It’s a great day today. I’ve watched the news with anxiety over the last few days, because as I looked at the war, I saw two possible futures arising from it; one dark and bloody, couched in the resentful glare of the Iraqis who silently watched their conquerer’s tanks roll by; and another, hopeful, future – couched in the joyful kiss of a dark-eyed child on the cheek of a helmeted Marine.
Today I saw the joy and the hope – and the kiss – on the streets of Iraq, and a weight on my heart lifted.
Hope is the vital ingredient.
John Balzar, a columnist in the L.A. Times who I find intermittently fascinating and frustrating has a great one today. He is looking at the current mood in the country, and contrasting the determined hopefulness that the conservative, pro-war group has with the equally determined despair of the liberals and those who oppose the war.
Back to politics. Here at home, conservatives are mining this vein of American optimism and prospering as a consequence.
[Update: Check out Dan Hartung’s eloquent take on this.]
Mark Kann, chairman of the political science department of USC, says this is a traditional partisan advantage at moments of international engagement: “Conservatives always have been optimistic about the status and furtherance of America compared to the rest of the world. There is a whole body of literature on what is called ‘American exceptionalism.’ The idea of a shining city on the hill.”
Romantic? Perhaps. But I believe that cynics — and I’ll include myself here — owe it to our ideas, and our hopes, to pay fresh respect to that part of the American character. Not that optimism is always the avenue to political success. But sometimes it is; and at those moments, it’s hard to convince Americans of anything except their exceptionalism.
When citizens came to doubt their future in the 1980s, Ronald Reagan appealed to the nation’s sense of optimistic renewal. It was “morning in America,” and nothing else mattered nearly so much. In the 1990s, Bill Clinton gave optimism to a citizenry knocked off balance by global economic competition and technological change. Out of uncertainty, he promised that Americans could find opportunity. George W. Bush, who has neither Reagan’s sunny disposition nor Clinton’s empathy, seems to have fashioned his own kind of hardheaded, can-do optimism out of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Today, the language of Bush and his conservatives is spoken in high notes of expectation: liberation, freedom, security, possibility. Opponents find themselves bogged in something of a rhetorical quagmire, stuck with words like mistake, immoral, imperialist, failure, fraudulent, cynical, doom.
An optimist, as the old wheeze goes, sees opportunity in calamity, while a pessimist finds calamity in opportunity. Thus far, Bush’s opponents have failed to match his optimism with much more than the gloomy promise of worse to come.
And boy, is that combination of self-loathing, negativity, and hopelessness a winning political combination for the left.
ly, I refuse to yield all the optimism to conservatives. I believe there are a number of liberals like me – who define their liberalism not by antipathy for the modern West, or more specifically for the U.S., but by a desire for more justice, more liberty, more equality, and a belief that we can have it all. I think that someone will find a way to channel our patriotism, our hope, and our energy into a political movement that can stand toe-to-toe with the conservative wave that is going to rise for the next few years in this country. Somone is going to outline a future for us, and challenge us to make it happen.
We may never get there…I certainly won’t live to see it…but we can set out on the road. And, more important, we can start down the road hoping that what we want will be at the end of it. I wrote about a Balzar column before:
He wrote:
Yet I sense a yearning among Californians. I’m not the only one who wants to believe in destiny. I don’t know a single person who is content to allow a future Kevin Starr to describe this as the era when we gave up on our dreams.
I was bicycling through Death Valley one winter, and came across a series of grave markers next to the road. Children and adults who died while attempting to cross to California and their dream of a future.
It had a huge impact on me to realize how badly people wanted a better future for themselves and their children…badly enough to walk and ride ox-drawn wagons across the country and end up out of water, of food, and still to press on and cross Death Valley.
For me it was paved roads, a 25-pound bicycle and a support van driven by my girlfriend with water, food, and the promise of an air-conditioned hotel at the end of the day.
Why is it so much harder for us to hope than it was for them?
Why is so hard for the Left to look forward with hope, rather than around with disdain? It isn’t for me, and it isn’t for many others that I know.
And I’m happy to admit that it isn’t for me because I am perfectly willing to stand with conservatives in believing in American exceptionalism.
I just think we got there for different reasons, and that we’ll build the shining future using different tools.
The footage from today was good, and heartwarming. I hope that the attitudes of the the Iraq stay friendly towards America. I have my doubts about that, but that is okay too.
The interesting part of this conflict will be seeing what happens to the shperes of political influence around the world as a result. Life is never dull…
Ron
“I refuse to yield all the optimism to conservatives.”
Now look who’s standing athwart history shouting STOP!
