Bob Herbert poses a question which deserves some thought, because although the immediate answer is obvious, it leads to one of the great question marks of the 21st century:
I wonder whether Americans will ever become fed up with the loathsome politicking, the fear-mongering, the dissembling and the gruesome incompetence of this crowd.
Well, in fact, polls say that some two-thirds of Americans *are* fed up. So maybe Herbert means something about the public expression of outrage, something like, “Where are the legions of mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, lovers, and friends of the soldiers dying for Bush’s stupidity? Why haven’t we heard from them? Where, after Katrina, are the Kings, the Malcolms, the Stokelys? Where are the Berrigans? The Dillingers? Where are the Edward R. Murrows, the Oppenheimers, the Ellsbergs, the McGoverns, the McCarthys?”
The thing is. there are many of these, too. Including, off the top of my head, Cindy Sheehan, Brady Kiesling, Colleen Rowley, Richard Clarke, Bob Herbert himself, Amy Goodman, James Hansen, Al Gore, Howard Dean, John Murtha, Paul Krugman, Barbara Ehrenreich. All very different people with very different concerns and, to be sure, very different politics. But all share a deep level of competence, intelligence, and public commitment to the notion of a small “d” democratic America.
So in thinking about it, Herbert’s question surely isn’t about the dearth of protest and dissent. As for positive alternatives to Bushism, Herbert knows as well as the rest of us that plenty of those exist. What Herbert is getting at is that all that protest, all those proposals are happening in an organizational void. His question really is,
“When will America again have two national political parties?”
I honestly wish I could say 2006. There are some positive signs that a second party could emerge, in the face of major attempts to suppress it, from what’s left of the Democratic Party. It certainly would save a lot of time. Building a second party from scratch will be no picnic.
But let’s not kid outselves. A political party that announces “A New Direction” which scrupulously avoids Iraq, Katrina, and the fundamental issue of competence in government… That’s not a political party with national influence as a goal.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that the time is ripe – overripe – for a new generation of intelligent, hard-nosed, passionate, and responsible political organizers to create a truly mainstream political party that could easily route the Bushists. ‘Cause what’s goin’ on is just plain ridiculous and everyone knows it.
It is with great regret that I must resign from the vast left wing blogospheric conspiracy today. The time has come to choose one’s allegiances, and mine must lie with my liege lords, the journalistic and political leadership who have brought us where we are today. I can no longer be associated with the barbaric, illiterate jacknapes who presume to call their betters’ judgment into question.
You see, I’ve come to realize that this business of “punditry” and “politics” is not something anyone can just “do.” It is what one is born to, what one is meant to do, what one is. Some people are simply designed to have superior opinions. And those people are well known by others who have superior opinions. It is outside the natural order of things for unwashed, unknown rabble like me to set forth my ideas in the same public arena as someone like The New Republic’s Lee Siegel — and certainly not an intellectual adventurer such as David Brooks, who wrote the most important sociological work of our time, “On Paradise Drive.” (Only a man of great courage could have forced himself to enter a Red Lobster and mingle with the lower ranks and we must all be grateful for those dispatches from the wild. It is from first rate observers such as he that we rustics out in Real America can better understand our own shortcomings — as well as our delightful simple charm, of course.)
You see, the skills required to opine on political, cultural and current events are very, very special. They cannot be acquired by simply observing or reading or thinking. And writing about such topics cannot be considered useful merely because hundreds of thousands of people read your words. If anything, the opposite is true. Any circulation over 70,000 — or outside the elite capitals — must, by definition, be low-brow, cultural detritus and simply not worth our time. (I won’t even mention the horror of the rampant solecisms and bad grammar. My God, the grammar!) One must consider this burgeoning “medium,” if that is what it is, as just another vehicle for the lowest common denominator (as is that similarly destructive invention, television.) One is best served by simply not participating in it and shunning those who do. Only the wrong people are involved and I’m afraid that tears it for me, gentlemen.
I now regret very much having participated in this ignoble discourse over the past four years. When I read Mr Siegel’s claim that I was a “blogofascist” I nearly fainted dead away, the pain to my conscience was so sharp. What could be worse, I asked myself, than having the “culture blogger” of The New Republic disdain my work? What could be worse? He might as well have taken a knife and chopped off my middle finger.
