Judith, over at Kesher Talk points out something we political-theory types have missed that’s so ‘smack me in the head obvious’ that I’m almost embarrassed to link to it.
She points out that people may … wait for it … choose their political positions in some part because of who they like to hang out with.

In fact, many people – especially young adults – derive their political views from the social group wherein they feel the most comfortable. They want to feel part of a larger community, and the jargon, in-group jokes, soundbites, clothing styles, music tastes, et al, that identify this community assume a common underlying world view. They then adopt the politics that allow them to have companionship while enjoying their tastes, even though in most cases one is not dependent on the other.

Well, guilty as charged.

I was depressed for weeks after I learned about collaborative filtering, and proved its effectiveness to myself (note that the engines on Amazon are pretty poor, but the ones on NetFlix are pretty good). The notion that my tastes might be somehow formed in some part by my socialization and that other people’s behavior was a pretty good predictor of mine put paid to all my Howard Roarke fantasies. That and the fact that whenever I need clothes, I could pretty much go into one of three stores and they’d always have something I liked.

So the fifteen people who shop at The Gap, Bernini, and REI all have something in common with me…I wonder how our politics match up?

Roger Simon has a pretty bloody-minded (in the British sense) reply to my earlier question “Why Are You a Democrat?” His reply:

I don’t know. And more amazingly, I don’t care. In fact, I haven’t even thought about it much at all since 9/11. Party politics, as I have experienced them all my life, just don’t seem relevant to me now.

He goes on:

I admit it’s ironic when what we have before us is what appears to be the beginning of an epic struggle between religious fundamentalism and secular democracy and, as a militant democrat (small d), I can’t begin to concentrate on the internal affairs of my own political party. But I think there’s a reason for that: this same conflagration … this giant philosophical debate that engulfs our planet … is creating new alliances none of us had anticipated.

Now, I’ll agree to that…after all, while I think that before 9/11 I’d have enjoyed a drink and a chat with Joe, Trent, Celeste and the crew here, I doubt that I would have chosen to stand (or better, sit) and write with them.

But we’re together because we see the conflict in which we are now engaged, and have been for some years – without realizing it – as the central event of our era.

But while Roger (and Trent, and to an extent Joe) see it primarily as “an epic struggle between religious fundamentalism and secular democracy,” I see it in a somewhat more complicated way. So bear with me while I try and explain.
I’ll admit that the Islamist soldiers that we face – and let’s not call them anything but that – are the broadest part of the spearpoint. But the reality is that even the most militant forms of Islam don’t present a credible military threat to the West. If we have to fight them, we can and we will, and we will win.

The Islamist enemy – and since they call themselves my enemy, I will do them the courtesy of recognizing them as one – has roots both specific to the cultural and material history of the Muslim world, and generally applicable to almost every culture, including our own.

Those roots are in large part philosophical; they go to the question of how people have come to believe and understand the world around them.

I’ve talked about them at length, and have been thinking and reading primarily about these issues for a year now (Good Grief!! It’s been over a year!! It’s my blogoversary, and I want some damn cake…). Nothing has come close to changing my mind. This is not a question of the Muslim world vs. the West, although the current phase of the conflict involves combatants from the Muslim world.

This is a war of philosophies; of an alienated, frustrated, band of would-be warriors who are frustrated by what modernity means to them and mean to respond by pulling down the pillars of the temple.

They are in Europe, and here in the U.S.

Celeste wrote about one group, environmental terrorists slowly escalating their level of violence; she could just as easily have written about the right-wing anti-abortion forces who have already murdered in the name of their cause. Tim McVeigh may or may not have been connected to Islamist terrorists as some claim; the fact remains that this child of “fly-over country” either led or participated in the second-largest terrorist action ever in the U.S.

Richard Reid became a terrorist in the U. K., not in the West Bank. Ted Kaczynski became one in Montana.

And while jailing or killing active terrorists is and must be the immediate goal, the ultimate goal must be to stop growing them before the disease – “mad human disease” – infects our own communities.

And to do that we need something that each party has to offer. We need tradition and license, regulations and freedom, a safety net and responsibility. We need a dialog – not always a friendly, neighborly chat, but a sometimes muscular disagreement with raised voices – on any number of issues domestic and foreign.

We’re trapped between venal corporations, bloated government bureaucracies, corrupt politicians, and radicals who, frustrated with their own lives, are perfectly willing to take yours.

We have problems local and global far beyond our resources to easily solve them.

So we’re going to muddle, as humans always have.

So why am I a Democrat? Because I don’t believe the GOP can solve these problems by itself.

