Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) sends a nice letter to the lobotomized castrati who edit the Washington Post…I like how we have to rely on career politicians to provide a check on the corruption and idiocy of the media. That’s a quite healthy situation, and not at all fucked up. Sleep tight.
This really is reaching crisis proportions. In order to appease the mouthbreathing neanderthals who insist that science is just another “opinion”, the L.C. are actually disseminating total bullshit to the public and calling it fact.
This is a problem. The people who believe Republican science are the ones driving big cars and handling your food. It’s dangerous.
I’m ridiculously busy and I don’t have time to write much about the circular firing squad. Still, I’ll write a few words in passing on which I’ll elaborate later.
If, in order to be “hard” we must support irrationality and grievous error then we are doomed as a country. We are simply too big for that. We will not have many chances to make the kind of mistake we’ve made with Iraq without suffering serious consequences. It is the very definition of hard nosed, cold hearted realism to say that we should not squander our military resources during a national security crisis by fighting the wrong goddamned war. It is not “soft” to note that sexually torturing citizens whom we were ostensibly liberating and whose cooperation we needed was a lousy war plan. And it is nothing short of hawkish to point out that proving to the whole world that our vaunted intelligence services couldn’t find Baghdad on a fucking map made this country and all its allies less safe. We are the reality based community and facing up to facts is the single most important thing we can do to protect this country. Letting the faith based morons who planned this debacle of a response to 9/11 off the hook and holding their hands in solidarity not only looks weak, it is weak.
But, as usual, all of this braying about repositioning and purging obscures the fact that we aren’t dealing with a policy issue at all, are we? We are once again drowning in perceptions, in which the alleged Democratic tough guys are accusing the alleged Democratic sissies of fucking things up and losing elections because the American people won’t support a party that is “soft” on … anything. They are right in a way but they fail to see why this perception is so widely held, who is responsible and how to change it. Mainly this is because the ones making this accusation think they are hard when they are actually soft.
I agree that we need a change in strategy. But, we’ve hit a wall compromising or cooperating with this modern Republican Party on issues. They have left us no room on policy except total capitulation. Anybody who doesn’t see that is definitely soft. (In the head.) Politics is now beyond issues. For Democrats, it’s existential.
Do we want the public to understand that we’re “hard?” Do we need for people to take us seriously as tough guys who will keep the country safe from the “ism” of the moment? Of course. But does anyone believe that we can demonstrate our powerful rigid tumescence to the public with academic papers or scholarly op-ed’s or earnest senate speeches? This argument always implies that we are campaigning in a vacuum and fails to take into consideration the nature of the opposition. We could be Beinartian Hawks or Kucinichian doves or George Patton or Ulysses S. Grant and it would mean nothing as long as the opposition comes up with simple marketing slogans to position our candidates and our ideas as soft and we do not respond in kind.
Let’s talk about flipping and flopping for a moment. That phrase didn’t come out of nowhere, you know. “Flip-flop” was not some complicated concept in which people were persuaded by examples in his record that Kerry was unprincipled or indecisive. “Flip-flop” was an uncomplicated, symbolic slogan that stood for flaccid penis. Yes, it’s really that simple, folks. People may not have been consciously aware that the term flip-flop was meant to unman our war hero candidate, but it did so just the same. And it played off of 35 years of exactly the same kind of imagery from “with hair that long, hippie, you can’t tell if you’re a man or a woman,” to “he’s been botoxed.” This image doesn’t come from Michael Moore or indeed from any Democrat. It comes directly from the propaganda shop of the Republican party and it plays right into the lizard brains of certain white males and the women who inexplicably love them. It wouldn’t matter if Michael Moore joined the marines and MoveOn decided to merge with Club For Growth. The right has a tremendous investment in framing the left as too “soft” to keep the nation safe and they will continue to play that card no matter how tough we sound on terrorism. It is how they win.