Here is a man of high distinction who is clearly a knight among knaves and whose only mission in life is to educate and elucidate for the plebeian masses what they should enjoy. (His review of the Tom Cruise masterpiece “Eyes Wide Shut” alone is a education in superior taste and insight.) Yet from this lofty cliff he boldly stepped off and entered the battle with a couple of blog posts (ah, irony!) so profound and so cutting that he may well have changed the course of history:
It’s a bizarre phenomenon, the blogosphere. It radiates democracy’s dream of full participation but practices democracy’s nightmare of populist crudity, character-assassination, and emotional stupefaction. It’s hard fascism with a Microsoft face. It puts some people, like me, in the equally bizarre position of wanting desperately for Joe Lieberman to lose the Democratic primary to Ned Lamont so that true liberal values might, maybe, possibly prevail, yet at the same time wanting Lamont, the hero of the blogosphere, to lose so that the fascistic forces ranged against Lieberman might be defeated. (Every critical event in democracy is symbolic of the problem with democracy.)
Yes. One does wonder about its utility at times like these, doesn’t one?
The next day he further expounded on his important new thesis:
I am overwhelmed by the intolerance and rage in the blogosphere. Conscientiously criticize, in the form of a real argument, blogospheric favorites like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, and the response isn’t similar criticism, done conscientiously and in the form of an argument, but insults, personal attacks, and even threats. This truly is the stuff of thuggery and fascism.
Dear me!
Mr Siegel knew that the blogofascists would mercilessly attack him with shocking epithets like “asshole” and “wanker” and even threats yet he forged on, unconcerned with his own safety, fearlessly determined to change hearts and minds with his unique professional gifts of subtle argumentation and gentle persuasion. The time had come to draw a line in the sand. My god, what an inspiration this man is.
I shall not let him down. That column changed my life. Even as I knew it had the ring of truth, I tried to resist, telling myself that he couldn’t be talking about me — not me. How can I be a flip-flopping cowardly America-hater while at the same time a fascist? A bleeding heart, terrorist coddler while also a brownshit? How does this work? I was finally persuaded by his preturnaturally sagacious observation that the man I looked up to as a father figure (indeed, a demi-God of sorts) Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, is actually a rootless former soldier looking for meaning in a stark post-modern landscape of internet cafes and shiny espresso carts. This is the man who is leading his listserve army of angry, middle aged, liberal professionals into blind blogofascism. The writing is on the wall, my friends:
Two other traits of fascism are its hatred of the processes of politics, and the knockabout origins of its adherents. Communism was hatched by elites. Fascism was born along the drifting paths of rootless men, often ex-soldiers who had fought in the First World War and been demobilized. They turned European politics into a madhouse of deracinated ambition.
In a 2004 article in The San Francisco Chronicle, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga told a reporter that he moved to El Salvador in the late 1970s with his family–one of his parents is Salvadoran–who apparently had financial interests there. The article relates:
“I believe in government. I was in El Salvador in the late ’70s during the civil war and I saw government as a life-and-death situation,” he said. “There was no one to root for. The government was a corrupt plutocracy and the rebels were Maoists. The concept of government is important.”
He remembers bullets flying in the marketplace and watching on television as government soldiers executed guerrillas. He also remembers watching footage of the Solidarity movement in Poland.
He was 9, and he asked his father what that was all about. His father, a furniture salesman, said, “It’s just politics.”
The future blogger said, “Tell me all about it.”
So he loves government, but hates politics. There’s something chilling about that.
It makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck doesn’t it? Is Siegel the only man in America who can see the threat? Can he be the only man in America who is willing to stand up and speak the words “Never Again?”
No he is not. Today, I have joined the resistance and say goodbye to all that. I’ve been called up by my new leader, Lee Siegel, defender of intellectual rigor in our national discourse. The Great Lee Siegel who wrote this:
You’d think that staring into the mirror and repeating your name over and over would have the opposite effect of helping you get out of yourself, but that’s not the case. The idea is to find a place so deep inside yourself that, with intense concentration, you look to yourself like a stranger. Your very name becomes an alien phrase. Physically, you start to seem imaginary. Spiritually, you start to seem more real. Hoffenshtoffen suggests keeping a packed suitcase standing in the middle of your apartment as a symbolic reminder of that magical fulfillmentÂ?self-surrenderÂ?when you leave yourself utterly and travel in a trancelike state to pure objective reception of the outer world.