Armed Liberal – I’m an unarmed conservative. I think the difference between the two of us is really one of emphasis. You define your liberalism in terms of “more justice, more liberty, more equality, and a belief that we can have it all.” From this, I take it that when you think of progress you think of the duty that those of us with more stuff and more freedom owe to those of us with less stuff and less freedom. For my part, when I think of progress I think about what is likely to lead to some of us having more stuff and more freedom that we can, if we choose, share. For the liberal dream to be realized, we need wealth. For the conservative dream to be worth working for, we need to share the wealth once we get it. But are these views in opposition? I don’t think they are in any necessary way. We can have it both ways, if only because there are lots of us.
A.L., I’m really glad to hear this. I’ve been reading some liberal bloggers today, and the doom and sadness couldn’t have fit Balzar better if they (Kos, Calpundit, Atrios, Oliver, et. al.) tried. It was remarkable, in a twisted kind of way.
Until American liberals can look on the victory of their OWN country in war and the fall of a murdering tyrant with genuine, unfaked happiness, they will not only be out of power – they will be unworthy of it. The impression they left for outsiders was not of serious people warning of problems ahead – it was of people actually disappointed that their country had not failed in war, so thjey could say “I told you so.” That actually seemed to matter to them more than thousands of cheering Iraqis in downtown Baghdad. As I say, remarkable.
How we get from here to there… well, you may need some of that optimism you’re talking about.
Powerful stuff today for A.L. to see the opportunities. P.B. and J.K. are right-on. Leftists need to stop being ashamed to be Americans. A photo on 4/7 of an Iraqui youngster tearfully hugging his Iraqui freedom fighter uncle from St. Louis says it all, as far as I’m concerned. Proud to be an American!
Why aren’t liberals more hopeful?
Because their solution for all problems great and small – socialism – can only be maintained by armed force. In addition no matter how much force is applied more is always required. Read Hayek to find out why.
I used to be a liberal. I didn’t become hopeful about my liberal ideals until I joined the American Right. Capitalist economics will and has done more for the poor than redistribution ever has or ever will.
With due respect, M. Simon … bull.
All actions by governments – including the defense of property rights – are done “@gun” – ultimately at the point of a gun.
There is no divine definition that says that Disney’s rights to Mickey Mouse last for 99 as opposed to 9 years, and still the agents of the government – with guns – will come and take me away if I violate those rights.
A.L.
Isn’t that a straw man, A.L.?
“There is no divine definition that says that Disney’s rights to Mickey Mouse last for 99 as opposed to 9 years…”
No, there isn’t a divine definition. But there is a social contract, to abide by laws and if you don’t like them to try to change them in peaceful ways. If you just decide to break the laws you don’t like, people from the government might want to have a word with you. But I don’t see how that invalidates M. Simon’s point. Where people are free to follow their own muse, governments will need less coercion.
Nonetheless, I would say to M. Simon that guns are not always necessary to maintain socialism. It can also be done – as it is done in Europe and Canada – by mortgaging the future. At least, it can be done that way for some years, perhaps even a couple of generations, before the system collapses. (And, no, I don’t think there is any equivalent danger of the American free enterprise system collapsing the way the European system is going to in the foreseeable future.)
But this sidebar about socialism puzzles me. Surely there is a difference between the kind of liberalism A.L. espouses and socialism. Or have I missed something? (Very possible!)
Patrick
See my April 9 post, AL: I anticipated you.
M. Simon has been peddling his all-liberals-are-socialists Dittohead BS on LGF for a year or so already. What a truckload that is. And how demonstrative of M. Simon’s lack of knowledge of the world, and political history; I wouldn’t act as arrogant as he, if I knew so little.
Conservatives aren’t all optimists, either. Reagan gave them (among other things) an extraordinary infusion of hope and it was a great gift, reinforced by the events of 1989-91.
But recall Derbyshire. Robert “Slouching Toward Gomorrah” Bork. George Will, on the even-numbered days when the liberals are coarsening society with loose morals (as opposed to the odd-numbered days when the liberals are stuffy puritans opposed to fun). A few of the more extreme religious conservatives who view a slide into chaos as a sign of the impending End Times and reserve their optimism for the next world.
Those dour pessimistic guys are still around. Fortunately (for America if not for liberalism) their influence in American conservative circles has been dropping. There does seem to be more pessimism on the right when talking about domestic affairs than about foreign policy and war. But even much of that vanished after Sept. 11, 2001; with the US at war with apocalyptic religious tyrants it was suddenly not so fashionable to write a rant about how America was being consumed from within by a cancer of filth and libertinism.
A little while ago Kevin Drum suggested that a viable Democratic presidential candidate could run on a platform of opposition to a perceived neocon menace. I think that would be a terrible idea. Say what you will about the neoconservatives, their fundamental defining attributes are that
(1) they sincerely care about freedom and democracy, and
(2) they are extremely hopeful.
Attack, if you like, their tendency to exaggerate the ease of accomplishing things with US military force, but any line of argument that opposes either of those two points is a loser, and rightly so. I agree that liberals need to embrace that hope, and only then quibble over implementation.