You can't have missed the big debate raging in the Democratic party these days, on why we lost the election, how do we win the next one, and where do we turn for candidates/strategy/our next blog entry.
So I read this article in The Atlantic with interest, and not a little skepticism. Another journalist weighing in on a debate that's heavy on armchair opinion, short on actual voter contact.
First of all, the author, Marc Cooper, calls linguist George Lakoff's efforts at reframing "hooey". Not a good start for me; I happen to believe understanding linguistics is crucial to our winning an election. Then he claims we're wrong for focusing on the media as the source of our problems...again, I'm pretty sure until the media stops spitting out rightwing opinion as fact, we're not going to convince a majority of Americans to vote Democratic.
But the article still resonated with me, despite the fact it reeks with the familiar scent of a journalist trying to make a point at the risk of writing overblown rubbish. His premise is dead right, that us liberals/progressives/latte sippers have become separated from who and what we're fighting for.
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.
Most liberals I know spend more time at Starbucks (or rather, the locally-owned, fair trade coffee shop) than on picket lines. They spend more time high fiving at Eschaton than trying to pay for drugs at Eckerds. They spend more time at Vietnamese restaurants than they do hanging out with Vietnam vets. They'd rather be at an art opening than at an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, and the last time they went bowling was for Columbine.
I'm not saying go grab a Big Mac and a Coke and hit the bowling alley. But don't expect someone whose culture you don't even have a passing knowledge of to listen to you when you tell them how to vote.
Marc Cooper strikes a nerve, hopefully the one located near our ear canal. We need to put down our lattes, recycle our New York Times and shut down our laptops, then listen to what's on the minds of our fellow Americans. We might be surprised to find they aren't exactly concerned about the same things we are.
When MoveOn polled its contributors to find out what their priorities were, Cooper was appalled at the answers:
The results, in order, tell you all you need to know about the current state of progressive detachment and denial. Election reform and media reform came in first and second. The war in Iraq was third, followed by the environment, the Supreme Court, and civil liberties. In short, the biggest problems liberals face are those damned voting machines and Fox News. Glaringly absent from this activist wish list is anything vaguely resembling an aggressive populist agenda. The MoveOn plan provides no answers to those sweaty plebes out there who are "stoked" by kulturkampf rhetoric as well as all-too-real fears about their jobs, wages, health insurance, and school tuition.
He adds:
A far more challenging exercise after the election would have been for MoveOn to order its troops to meet with and listen to ten people who disagreed with them—instead of talking, as usual, only to one another.
What you might have heard (as anyone who's wandered from the phonebank script can tell you) is that most Americans aren't concerned with losing their civil liberties; they're too busy worrying about losing their jobs. Most aren't going to get worked up about the environment, when they haven't taken a vacation in years. Most Americans aren't worrying about how Fox news is lying to them when their kid is afraid to go to school.
There's been a massive redistribution of wealth going on, a shrinking—and squeezing—of the middle class, but most people wouldn't enjoy discussing the economics of that. They do, however, care to discuss why they can't pay for their kid's college like their parents did, or why their health insurance premiums keep going up.
It's no surprise the only issue we're winning on these days is Social Security, a core liberal (yes, I used the "L" word!) value. Let's keep on talking about that Lock Box Al Gore envisioned. Let's talk about the national debt, which a sample of Americans given a pretend budget chose to address first. Let's talk about health care. (I can't even tell you the specifics of Kerry's health care plan, and I was paying attention!) Let's talk about minimum wage. (Why is it the bill recently introduced to raise the federal minimum wage was introduced by a REPUBLICAN?! It was a rotten bill, designed to hurt those at the bottom of the scale, but why aren't more liberals' hair aflame to raise the minimum wage from $5.15 an hour? Could it be because not many of us work in minimum wage jobs?) Let's for god's sake talk about education and child care, subjects every parent and grandparent knows a thing or two about, regardless of where they live or who they voted for.
I doubt ideas such as these need reframing; they do, however, need reinforcing—and not just in the echo chamber of Eschaton. We need to practice a real discourse—involving equal amounts of listening and talking—with those who may have a different outlook on life—call it Strict Father if you want. (If the language thing still has you worried, listen to Sen. Barack Obama's convention speech. He reframes with the best of 'em, a skill he probably learned by listening more than talking.)
We're an insular group, us liberals. We feel oppressed, and consequently, we like to stick with our kind. It's hard for us to be around Republicans, at our family gatherings, in our social groups, without thinking, "How could you vote for George Bush? You betrayed me!" Invariably we add, "And besides, you're ignorant."
Unfortunately, while we were busy worrying about rigged voting machines, we forgot to give them a reason to vote for us. We might have found them willing to, if we'd heard their concerns, rather than just handed over ours.
No one solution will give us electoral victory—when asked to weigh in on the debate, I tend to answer "all of the above." Fortunately, that's allowed:
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.
And might I suggest we quit using words like "reify"?
