Re: Roe v. Wade. The problem with the federalist solution (which I might otherwise be inclined to support, because I'm sick of losing elections over this [I'm thinking of Catholics who voted for Bush because of abortion even though they said, when polled, that they agreed with Kerry on a whole range of other issues]) is this: Roe v. Wade is currently the law all across the land and it bans all states from enacting categorical bans. The only way to change this is to overturn Roe v. Wade. And the only kind of judge who's going to overturn Roe v. Wade is almost certainly going to be a judge who's going to rule in scary ways on all kinds of other areas (privacy, civil rights, race discrimination), which would also, in many cases, apply all across the land. There's no way of saying, Hey, we've changed our minds and would not like to give up Roe v. Wade and reach a state's-rights compromise. What was wrought through the courts must be unwrought through the courts (or not unwrought).
Just for the record, Steve Gilliard did not write the quoted passage - the entire posting is by mg_65. Steve inserted another couple of sentences at the beginning to try and clarify this.
You're right, religious arguments are phoney; however, one can still appeal to biblical philosophy. There are many values in the New Testament that speak well to a progressive political philosophy. I wouldn't argue for a secular agenda based upon Jesus' teachiings, but I don't see any problem with pointing out that the two not only aren't incompatible, but might even parallel. After all, Jesus was all about Social Security.
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 11- 8-04 3:16 PM
W has the potential to be remembered as one of our greatest Presidents.
Glenn Reynolds
http://techcentralstation.com/110504C.html
VDH
http://victorhanson.com/articles/hanson110704B.html
Watermelon groupthink is well educated but too 'groupthink-iferous'.....
Posted by abc123 | Link to this comment | 11- 8-04 3:57 PM
It's not even a paragraph out of Leviticus, unless two sentences constitutes a paragraph.
We all know that David and Jonathan were getting it on, though.
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 11- 8-04 5:25 PM
Shorter translation:
Let's lose the next Presidential election, too! And keep losing Congress forever.
Posted by Timothy Burke | Link to this comment | 11- 8-04 6:04 PM
Whatever, Timothy; if we lose we lose.
We've been pandering to the right's conception of what Middle America is like for too long now. I thought that the "heartland values" were self reliance, "don't tread on me," independence and equality. But then these so called "conservative" voters voted in a guy who just announced that, under his federal government, the State Constitutional Amendments that have just been passed banning gay marriage aren't good enough. Not only does he want the states to have the right to ban it, but he wants no states to have the right to allow it.
I think it's about time to stop being such dicks about pandering to the right, and start sticking up for America. If we lose, well, so be it, but then all it will prove is that America really is a country full of dicks.
Posted by McDuff | Link to this comment | 11- 9-04 7:11 AM
I'm no fan of a bigger government, but maybe we'd be better off if we had a license to act politically rather like driving licenses. Along with learning to use one's turn signal and parallel parking, one could learn that politics involves working with, persuading and occasionally even defeating social constituencies and interests unlike one's own.
I prefer to wait for defiant proclaimations that it is better to die standing than live on one's knees for the actual moment at which I am found kneeling with a gun to my head. There's no hurry to get there, except for people who have an overly indulgent sense of the dramatic.
In the meantime, the actual work of politics calls. If one loses, then figure out a way to win. If one loses because one insists that every single part of one's political agenda must be enacted exactly as envisioned or none of it enacted at all, then one has no agenda in the first place. Remember the Twilight Zone episode where Burgess Meredith is the last man on earth, and is happy because of it until his glasses break? That's the kind of political vision that insists on all or nothing at all.
Posted by Timothy Burke | Link to this comment | 11- 9-04 7:31 AM
If one loses because one insists that every single part of one's political agenda must be enacted exactly as envisioned or none of it enacted at all
Timothy, I'll bet if you kick that strawman in the nuts just once more, he'll go down for good. Probably half of the Democratic coalition is closer on the issues to the Green Party than they are to the Democratic platform. Do you think Kucinich really only represents the beliefs of 1% of the Democratic Party? Of course not. Was Clinton in the center or the right of the national party? Nobody, but nobody, has compromised more on their agenda than what passes for a left in this country.
I don't see Democrats anywhere refusing to compromise on their agenda. What I am seeing is some backbone that, dammit, we have to stand for something besides a marketing campaign designed to eke out 50% plus 1.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 11- 9-04 7:48 AM
Got a bulk deal on black-and-white paint, TB? We're all just trying to figure out where to draw the line. You agree that there should be a line drawn, I hope? I agree that there's actual politics to be done, but there's also the bigger work of dismantling the institutionalized bigotry that makes that political work nasty and nation-rending. You're an academic historian -- which kind of work will you be engaging in over the coming years?
Posted by Bob | Link to this comment | 11- 9-04 7:53 AM
Second-guessing people who are already dead and can't fight back, of course.
In fact, like many historians, I'm generally pretty pessimistic about what it is actually possible to accomplish through short-term politics, and generally believing that many long-term issues get resolved only at levels of social conflict and negotiation that lie deeper and more subtly in the foundations of everyday life than elections and parties and government policies. So maybe I should get my panties tied in such a twist anyway.
But basically, I'm saying that when you come up against a rock wall, it doesn't do much good to tell it is wrong and bad and damn it, we're going to find a way to push it back a couple of inches. It doesn't matter how much the Democrats have already compromised--they're going to have to give something else up.
The problem is that "compromise" is the wrong way to think about it. It's too piecemeal, and everyone's right to say that's just a slower trip to defeat. What I'm saying is that the Democratic coalition is going to have to take some huge, honking part of their conventional poltical project and give it up in a way that is deliberately designed to sway some signficant social constituency to break with the Republicans. Not as a small policy compromise, but as a major, consistent, deep transformation of political conviction.