But there is one surefire way to convince the American people that Democrats are “hard” enough to take on the enemies of the United States. And that would be for us to take on the goddamned Republicans. As long as we do not respond in kind to their in your face bully boy style of politics we will continue to look weak in the face of an existential threat — because we ARE weak. We can look to history for Scoop Jackson lessons or Arthur Schlessinger lessons, but they are not relevant to the problem at hand. Our problem is that since 1968 the Republicans have waged a take-no-prisoner war against the Democratic party and they use that proxy war to prove to the American people that they are tough enough to protect the American people from threats, both internal and external, and the Democrats are not. (Indeed, to listen to their most skilled polemicists, Democrats are the threat.) And despite the fact that they are completely full of shit, it works quite well because they practice what they preach by fighting every last Democrat to a standstill and when they lose they get right back up and start fighting again with everything they have. People can see exactly what they are about. They demonstrate it. We, on the other hand, talk a lot.
The father of the modern Republican party (perhaps modern American politics) is not sunny Reagan, it’s darkling Nixon. Until we finally grasp the nature of the opposition we will continue to lose. It is the central problem we face.
One word of advice. When George Will backs your ideas you need to rethink your position. Prominent Republican mouthpieces do not have our best interests at heart. Ever.
Those of you who follow the religious beat more closely than I do have probably seen this article called The Fundamentalist Agenda, by Davidson Loehr. I may not have religious experiences, but I do have epiphanies and reading this was one.
From 1988 to 1993, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences sponsored an interdisciplinary study known as The Fundamentalism Project, the largest such study ever done. More than 100 scholars from all over the world took part, reporting on every imaginable kind of fundamentalism. And what they discovered was that the agenda of all fundamentalist movements in the world is virtually identical, regardless of religion or culture.
The five characteristics are
1) Men rule the roost and make the rules. Women are support staff and for reasons easy to imagine, homosexuality is intolerable.
2) all rules must apply to all people, no pluralism.
3) the rules must be precisely communicated to the next generation
4) “they spurn the modern, and want to return to a nostalgic vision of a golden age that never really existed. (Several of the scholars observed a strong and deep resemblance between fundamentalism and fascism. Both have almost identical agendas. Men are on top, women are subservient, there is one rigid set of rules, with police and military might to enforce them, and education is tightly controlled by the state. One scholar suggested that it’s helpful to understand fundamentalism as religious fascism, and fascism as political fundamentalism. The phrase ‘overcoming the modern’ is a fascist slogan dating back to at least 1941.)”
5) Fundamentalists deny history in a “radical and idiosyncratic way.”
All of this is interesting and it’s interesting because it crosses all religions, cultural and regional boundries. When the scientists were presenting their abstracts, “several noted that all their papers were sounding alike, reporting on ‘species’ when studying the ‘genus’ was called for, that there were strong family resemblances between all fundamentalisms, even when the religions had had no contact, no way to influence each other.”
Now, evolutionary psychology theories of the moment can be awfully facile because mostly they reinforce certain social norms that can easily be explained in other ways. (No Virginia, women do not necessarily practise fidelity and men do not “need” to spread their seed far and wide because of their alleged biological programming. It’s a lot more complicated than that.) Still, this explanation for fundamentalism — and more importantly perhaps, why it rears its ugly head from time to time is very thought provoking:
The only way all fundamentalisms can have the same agenda is if the agenda preceded all the religions. And it did. Fundamentalist behaviors are familiar because we’ve all seen them so many times. These men are acting the role of “alpha males” who define the boundaries of their group’s territory and the norms and behaviors that define members of their in-group. These are the behaviors of territorial species in which males are stronger than females. In biological terms, these are the characteristic behaviors of sexually dimorphous territorial animals. Males set and enforce the rules, females obey the males and raise the children; there is a clear separation between the in-group and the out-group. The in-group is protected; outsiders are expelled or fought.
It is easier to account for this set of behavioral biases as part of the common evolutionary heritage of our species than to argue that it is simply a monumental coincidence that the social and behavioral agendas of all fundamentalisms and fascisms are essentially identical.
What conservatives are conserving is the biological default setting of our species, which has strong family resemblances to the default setting of thousands of other species. This means that when fundamentalists say they are obeying the word of God, they have severely understated the authority for their position. The real authority behind this behavioral scheme is millions of years older than all the religions and all the gods there have ever been. It is the picture of life that gave birth to most of the gods as its projected champions.