Just back from Lileks-ville (TG’s stepson’s wedding in St. Paul, Minnesota); no wi-fi at the Starbucks (and a schedule too full of celebration to spend time in front of the laptop). Interesting people there; different from the folks in Ellay. There’s a blog post in it somewhere.

I’ve been browsing the blogs as I try and take my “Why Are You a Democrat” post and extend it to respond to some of the smarter replies.

And as I went over to Michael J. Totten’s site, and found a GREAT photo essay on modernism which absolutely takes my comments on ‘incompleteness‘ and scale and puts them out in a way that can be easily seen.

You’ve gotta check it out.

Speaking of Democratic reinvention, check out “Democrats For National Security,” a group started by Timothy Bergreen; it’s well worth clicking through the entire Powerpoint Presentation.

Sign me up…check out this slide:

Mission One

Rebuild the consensus in the Democratic Party in favor of a strong national security … reclaim the mantle of Roosevelt, Truman and, Kennedy

Make party aware of the danger and costs we as a party face if we do nothing.
Credibility as a Commander-in-Chief a threshold issue for 2004 Presidential nominee
1992 was an aberration; end of Cold War took issue away for GOP
Broader Democratic agenda advanced when we are in control of Executive Branch
Progressive agenda suffers when we ignore these issues
Craft a coherent message that the Democratic Party and individual candidates can sell to the American public.

Well, duuuuh…

I’ve been thinking a lot about the forthcoming election, which I think will go badly for the Democrats. Given that we’ll be looking at a rebuilding season, I thought I’d outline some of what I’ll be looking for as a consumer of liberal policies, as well as links to the related stuff I’ve written about these things in the recent past.

Looking through them, a few points keep coming up.

The future ought to be better than the past; there’s a reason why we’re the ‘progressive’ party. There are major changes coming in the world, as technology and transportation cause economies and cultures to intermingle, and provide unprecedented opportunity to those who have had none. We ought to be finding ways to manage the impacts of it, and help steer it toward a desirable (rather than “Snow Crash” like) future state. But we need to embrace the future, not recoil from it.
Just because the cultures are intermingling doesn’t mean we shouldn’t value and cherish ours. We’re noth the source of evil in the world, Noam Chomsky and Chris Hedges notwithstanding.

Given that what differentiates our side (Democrats) from the other side (GOP) ought to be the attention we pay to the welfare of the bottom 20% in wealth, income, and power, (we both ought to be concerned with the general welfare of society) perhaps we could lose the obnoxious elitism??

Practically, I suggest a few policy directions here, here, here and here, but in general I’ll suggest three guiding principles:

1) Scale matters. Rather than One Big Solution to problems, let’s work on policies that promote small, organically growing policies that directly impact the people targeted and put down roots. Not Le Corbusier, crabgrass.

2) Hypocrisy shows. When your welfare policy is set at AFSCME conferences or at private homes in the Malibu Colony, and your corporate governance policies are set by trial lawyers, it’s hard to get taken seriously. If you have investors (what I call the current class of political donors) make damn sure that your policies don’t tilt stupidly in their favor.(Hollywood, Democrats, DMCA)

3) Get out of the fishbowl. The political and media elites of this country live lives that are pretty well disconnected from those of their consumers. Find a way to break out. Bob Graham found one way; find others.

Most of all, don’t spend time focus-grouping clusters of policies; figure out something we can believe in – an attractive, articulate vision of what America and the world ought to be and a set of policies that offer a reasonable change of moving us toward that vision.

When Detroit builds good cars, people buy them. All the focus-group testing, marketing budgets, and binders full of sales spiffs won’t move them if they are just crappy cars.

So if you want my advice; it’s simple. Build good policies. Be trustworthy. Figure out why you’re a Democrat and make it stick.

I’m a Democrat because I believe that government policies ought to tilted in favor of my assistant – the single mom making $22,000 a year in Los Angeles – rather me, or than the investor whose portfolio only grew 2% last year (and yes, spare me, I know that our well-being is all connected. But how about some trickle-up policies for a change?).

Why are you a Democrat?

UPDATE: Roger Simon has some thoughts on that question.

Bear Attacks Sub

During the ICEX 2003 naval exercises near the North Pole, the American submarine Connecticut (SSN 22) poked it’s sail and rudder through the ice. When an officer looked around outside via the periscope, he noted that his sub was being stalked by a hostile polar bear. The periscope cam was turned on, and these photos of a polar bear chewing on the subs rear rudder resulted. The damage was said to be minor. The SSN 22 is a Seawolf class boat, one of the navy’s newest submarines. It wasn’t designed as a polar bear snack, but that’s how life is sometimes.