Sounds silly and pretentiously spirituel, I know. But extricating oneself from oneself is the great problem of human life. Buddha’s name for the smothering, clamoring self was “desire”; Plato’s was “appetite”; Rousseau’s was “reason.” (The translations are Sylvester Cointreau’s.) William James, my favorite American writer, wearily wrote to a friend toward the end of his life that the human ego had begun to repel him. I sort of feel like that sometimes. That’s why, more and more, I love the sound of laughter. Not withering, or cruel, or exclusive, knowing laughter. I mean ego-bursting laughter that is like wisdom speaking in slang.
So who is this person staring back at me from the mirror in my bathroom? My lips are small and thin; Maya likes the way the upper lip protrudes slightly over the lower one. Carmencita likes the lower lipÂ?but she also wants me to wear cologne. A certain roundness and softness to my face always bothered me. I wanted to look hard and lean and chiseled, just as I wanted to have that invincible steel will of Central European intellectuals like Arthur Koestler, and not all that moist, tremulous high (and low) feeling I’ve inherited from my Russian-Jewish forebears. Everyone in my family is vibrato; there is not a note blanche to be found in our entire genetic pool. Weeping was a form of communication. One sob meant hello, two sobs meant good-bye, three sobs meant “There’s a call for you,” and so forth. Hoffenshtoffen, who gets bored by lachrymosity, says that I was born with a silver violin in my mouth.
That’s what the smart people call “insight,” my friends, something the narcissistic blogofascists like Markos Moulitsas Zuniga with his puerile nickname “DailyKos” know nothing of. This is how Lee Siegel and his sinecured cadre of noble elite scribblers will lead us simple progressive peasants from the wilderness.
Before you make a decision about whether to join our small resistance movement, I would ask you to think about something — something important. Have the liberal establishment elites of the past quarter century let us down yet?
A funny thing happened on the way to Church today. Well actually it was at the bookstore last night. This article, “Heaven Can Wait,” by Susan Jacoby, which appears in the Spring issue of Dissent magazine, leapt off the shelf, right into my hands (honest to god):
There is no such thing as generic religion or, for that matter, generic evangelical Protestantism, and most ecclesiastical leaders, whether evangelical or not, are interested in the welfare of all only insofar as welfare is defined in accordance with their particular faith. That is the fatal flaw in all proposals, whether from the left or the right, for a stronger religious voice in the public square. No one would deny that some religious spokesmen are capable of framing moral issues in transcendent fashion; the civil rights leadership provided by black churches is the prime twentieth-century example. But the voices of African American preachers spoke to a broader public morality precisely because they emanated from outside the government and the political establishment. Most southern white Protestant churches, by contrast—churches that helped spawn the present generation of Dixiecans who invoke the name of Martin Luther King in order to push the Republican faith-based political agenda—were closely allied with segregationist politics-as-usual and had no interest whatever in the welfare of blacks.
The absence of any common religious definition of welfare becomes evident in every political battle over “values issues.” Both supporters and opponents of ham-handed, faith-based attempts by the U.S. Congress to intervene in the case involving removal of the comatose Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube, for example, would have said (and did say) that they were concerned about the welfare of Schiavo and those similarly situated. But the two groups defined welfare in irreconcilable ways, largely attributable to religious convictions about whether human beings have the right to “play God” with their own lives.
The limited, and often conflicting, definitions of welfare promulgated by various religions were very much on the minds of the framers of the Constitution when they deliberately omitted any mention of God from the document and instead ceded supreme authority to “We the People.”
The framers did not write, as they might have, “we the people under God”—a phrase that would have prevented angry debates in state ratifying conventions over the Constitution’s unprecedented failure to acknowledge a divinity as the source of governmental power. They did not, as a group of ministers would unsuccessfully propose to Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, write a preamble that declared, “Recognizing Almighty God as the source of all authority and power in civil government, and acknowledging the Lord Jesus Christ as the Governor among nations, His revealed will as the supreme law of the land, in order to constitute a Christian government….”