Fundamentalism is absolutely natural, ancient, powerful—and inadequate. It’s a means of structuring relationships that evolved when we lived in troops of 150 or less. But in the modern world, it’s completely incapable of the nuance or flexibility needed to structure humane societies.
Perhaps it is facile to suggest that these people are less evolved but well…if the shoe fits. I actually think this is a fairly decent explanation for the phenomenon.
The author goes on, however, to suggest that the reason for fundamentalism’s rise is that liberalism has failed to properly incorporate progress into society which leaves many people uncomfortable thus “defaulting” to the basic human response.
But for the liberal impulse to lead, liberals must remain in contact with the center of our territorial instinct and our need for a structure of responsibilities. Fundamentalist uprisings are a sign that the liberals have failed to provide an adequate and balanced vision, that they have not found a vision that attracts enough people to become stable.
Just as it’s no coincidence that all fundamentalisms have similar agendas, it’s also no coincidence that the most successful liberal advances tend to wrap their expanded definitions in what sound like conservative categories.
John F. Kennedy’s most famous line sounds like the terrifying dictate of the world’s most arrogant fascist: “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” Imagine that line coming from Hitler, Khomeini, Mullah Omar, or Jerry Falwell. It is a conservative, even a fascist, slogan. Yet Kennedy used it to effect significant liberal transformations in our society. Under that umbrella he created the Peace Corps and vista programs and through them enlisted many young people to extend our hand to those we had not before seen as belonging to our in-group.
Likewise, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. used the rhetoric of a conservative vision to promote his liberal redefinition of the members of our in-group. When he defined all Americans as the children of God, those words could sound like the battle-cry of an American Taliban on the verge of putting a Bible in every school, a catechism in every legislature. Instead, King used that cry to include Americans of all colors in the sacred and protected group of “all God’s children”—which was just what many white Southerners were arguing against forty years ago.
When liberal visions work, it’s because they have kept one foot solidly in our deep territorial impulses with the other foot free to push the margin, to expand the definition of those who belong in “our” territory.
He’s basically saying that in order to pave the way for change, liberals have to first be aware of the sacred symbols and rhetoric of traditionalism and then attempt to harness those symbols to advance our cause. I think there is some truth in that.
The Bible is one, of course, but so are the “sacred” texts of our nation, those that outline the rules and beliefs of our territory and tribe. Those symbols and totems are powerful mojo for the other side if we don’t lay claim to them. They mean more than just surface martial nationalistic nonsense — indeed, if this thesis is true, they may be more powerful than Christian fundamentalism. At the very least, liberals should embrace the symbols like the flag and the constitution and all the apple pie traditions with the knowledge that if we don’t, a more pernicious force will. It’s about the power of deeply held territorial impulses. Christianity and Islam are only a couple of thousand years old. As the author says, the [fundamentalists] have “severely understated the authority for their position.” Perhaps we should stake that authority for our side in service of our ideals.
I can think of a few ways we might do this. The first that comes to mind is to pit fundamentalism against territory. If this retreat to fundamentalism is really a default to primitive biology, then we can frame this as America vs the fundamentalists. And lucky for us, it’s easy to do and will confuse the shit out of the right. We have a built in boogie man fundamentalist named Osama on whom we can pin all this ANTI-AMERICAN fundamentalist dogma while subtly drawing the obvious parallels between him and the homegrown variety.
We start by having the womens’ groups decrying the Islamic FUNDAMENTALIST view of womens rights. These FUNDAMENTALISTS want to roll back the clock and make women answer to men. In AMERICA we don’t believe in that. Then we have the Human Rights Campaign loudly criticizing the Islamic FUNDAMENTALISTS for it’s treatment of gays. In AMERICA we believe that all people have inalienable rights. The ACLU puts out a statement about the lack of civil liberties in Islamic FUNDAMENTALIST theocracies. In AMERICA we believe in the Bill of Rights, not the word of unelected mullahs.