(From Dave’s Daily; click over for a photo)

In commemoration of the 55th anniversary of Nakba, a Palestinian memorial marked on May 15, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat on Thursday stated that Palestine “is our country, to which every Palestinian refugee has the right to return.”

Palestinians who lost their homes or their lives in conflict following the creation of an Israeli state in 1948 are those remembered in Nakba, the Arabic word for cataclysm or catastrophe.

“In this day of mourning, the Israeli state was founded as a result of a colonial conspiracy and was established on Palestinian lands whose residents were expelled and massacred,” said Arafat.

In a speech broadcasted by the Palestinian Authority-run local channel, Arafat said that he will not “accept humiliation and Israeli colonialism and the Israeli aggression carried out against Palestinians and their holy sites.” Israel must withdraw from all the lands it occupied in the 1967 Six-Day War and Palestinian refugees must be allowed to return to their homes, he insisted.

From UPI.

Well, no one said peace would be easy. Or, as long as this fossil is around, possible.

Joe didn’t much care for (understatement alert!) my post setting out an attachment to equality or acceptance of hierarchy as one axis in the division I’m trying to make between ideologies.

I’m not backing down. Let me try and expand on and strengthen what I said in two areas.

First as to Joe’s comment:“The LAST thing communism is, is equal. Not even in misery. Party cadres are always a cut above – essentially, all it does is substitute political power for currency. Failure to understand this is an essential failure to understand Communism in any of its forms.”

Let’s make one thing clear. What’s being discussed are ideals; they are the ideals that are set at the head of the table by a variety of actors, and a variety of groups of actors, each of whom acts in very complex ways.
I’m rereading Walter Russell Mead, in anticipation of having it out, Matrix-style, with David Adelsik, and one of the most powerful things in the book is his recognition that American foreign policy is inevitably something that emerges from a complex and dynamic system of beliefs and interests and hence is something that can’t be fit neatly into a mental container. That acceptance of complexity in his book is contrasted with his effort to pick apart some of the beliefs and perceptions of interest, and set them out in an articulatable way.

Similarly, I’m trying to talk about complex systems of political action and belief, and reduce them, in an effort to come up with some of the ‘articulatable’ subsystems. So yes, I completely understand that Soviet Russia was in fact as hierarchical as the court in Versailles. But the belief system that held that hierarchy together – aside from a private and naked ambition on the part of the participants – was one that idealized the ultimate Worker’s Paradise.

The interesting thing to me right now is the split…the Matrix-like division between the apparent and the real…in these ideologies. And to understand that, we start by understanding the ideal, because that fantasy, that collective dream, is a big part of what ties people to these ideologies and makes them powerful.

Second, Joe says: “You can’t dispense with the question “what kind of equality” when that IS a key question behind your matrix.” No, Joe, it’s not.

The question becomes the relative importance of the “equality of outcome”/”equality of treatment” distinction and the “for equality”/”natural hierarchy” distinction.

I throw my hands up and surrender to the point that there is a real and deep distinction between the two forms of equality (of outcome and of treatment), and that this is itself a significant and fruitful area for exploration.

But I’ll also suggest that there is also an even more significant distinction between a society that holds equality – any kind of equality – as a foundational belief, and one that does not. I used Dickens’ England as an example of a class-driven society; one in which the accepted reality of inequality – in every form, political, legal, economic, and moral – is itself one of the organizing principles of the society. I could have used Elizabeth’s England, or the Persia of Cyrus, but there are more people that know Dickens – and the point is more clearly made by a society closer to us – than either of those.

Those are fundamentally different kinds of societies than those that hold equality as a value, regardless of what kind of equality is being discussed, and that difference ought to be obvious. If it isn’t, imagine for a moment a Persian artisan making an appeal to Cyrus or Darius based on their common humanity, and on some body of common rights. Having trouble?? No kidding…

The notion that people are equal in any way, and that societies should be organized on that principle was a revolutionary one, and one that we sadly take for granted. We shouldn’t.

I talked about “openness and incompleteness” as one axis of my 2 x 2 political Matrix (I have tickets for 10:00 pm Thursday, btw, with TG and the oldest boys…). The other is Equality.

Equality is one of those words whose meanings change depending on your perspective; the two definitions seem to be “equality of treatment” and “equality of outcome”. I’ll be abstract from this and suggest that while this distinction is damn important, the more important one is between “equality matters” and “no it doesn’t, I rule”.