Americans have always been a predominantly Christian people (overwhelmingly so at the time the Constitution was written), but the founders established a secular central government. Today, religious conservatives are wreaking havoc with that glorious paradox, and they are aided by liberals intimidated by the vilification of secularists over the past twenty-five years. Still worse, many liberals have thrown in the towel and accepted the right-wing premise that there can be no morality, and no exposition of moral issues in the public square, without reference to religion. …
I could not agree more … that the left needs to present its case in unapologetically moral terms. But those moral terms should be grounded in reason, not in pandering to the supernatural beliefs of Americans. Indeed, American presidents in the past—and not only the distant past—have had great success in combining reason with moral passion. Perhaps the most outstanding example is John F. Kennedy’s June 1963 American University commencement speech, now regarded as the beginning of détente with the Soviet Union. Kennedy spoke of peace as “the necessary rational end of rational men” and declared, “Our problems are manmade—therefore they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man’s reason and spirit often solved the seemingly unsolvable—and we believe they can do it again.” Then Kennedy memorably observed that “our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”
Could there be a more reasoned yet passionate statement of secular morality than the assertion that we owe our children a peaceful world not because we are immortal but because we are mortal?
Call me crazy, but I have a feeling that a great many Americans, including religious Americans, are sick of hypocritical politicians who pretend that their policies deserve support because they are the work of a Higher Being. The question is whether there are any political leaders left with the courage to appeal to voters as reasoning adults, with arguments based not on the promise of heaven but on the moral obligation of human beings to treat one another decently here on earth.
Digging though my own archives, I found this reference to Richard Bushman’s 1967 masterpiece From Puritan To Yankee in which the author describes how New England society threw off the shackles of Puritan influence. Remarkably, this transition away from Puritanism, and toward individual freedom, was largely accomplished by the 1760s, just in time (not coincidentally) for the American Revolution. Oscar Handlin, the Pulitzer Prize winning author and renowned former Harvard professor, writes in the forward to the book:
No attempt to trace the history of liberty can deal with the detached individual in isolation. Freedom is a condition not of the single man alone but of man in relationship to a community. The group protects him against the misuse of the power of others and provides the setting within which he can advantageously exercise his own powers. Therefore, changes in the nature of the community, which necessarily either increase or restrain the capacity of the individual to act, affect his liberty. … Particularly significant in the analysis of the process by which the Puritans became Yankees is the light it throws on the relationship between society and individual personality. The description of the forces in the community that gave birth to the wish to be free, among men brought up in a closed order, illuminates an important, and neglected, facet of the history of liberty in the United States.
It is ironic that the demise of Puritan religious influence coincides with the emergence of the type of personal and secular liberty that was to become the foundation of America. Richard Bushman, the book’s author, describes the process of elections in Puritan days, and how a government meshed with religion was opposed to the concept of Democracy.
Election of these officials, even the highest, did not diminish their authority or make them responsible to the people. Democracy, in the Puritan view, was non-government, or anarchy, and rulers had to constrain [themselves] not to obey a corrupt popular will. Election was a device for implementing divine intentions rather than for transmitting power from the people to their rulers.
Bushman provides a contemporaneous quote from John Bulkley’s work The Necessity of Religion, published in Boston 1713, to illustrate the religion-based political thinking of the day:
In elective states, where persons are advanced by the suffrage of others to places of rule, and vested with Civil Power, the persons choosing give not the power, but GOD. They are but the instruments of conveyance.
So, as Bushman concludes, “rulers were obligated to God, not to the people.” I can think of two modern-day despots who follow this doctrine: George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden, each of whom believes himself to be a divine instrument of good, and the other of evil.