One example that lots of people are now talking about is federalism. Maybe we should seriously consider allowing states to decide on things like aborition rights--we'd still have the rights that we believe in in the blue states. Yes, that means tossing poor women in central Alabama to the figurative wolves. That's where I think we're at right now: deciding who gets hucked out of the lifeboat. I'd rather preserve the right to choose in some places than lose it everywhere, and I'd rather preserve it in a way that was philosophically coherent and likely to sway some critical social constituencies to rethink their own political loyalty to the Republicans. I'd rather come to some kind of stable consensus than be locked into an endless war of political attritition with the religious right.
That's what I hear when I hear all the macho-bullshit stuff about how we really got to fight back now, and not give any more and never surrender, never give in. Whatcha gonna do, heroes? What does all that stuff really mean? You going to show up with protest signs in small-town churches in Mississippi? You going to promise to call talk radio more often? I'm just not clear on what it means to fight back more strongly when the very best-case scenario means, "We'll win the Presidency back and stuff the 25% of the voting population that believes in cultural conservativism back in their box". They'll still be there, guys, even if we actually win an election or two. If you can't figure out a strategy that either permanently marginalizes them from the national consensus or that makes a stable truce with them, then what's the point? Then it really does amount to just empty defiance.
Posted by Timothy Burke | Link to this comment | 11- 9-04 1:20 PM
Well, I think the issue that could be heaved overboard with the least opposition on our side to the greatest potential gain would be gun control. And I say that because it's an issue that I personally don't give a rat's ass about on either side, so maybe I'm just fooling myself.
shrug.
Whatcha gonna do, heroes?
My pet strategy would be reverse their strategy: make an all-out push to label the GOP as the party of Pat Robertson, Hal Lindsey, and Lou Sheldon. Force the McCains and Lugars and GOP-voting libertarians to defend their bedfellows at every opportunity. Framing, framing, framing. Pull out the articles advocating banning birth control and executing obstetricians and jailing homosexuals.
That's the strategy they have used to bludgeon the Democrats for four decades now. How many times during this campaign did you hear Michael Moore invoked - a guy who isn't even a registered Democrat?
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 11- 9-04 1:48 PM
1) What makes you think greater federalism in the Democratic platform will help the Dems gain votes? GWB has chunked federalism, and it hasn't hurt him.
2)The abortion issue - how could that be up to states? If it's murder, then it's murder. Unless I am deeply mistaken, this would be an impossible legal problem.
3) If the Democrats become Alternative Republicans, why should a) Liberals vote for them anymore and b) Real Republicans choose the imitation brand? Do you really think there are many voters out there whose single-issue is increased federalism, and who won't think that Democrats will increase big government in other ways?
4) I don't like caching out fighting-back goals in political terms. The best-case scenerio for fighting back is that in 4 years the vast majority of voters go to the polls with an adequate knowledge of the two candidates' and parties' positions. That plainly didn't happen this year with respect to Republican voters; it was the reverse, actually, according to certain polls.
5) Do you not admit a possibility that a truly-liberal agenda, properly conveyed, could find popular support? It certainly has before. I hate to say it, but it's really all in the marketing. Anyway, this muddly, we're-like-centrist-republicans party platform isn't working.
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 11- 9-04 1:48 PM
Forgive my ignorance, but what is the liberal gun-control position that conservatives find abhorrent?
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 11- 9-04 1:50 PM
Best I can tell, mentioning it at all. But then I live here in NC where everybody in both parties pledges allegiance to the 2nd Amendment (and you're in Louisiana, right?), so I think it's largely a perception of the national party.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 11- 9-04 1:58 PM
Yes, I live in the land of red beans 'n rice.
One of the people I (sort of) live with said to me before the election that she like Kerry, her only qualm was that he wanted to ban guns. This was something her dad had told her. So, I think you're right, the whole gun issue as far I can tell is a myth started and perpetuated solely by the right. Whatever gun control laws democratic politicians actually do purpose, ones I've heard at least, are moderate and generally popular. (ex. gun locks, assault weapons ban, waiting period)
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 11- 9-04 2:09 PM
2)The abortion issue - how could that be up to states? If it's murder, then it's murder. Unless I am deeply mistaken, this would be an impossible legal problem.
Not necessarily. The issue would be whether or not Roe v. Wade had overreached in declaring that categorical bans on abortion were unconstitutional. If it were overturned, it would most likely along the lines of, "Yes, Roe v. Wade overreached by straying too far or inferring too much from the text [ie, the constitution]." This would then open the way for states to ban abortion or not, as their legislatures saw fit.
Posted by mcm | Link to this comment | 11- 9-04 2:52 PM
Re: Roe v. Wade. The problem with the federalist solution (which I might otherwise be inclined to support, because I'm sick of losing elections over this [I'm thinking of Catholics who voted for Bush because of abortion even though they said, when polled, that they agreed with Kerry on a whole range of other issues]) is this: Roe v. Wade is currently the law all across the land and it bans all states from enacting categorical bans. The only way to change this is to overturn Roe v. Wade. And the only kind of judge who's going to overturn Roe v. Wade is almost certainly going to be a judge who's going to rule in scary ways on all kinds of other areas (privacy, civil rights, race discrimination), which would also, in many cases, apply all across the land. There's no way of saying, Hey, we've changed our minds and would not like to give up Roe v. Wade and reach a state's-rights compromise. What was wrought through the courts must be unwrought through the courts (or not unwrought).
Posted by mcm | Link to this comment | 11- 9-04 3:14 PM
Just for the record, Steve Gilliard did not write the quoted passage - the entire posting is by mg_65. Steve inserted another couple of sentences at the beginning to try and clarify this.
Posted by Theo | Link to this comment | 11- 9-04 8:18 PM