You got a problem with that Jerry? Pat? Karl????
Pit American liberalism against Islamic Fundamentalism. Since it’s pretty much exactly like Christian fundamentalism, perhaps at least a few people will draw the obvious conclusions. But more importantly, it places us with, as the author says, “one foot solidly in our deep territorial impulses with the other foot free to push the margin, to expand the definition of those who belong in “our” territory.” This way we define the territory as being ours while at the same time placing the fundamentalists firmly outside of it by using the symbols of territory instead of religion.
I am concluding more and more that we are dealing with a pre-modern political situation in a post modern world. It’s not about issues, it’s about tribal identity. We have to start thinking in terms of how to communicate our ideals and our vision in symbolic terms. Go for the gut, not the head. My view is that we can do this by using our sacred political symbols to illustrate what we believe in. People use the Bible and that’s just fine. But it isn’t the only game in town. “This Land Is Your Land” can bring a tear to the eye as well. And if this fellow is correct in that religion is being used in service of something far more primal than we realize then there is definitely more than one way to skin a cat.
I’d be interested in hearing other ideas you may have about how we might communicate by keeping “one foot solidly in our deep territorial impulses with the other foot free to push the margin,” without compromising our principles or our agenda.
(And yes, I’ve read Lakoff. He’s great, but we need to consider not only framing, but the context of the argument and the “feelings” into which we want to tap. I think this issue of territorial impulse and biological default settings in times of rapid social change is one way to think about it. There are, undoubtedly many others.)
Thanks to this exceptional rundown of the “abstinence only” story from Barbara O’Brien, from which I got the link to the article. I highly recommend you read both if you are interested in this topic.
Update: My apologies to Barbara O’Brien, whose name I got wrong and have since corrected.
For those of you looking for a special gift for that angler in your family (and they are legion) check out these beautiful handcrafted split cane flyrods made by reader and penpal JDW and family. I don’t know much about fishing, but I certainly can appreciate fine craftsmanship. These are incredible:
Even if you don’t fish, check out these beauties at the J.D Wagner web page.
I don’t care about the stupid weblog awards. My post was a joke, a little poke of fun at myself and the rest of the left blogosphere. I do not endorse “rigging the vote” nor did I issue a call to arms to do so. If people took my little joke that way then they are a) stupid and b) stupid.
I don’t care about shit like this. So please, stop with the e-mails. Go bother somebody else. I don’t even know who you are.
The Donkey Rising has a very useful list for us to use during this shopping season. May I suggest e-mailing it to your Democratic friends?
With the holidays upon us, some of us might wish to be mindful of who we patronize relative to their Election Cycle political donations, as reported by the Center for Responsive Politics.
WITH US:
* Price Club/Costco donated $225K, of which 99% went to democrats;
* Rite Aid, $517K, 60% to democrats;
* Magla Products (Stanley tools, Mr. Clean), $22K, 100% to democrats;
* Warnaco (undergarments), $55K, 73% to democrats;
* Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, $153K, 99% to democrats;
* Estee Lauder, $448K, 95% to democrats;
* Guess ? Inc., $145K, 98% to democrats;
* Calvin Klein, $78K, 100% to democrats;
* Liz Claiborne, Inc., $34K, 97% to democrats;
* Levi Straus, $26K, 97% to democrats;
* Olan Mills, $175K, 99% to democrats.
* Gallo Winery, $337K, 95% to democrats;
* Southern Wine & Spirits, $213K, 73% to democrats;
* Joseph E. Seagrams & Sons (includes beverage business, plus considerable media interests), $2M+, 67% democrats.
* Sonic Corporation, $83K, 98% democrat;
* Triarc Companies (Arby’s, T.J. Cinnamon’s, Pasta Connections), $112K, 96% Democrats;
Coors, $174K, 92% to republicans; (also Budweiser – sd)
Brown-Forman Corp. (Southern Comfort, Jack Daniels, Bushmills, Korbel wines – as well as Lennox China, Dansk, Gorham Silver), $644, 80% to republicans;
Pilgrim’s Pride Corp. (chicken), $366K, 100% republican;
(Does anybody know what the restaurant chains are so anxious about? GM foods? Minimum wage hikes? Why are they all giving big bucks to the Republicans? It kind of freaks me out.)