A final passage from the book is both compelling and frightening. It speaks to the oppressive and coercive power that results when you mix religion with government, and mix both with other means of authority, such as the institution of family:
The combined force of so many institutions invested law and authority with immense power. In nearly every dimension of life – family, church, the social hierarchy, and religion – a [citizen] encountered unanimous reinforcement of governing authority. The total impact was immense, because each institution was an integral part of a monolithic whole. In each community the agencies of law and authority merged so that the individual felt himself confined within a unified governing structure. The preacher’s exhortation to submit to domestic government reinforced the father’s dominion in his family. Church discipline carried added terrors because censures were delivered before the neighbors and the town’s most prominent families, and the assignment of pews in the meetinghouse according to social rank reminded everyone of the distinctions among individuals and of the deference due superiors. The total environment enjoined obedience: the stately figure of minister or commissioner as he rode through town, the leading inhabitants’ imposing two-storied houses standing near the meetinghouse at its center, the austere graves of the dead in its shadow. As interpreted by the minister’s sermon, even the natural world – the storms, the wolves in the wilderness, and the catastrophes at sea – spoke of the war of good and evil and of God’s mighty government. Social institutions, conscience, and the forces of nature meshed in the communal experience to restrain rebellious dispositions.
After reading this, the parallels are clear that the current movement afoot in our society — the movement to infuse religion into government — is working against, and not for, the very same liberty upon which America was founded.
Remarkably, Bushman’s book is still in print, more than forty years after it was written. You can find it in almost every library, or here from the original publisher, Harvard University Press. I found it for $3 at one of my favorite haunts, Half Price Books.
The number of prominent Democrats urging pre-emptive action against North Korea’s ICBM grows as Walter Mondale chimes in. These are the Democrats who can win elections because they are serious.
As expected, the Bush administration tried to shoot the messenger. The purest expression of the administration’s position comes from Terri Wagner, a regular New York Times reader from Elberta, Alabama* who writes:
Your decision to print this article is disturbing to me. Timing is the issue with me.
We have troops in the field fighting every day. We have just recently seen the brutality of the enemy.
The time to consider which programs are successful or not is after the troops come home, which in this case means a free Afghanistan and Iraq.
Please consider the timing of your articles in matters of national security when troops are still on the ground. [Emphasis in original.]
As long as troops are abroad, Bush should not be criticized. Ever. And you wonder why Bush has said troops will be in Iraq during the rest of his term in office.
No one’s criticizing the effort to track terrorist finances, duh.** The real issue is simple:
The Times (and others) would never have decided to break the story were it not the fact that the Bush administration is once again abusing its power and refusing to recognize any rules or limits on that power.
*Of course, Terri’s a regular reader of the Times, even if she lives in Elberta, Alabama which is, I admit, pretty far from New York City. How else could she have learned about the article? She may even have a subscription. You’re not suggesting her letter was part of an organized rightwing campaign against the Times, are you? Honestly, the cynicism of some people.
** From the first time I heard the term a few days after 9/11, I’ve repeatedly said (and of course, this is far from an original thought) the US should infiltrate and thoroughly corrupt the hawwalas, making them unreliable. That, of course, is rather difficult to do when you don’t have more than five fluent Arabic speakers tops working in the FBI (which is true, by the way, at least until very recently). Far easier – and far less effective, if your real goal is to catch terrorists and not hoover up as much info as you possibly can – is to once again operate with no serious oversight and troll through ” ‘at least tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of searches’ of people and institutions suspected of having ties to terrorists.”
For several years now, when Saturday rolls around and we receive the New York Times Book Review in our paper, I have been in the habit of totting up the number of left-leaning and right-leaning books on the hardcover non-fiction besteller list. It’s probably a worthless exercise, so far I haven’t perceived a trend I can correlate to anything, except maybe to election cycles where more rightwing books make the list. But I thought it might amuse you as well so here is this week’s tally based on the online bestseller list which seems one week ahead, strangely enough, of the printed one (dated July 2 instead of July 25). In any event, I only look at the official (to be printed) list of top 15.
Now caveat lector, boys and girls. Of course, to anyone with even a smattering of statistics, the whole enterprise is a hopelessly crude metric (and of absolutely nothing to boot). At the very least, the index should also weight length of time on the list and relative placement, if not also take into account actual sales. As for determination of political leanings, sometimes they are open to serious question as they are this week with all three “left” bestsellers (and perhaps two of the authors on the “right” might object to my forcing them to share the red bed, ideologically speaking of course, with Coulter). You wanna make a better NYT Bestseller Index, be my guest.
Anyway…
It’s a tie this week, 3 to 3.
