You know, I’m as big a fan of blog triumphalism as anyone, and as much a believer as the next guy that blogging has unleashed this vast array of heretofore unknown talent which will save the world or something like it.
And then I read something like this analysis (here’s a Word download, for you non-Atlantic subscribers – and you ought to subscribe, you know!) of the current state of the Democratic Party by Marc Cooper in the Atlantic and realize there’s a reason why he writes about politics as his day job and I do it as a hobby.
America, now more than ever, needs a vibrant, viable, progressive alternative. The challenge to liberals, then, isn’t to reify their differences with a mythical red America and its strict daddies but, rather, to find common ground. Perhaps they ought to start by taking their own sermons about diversity a good deal more seriously. Diversity should be much, much more than a code word for racial affirmative action. It also entails, as Potter and Heath argue, “[making] peace with mass society” and learning to live with what the philosopher John Rawls called “the fact of pluralism.” Modern America is large and, yes, diverse enough that it’s absolute folly to think some sort of progressive or nurturant world view can—or should—become majoritarian. Who would want that sort of conformity in any case? “We need to learn to live with disagreement—not just superficial disagreement, but deep disagreement, about the things that matter most to us,” Heath and Potter conclude.
The trick of effective politics—as opposed to thinly disguised self-affirming psychotherapy and aesthetically gratifying rebel poses—is precisely to unite people with different views, values, and families around programs, candidates, and campaigns on which they can reach some consensus, however minimal. Before liberals and progressives dash out with their new vocabulary to try to convince others of the righteousness of their values, they might consider spending some time listening to others instead.
I’d started a review of Lakoff’s thin little self-affirmation, and put it aside as the only responses I could muster were so negative that they were embarrassing.
Cooper has thicker skin:
Much more than an offering of serious political strategy, Don’t Think of an Elephant! is a feel-good self-help book for a stratum of despairing liberals who just can’t believe how their commonsense message has been misunderstood by the eternally deceived masses. Liberal values are American values, they say, but somehow Americans just keep getting tricked—by Fox News, Sinclair Broadcasting, AM talk radio, conservative think tanks—into thinking and voting against their own interests.
Go read the whole thing.
I still say liberalism, “progressivism”–or whatever you want to call it–is doomed as long as there are a significant number of voters who remember the economic, social, cultural, and foreign policy disasters liberalism had wrought by 1979. Just as conservatism was doomed as long as the depression was an open wound. Liberals can re-label themselves as “progressives,” create a wonderful narrative, create a liberal media juggernaut to counter Fox, Talk Radio, etc. They can attempt to connect with the “common man” all they like. Liberalism will remain doomed unless and until conservatism creates a disaster on the order of 1929 or 1979. It certainly could happen, but I doubt it will happen soon.
Marc Cooper has been on this tear for a while (he was linked prominently in “Activism’s Onanist Fantasy Ideology”:http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/006186.php for instance). As a conservative, I wish he would stop because he’s getting in the way of our plans for a long term majority. Fortunately, I can go to sleep at night knowing that he probably won’t be listened to. Anyway… I thought you missed the money quote that followed his description of the Democrats’ despair:
bq.. “So what’s an earnest, honest liberal to do when nobody wants to hear the truth? Why not turn to personal therapy disguised as politics, psychobabble as electoral strategy? Lakoff, revealingly, provides nary a word on reshaping the Democratic Party itself, blunting the influence of corporate cash, eliminating the stranglehold on the party and its candidates by discredited but omni-powerful consultants, reversing its estrangement from the white working class, finding some decent candidates, or just about anything else that might require actual strategic thinking, organizing, and politicking. Never mind. What liberals most need to do, Lakoff says, is “be the change you want.”
This is not to disparage as self-indulgent, latte-sipping navel-gazers and whiners the 48 percent of the electorate that voted Democratic. But Limbaugh-driven stereotypes aside, the Democratic liberal and activist crust does indeed seem ever more in denial about the depth of its defeat, about its detachment from what it claims as its “traditional base,” and about its apparent willingness to pursue little more than a self-referential, self-indulgent political aesthetic. It’s much easier nowadays to fancy yourself a member of a persecuted minority, bravely shielding the flickering flame of enlightenment from the increasing Christo-Republican darkness, than it is to figure out how you’re actually going to win an election or, God forbid, organize a union.”
p. I’ll add that this would be an opportune time to remind people about Armed Liberl’s “sewer socialism”:http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/005510.php article a while back.