Let’s be sure to spread some Holiday cheer to the good guys — and stick it to the others. This is America, after all.
Rittenhouse reveals that the torrid, heaving, breathless tome known as Sisters has been disappeared from the web:
…Mrs. Biscuitbarrel dropped me a note this afternoon telling me Live Journal has blocked her access to the site’s template. And I notice that Mrs. Biscuitbarrel’s web site has been taken down, presumably by Live Journal.
No word yet on who instigated this attack.
I don’t know, I have the feeling this isn’t the last we’ve seen of Sisters.
Oh, it will be impossible to keep this panting paeon to Montana’s sapphic history away from a public that demands it. If Mrs. VP were a real capitalist she’d option it for a seven part series on Showtime. Barring that, we shall have to be content with furtive peeks into her fertile imagination from the far corners of the internet. A raging thirst for softcore GOP bodice ripping girl-love must and will be slaked.
It’s official: if you are linked by The Left (d/b/a “Happy Furry Puppy Story Time With Norbizness”), the chances of your winning the 2004 Weblog Awards (previously known as “The Awardies”, “The Cable Ace Awards”, the “Cross de Guerre with Palm Leaf”, and “The 12th Annual Montgomery Burns Award For Outstanding Achievment in the Field of Exellence”) are virtually nil. There is simply no other non-insane explanation for this phenomenon, as you will see in the following bill of particulars,:
— in the Best Overall Weblog category, the combined votes of Talking Points Memo and Political Animal, whose hits are in the millions, are approximately one-eleventh the total of The Corner at the National Review, a repository of two-word posts, fake e-mails, and John Derbyshire. These cretins also are also outdoing the combined efforts of Reason’s Hit & Run and Crooked Timber by 10-to-1 in the Best Group Blog category.
— in the Best Humor Weblog category, Jesus’ General, the only recognizable left-of-center site out of 15 nominees, is garnering only 5.5% of the vote, distantly trailing some tepid Onion-lite and Dave Barry-lite right-of-center sites. Even resident Martha Stewart in bondage fetishist, Jeff G. at Protein Wisdom, is getting smoked like a Doral Light by Fred Leuchter, proving that the curse of The Left makes no distinction in its thorough disembowelings.
[…]
— Dan Drezner and Digby’s Hullabaloo are being dealt humiliating set-backs in the Best of the Top 100 category. Sorry guys, it’s nothing personal.
In fact, Matthew Yglesias is the only liberal winning in any category. It happens to be “best liberal blog.” In all other categories, the left is getting its ass kicked.
Ah, I remember those good old days when we could make a publicly held media company back down in a matter of days. Seems like only yesterday. Now we are a bare hulk of a blogospheric movement. The shame.
I see that certain people in the Democratic leadership have been listening to Rush Limbaugh again:
We’ve got to repudiate, you know, the most strident and insulting anti-American voices out there sometimes on our party’s left … We can’t have our party identified by Michael Moore and Hollywood as our cultural values. – Al From, CEO, Democratic Leadership Council
Yes, it’s always a good idea to sling the word “anti-American” around when talking about members of your own party. It’s so helpful to reiterate Republican talking points in public and suggest that Michael Moore and “Hollywood” must be repudiated because they are unacceptable to the public despite the fact that their “product” seems to sell quite well to a rather significant faction of the party.
Meanwhile, the Republicans have been very successful inviting their sociopathic lunatic fringe right onto the dais and treating them like royalty. You didn’t see the Republicans rejecting Falwell or Coulter because they say inflammatory things, do you? No, because a large number of their constituents think they are terrific. It’s called having respect for your grassroots.
Perhaps the reason the Republicans are winning is because the American people simply appreciate something other than a bucket of lukewarm spit in their leaders and instinctively see through all this silly “Sistah Soljah” bullshit for the half assed, lame symbolic capitulation it really is.