Left:
Cooper: DISPATCHES FROM THE EDGE Friedman: THE WORLD IS FLAT Levitt/Dubner: FREAKONOMICS
Right:
Russert: WISDOM OF OUR FATHERS Coulter: GODLESS Stossel : MYTHS, LIES, AND DOWNRIGHT STUPIDITY
[UPDATE: Some folks in comments have objected that at best the so-called “left” books are centrist or centrist-right. DukeJ astutely observes: “[A]re we so conditioned that we see centrists or even ‘objective’ journalists as representing the left?”
Good point. He’s exactly right. If the index has any utility at all, it is as a stark demonstration of precisely how constipated our public discourse on politics has become. With this in mind, perhaps it is worthwhile (but only a little) to track the index as the election season progresses.]
“The public is divided … on whether the federal government should be involved in promoting moral values, with 48% saying it should and 48% saying it should not. In 1996, Americans took a very different view on this matter, with 60% saying the government should be involved and 38% saying it should not… That change appears to be a fairly recent phenomenon.” From 1993 until recently, majorities of at least 10 percentage points chose “Government should promote traditional values” over “should not favor any values.”
People are getting sick of these phony busybodies blathering on about moral values when everybody knows they are anything but moral. There’s always been a strain of moral sanctimony in America. And there’s always been an equally strong strain that wants to shove a grapefruit in their faces. It looks like we might be coming back into balance.
(Speaking of which, is everyone excited about this week’s Deadwood? I know I am…)
I initially had some second thoughts about this post from yesterday. I thought perhaps I was being to harsh in criticizing the Democrats for their response to this Republican trash talk on the war. But I posted it anyway because I honestly believed that they were in danger of screwing this up at a time when there is no reason for it and I feel almost apoplectic at the prospect.
Consider this post an open letter to Senate Democrats.
You’re really doing a poor job in the public debate over Iraq.
Luckily, unlike what’s imagined by the imbeciles who write The Note and others in Washington, reality is not simply a DC media and politics confection. The Dems can muff this several times before coming back and getting it right. And they’d still be more or less fine. Because the Iraq War is still really unpopular. And the great majority of the country has lost faith in President Bush’s conduct of the war.
But that’s still no excuse for handling this so poorly.
The Democrats have to be much more aggressive. But ‘more aggressive’ doesn’t mean a quicker withdrawal. It means making your point forcefully, on your own terms, repeatedly.
But they’re not doing that.
What I see is Republicans on TV repeating their ‘cut and run’ charges. And to the extent I see Democrats, it’s Democrats denying the charge. No, we’re not for cutting and running.
The president wants to stay in Iraq for at least three more years. It’s not that he won’t set a date to withdraw. He doesn’t even have a plan that gets to the point where the US could end the occupation. In practice he wants to stay in Iraq forever. What Repubicans are voting for is More of the Same, More of the Same failed policy.
The war is unpopular. It’s a quagmire. Yet, they change nothing. The only proposal they can come up with is to grant amnesty to the insurgents in the hopes they will be so grateful they will just give up. That’s it. This war just grinds on, nothing improves, they make no progress.
And they refuse to change course because the president sees everything in terms of losing face and covering ass. From what we’ve been reading this week, it’s his prime motivation for everything. He believes that if he loses face, the country loses face — l’etat c’est moi.
In the face of that, it doesn’t matter whther or not the Democrats all agree to the last comma on a plan for withdrawal. What matters, as Marshall says, is that we are against the status quo:
The thing is that the status quo is morally indefensible because it just means continue to burn through men and money for a failed policy because President Bush isn’t capable of admitting his policies have failed.
He’s like an owner of a business that’s slowly going under. He doesn’t know how to save the situation. So he won’t get more money or resources to fix the business. That’s throwing good money after bad. And he won’t just liquidate and save what he can, because then he’d have to come to grips with the fact that he’s failed. So his policy is denial and slow failure. Here of course the analogy to President Bush is rather precise since he only has to hold out until 2009 when he can give the problem to someone else, just as he did in his past life with other businesses he drove into the ground.
But for the country that’s not acceptable. We don’t have a policy except for slow burn and denial. And the president’s ego isn’t enough to ask men and women to die for. We need an actual plan. And the president doesn’t have one.