Most societies have as their organizing principle the question of the distribution of power. Even the most repressive medieval societies were ruled by kings (and queens) who were caught in a delicate web of obligations … both upward and downward … and who usually prevailed or fell in no small part based on how well they managed them.

In modern political thought, we have one pole which suggests that equality is good (in one form or the other), and another pole which suggests it is bad, whether because of Divine Right in some form or another or because of the Invisible Hand and humanity’s inherent variations.

If you take this matrix, you get four quadrants:

Let’s go through them.

Closed/Unequal. The Nazi ideal. ‘Baathist Iraq would be a good example. A rigidly controlled society in which a strict hierarchy is not only an incidental part of maintaining control, but is a part of the value system of the society.

Closed/Equal. The Socialist ideal. Soviet Russia, in the imaginations of its supporters. In reality, Pol Pot’s Cambodia probably would stand as a good (that can’t be the right word in this context) example.

Open/Unequal. The Libertarian ideal. Much of Dickens’ (Victorian) England would be the best historical example I can quickly think of.

Open/Equal. The American ideal. America doesn’t perfectly embody it, but certainly holds it up and makes an effort to do so.

This maps to but doesn’t quite mirror Pournelle’s 2 x 2 matrix, which Trent Telenko pointed out to me in the comments to “The Fantasy Ideology of the GOP”.

I’ll try and extend this a bit and explain the differences and why I like mine better…

Rhetorically, what I’d like to say is that “While the GOP sells a past that never was, the Democrats sell a future that will never be.” But that’s not the case.

The Democrats, like the Republicans, are living in the past. They have a slight edge, in that the past they are living in – Selma in 1965 – is real. But like the aging high school baseball star, they see everything through the lens of the One Big Game, of the time years ago when they stood at the plate swung away and hit one over the fence.

I’ve come to the conclusion that the only way to explain what the Democrats are doing is that they desperately want to see everything as Selma in 1965, and they are constantly looking for a Bull Connors to stand up against. Why? As a way of establishing their courage and moral stature. Courage because they stood against the forces of ignorance and brutality – and even more important, against our own forces of ignorance and brutality. And moral stature came because they did the right thing in the face of difficult odds and prevailed.

The problem is that governing the country is not the same as marching on Selma. The necessary compromises, the inevitable comfort with the levers of power means that those who once marched from the Sierra Maestra now sit comfortably in corner offices.
And absent an organizing principle, other than Selma, keeping those corner offices becomes the critical feature. I told a story a while ago over at Armed Liberal, it’s a very small local one, but to anyone who has watched Democratic politics in the DLC era, it will sound very familiar:

In the 60’s in Berkeley, there was a movement to create a series of co-ops that would allow student-radicals to both generate jobs outside the hated-but-paying-their-rent capitalist system, and provide a living example that (for all I know) Trotskyite anarcho-syndicalism could triumph in the Belly of the Beast.

Most of these communal businesses failed mercifully quickly, as far as I know (this is all ancient history to me, so if I’m getting part of it wrong, drop a note). By the time I got there, there were two survivors … Leopold’s Records (“Boycott Tower Records, keep Berkeley Free”) and the Missing Link bicycle shop.

Leopold’s was off-campus somewhere near Telegraph, but the bicycle store was a part of the mini-shopping area that was in the ASUC building.

The student government decided that they were going to evict it to make room for a small-electronics (Walkmen, stereo, calculators, etc.) annex to the Student Store. Why??

The small-electronics store could pay as much as $50,000 more in rent every year.

Now this is an appropriately cold-hearted landlord kind of decision to make. But the people making the decision weren’t sweater wearing conservative Young Republicans, driven by their vision of the purity of the market.

They were a bunch of New Left, ethnic-identity, progressive communitarian kind of kids.

Why did they want to make this decision? Because it would mean $50K a year more for their organizing budgets; $50K more in pork they could carve up in the hopes of building their perfect communitarian future.

Now I don’t know about you, but I have a hard time imagining anything more keyed to a progressive communitarian future than a cooperatively owned bicycle store. I mean, how much better does it get? Nonprofit. Cooperatively employee owned. Bicycles, for chrissakes. If you really wanted to educate people in alternatives to the “mass consumerist repressive capitalist paradigm” (I think I got the buzzwords right), wouldn’t that be a good way to do it?

But reality couldn’t stand a chance against the cold need for this elected group to make sure that they and their friends were rewarded.

And the fantasy that allowed them to do this – that blinded them to what they were really doing, and pulled them away from what they professed to believe – was one that had them at the head of the march in Selma on Bloody Sunday, standing arm in arm with Dr. King.