Democrats need to hammer this point again and again and not get tripped up in the president’s bully-boy rhetoric. The president has no plan. He wants to stay in Iraq forever. He says for at least three more years. All the Republicans agree they want more of the same.
The Republicans are like mortally wounded dogs who are barely standing but who bare their teeth and growl dangerously when you get too close. When that happens, if you are a responsible person, you don’t get afraid and run away. You get some help and you put the dog down.
They can hammer us with “cut ‘n run” all they want, but they can’t “cut n’ run” from the fact that they are telling the American people there is no end in sight and there is nothing they can do about it. That’s the reason why Dems must step up now and aggressively pound this message home that the president has no plan. In order to win, the people must believe that by electing Democrats they are taking action to change the status quo. Democrats need to hammer the fact that for all the president’s bluster — he’s paralyzed by his inability to admit that he’s made a mistake.
Democrats may not have all the answers. The administration has got us in a hell of a mess and it’s not easy to get us out of it. But the Republicans have made it quite clear that their intention is to keep doing exactly what they are doing until somebody stops them. Democrats need to stop them — and they need the American people to understand that they are the only ones who can stop them. The Republicans can’t stop themselves.
Kos wrote an interesting post yesterday that deserves some further discussion. He offered his thoughts on Hillary Clinton (which were right on the money in my opinion) and in the midst of it mentions something that Hillary did last week that has not gotten nearly enough attention. (I would suggest that it would have gotten a lot of blogospheric attention if she wanted to use this medium to promote her ideas. This speaks to us directly.)
Last week Hillary introduced what I think should be a primary plank of the the Democratic Party:A Privacy Bill Of Rights. Indeed, I think this is the most fertile territory out there to gain some disaffected Republican voters and put some of the mountain west in our electoral quiver. It’s smart politics.
I happen to be a believer in the Democratic strategy that includes pulling on the civil libertarian threads in our coalition to weave a bigger tent. I’m personally horrified by the excesses of this administration and terribly worried that the huge bureaucratic domestic surveillance apparatus they are building is going to be impossible to control. I hear tales from all over the country of wads of DHS pork going to local and state police departments to use to spy on their own citizens and we know that at the national level they’ve pretty much discarded the fourth amendment and have enabled both the foreign and military spy agencies to work within our borders. There’s a lot of money and power involved, it’s secret and it’s fundamentally anti-democratic. We are building a police state and I firmly believe that, politics aside, if you build it they will use it.
That all this has been done by the alleged libertarian small government Republicans is no surprise to me. They have always been about big bucks and authoritarianism over all else. But it seems to me that it may come as a surprise to people with a certain “don’t tread on me” kind of ethos, particularly in the west which has a long tradition of such sentiment. If these tribal divides about which I often write exist, then there is a big one here. And if politics need to play to the gut as much as the head and the heart, this issue is powerful. Democrats have an opportunity to craft a real message of American independence if they choose to take it — and it might just be the way to beat back the fear factor a little bit, which I think people are getting tired of.
But there is another aspect of this which is important, as well. Clinton’s privacy Bill of Rights includes a lot of consumer protections, which is something that I think is a truly sellable, populist idea. The intrusion into our private lives by government is a threat to our individual liberty. The intrusion (and collusion) by its ally, corporate America, is truly a threat to the fundamental definition of what it means to be an American. The ability to amass all this data and create profiles of us and put us into categories and label us as being one thing or another according to complex formulas, means that the great innovation of America — the ability to reinvent ourselves and take risks — will no longer be optional. The great nation of immigrants and hucksters and innovators will become a stratified society based on criteria that has nothing to do with our potential and everything to do with our past.
Hillary said in her speech the other day: “privacy is synonymous with liberty.” This is correct. We give it up far too thoughtlessly in our culture and its going to come back to bite us if we don’t wake to the fact that big powerful forces are poking into our lives in unprecedented ways and will use the information they get to force us into little boxes they design.
Democrats need to make some new arguments. They need to talk in terms that are relevant to today’s world. Progressives are about progress; we cannot only be concerned about maintaining what we’ve got. We must forge on. If we believe in the common good, which I do, it must be tempered with a healthy respect for individual privacy. Without that we will not have the freedom or the ability to come together to create a better world. We’ll all be too busy furtively looking over our shoulders to pay attention to the road ahead.