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More Culture War

Let me make one thing perfectly clear with respect to my post below. The south is not a monolith and “middle America” is not only the south. The south votes more than 40% consistently with the Democrats, many of whom are white progressives and african American.

I am talking about a cultural attitude, much of which has metastisized to other parts of the country, in which liberals are demonized as “the other” and eliminationist rhetoric is commonly cloaked in appeals to religion and “values.” This, I believe, is an outgrowth of a long standing, grievance mind-set with its roots in the south. However, it is being exploited by a bunch of rich, greedy opportunists who have spent billions creating a media infrastructire — particularly talk radio — to pound these attitudes into people’s heads. This dichotomy in our country has been with us from the beginning, but this is the first time it’s been marketed successfully by the immoral oligarchs who, in a sweet bit of irony, are making a tidy profit at it.

For those who are criticising me for not providing solutions but simply whining about the situation, I plead guilty. I wish I had the answer. What I have learned, after years of believing in the DLC experiment, is that this problem isn’t a matter of compromising on issues. The issues are weapons and each time we capitulate they pull another one out of their sleeve. I no longer believe it is really about these issues, it’s about something else.

After the cultural upheavals of the 1960’s and 1970’s and our subsequent losses in presidential politics, we had to retool. We were saddled with the image of tax and spend, weak on defense and immorality and there had been a backlash. The Party set about trying to reclaim the center by taking down some of the cultural shibboleths that we thought were holding us back and trying some innovative economic ideas to persuade Americans that we could be trusted with their tax dollars. The end of the cold war gave us some breathing room on national security.

With the help of Ross Perot, we managed to elect what would have been a moderate Republican not 15 years earlier. And the Republicans went mad. They immediately started moving the goalposts. It did not matter how far to the right Bill Clinton moved they moved farther. There was no meeting in the middle on common ground. They would not allow there to be any common ground.

Still, Clinton successfully managed the economy and had the good luck to preside over a once in a lifetime technological revolution and he succeeded in ending the decades long assumptions about Democrats and the economy. It’s his highest achievement. (It was my hope that Kerry could do the same on national security.)

But, I have come to realize that the main problem isn’t our competence in those areas and indeed, it never was. They were just another “issue” with which to beat us over the head. The problem is the same as it ever was. It’s the culture war and it didn’t begin in the 1960’s.

It grew out of America’s original sin (or perhaps it’s original hypocrisy) about slavery. And it’s colored our vision of ourselves ever since. It’s roots are in the north south divide, but it also cuts across rural and urban, modern and traditional. It’s a problem of identity,grievance and intractability. It’s centered in religion and race.

Today, I think the rhetoric coming from the right wing media is the toxic poison that is spreading this culture war into our body politic so quickly. Most liberals don’t hear what is said about them to millions upon millions of “middle Americans,” in which every grievance, every problem is laid at the foot of the “liberal elite.” The message here is of tribal warfare. Rush and Sean and Bill are not shining examples of moral rectitude and everyone knows it. They are warriors. Down the dial and in the pulpits this battle is explained as fight for moral values, in which the liberal elite is forcing it’s decadence into their workplaces and their homes. Again, the fight is one of life and death. Even for those who don’t listen to the talkers on the radio and in the pews, the message seeps out. Us and them.

Until recently I believed that this culture war was on its way out. But the sophisticated use of modern media to exploit this long standing undercurrent of grievance has changed all that. It may be hundreds of years old but it has new life and it’s not going to go away by ekeing out a win in the electoral college.

I don’t have the answer. But, I do think it’s important that we recognise when things aren’t working. Making a show of compromising on social issues isn’t working. And I say that as somone who always, until now, thought it would.

It Won’t Work

This is more of the same, but I think it’s important so I’m going to keep writing about it. The Democratic party has tried valiantly to move to the center in an attempt to convince “middle America” that they are not hostile to their values. After the electoral debacle of the 80’s it seemed like a good idea and it gave Clinton the opportunity to slip in under the wire in 1992 under very opportune circumstances. But, this was all contingent upon the idea of a “new South” born of modern ideas and a dynamic economy. Those conditions seem to have manifested themselves differently than forecasted (mostly, in my view, because of the rise of talk radio) and I think it’s time that we made some adjustments.

We are beginning to look like Charlie Brown with the football. We need to recognise what these people really want from us.

Kevin Drum wonders why we don’t tweak the abortion and porn issues to peel away some of the values voters from the Republicans. Linking to Matt Yglesias’s piece today in which he elaborates on his red state “chump” thesis in which he points out that the Republicans never deliver much to the conservative Christians, Kevin says:

There’s a germ of an idea here, but it needs to be teased out. The abortion point is a good one, for example. Liberals are in favor of choice, not in favor of abortion per se, so why shouldn’t we talk more often about policies that reduce the need for abortions while continuing to defend the right of choice itself? This won’t impress the hardcore evangelicals, of course, but it might appeal to some of their more moderate neighbors. Ditto for porn.

Gay rights and feminisim are another thing entirely. Liberals are just fundamentally in favor of this stuff, and we shouldn’t even think about trying to talk our way around it. If we lose votes for it, we lose votes for it.

Basically, then, I think Matt has a point worth thinking about, but we have to figure out which issues it applies to. Abortion and porn are good examples, and that’s why master politician Bill Clinton talked about making abortion “safe, legal, and rare” and supported anti-porn measures like the V-chip. Neither of these things infringed on any liberal principles, but they did address some of the real-world concerns of those ordinary heartland voters we hear so much about.

The fundamental problem is that the super Christians won’t compromise on principle and the rest of these “values voters” are hypocrites. Nobody bought the v-chip in red state America or anywhere else. They don’t want to take responsibility for what comes into their TV’s, they want to hector people for “forcing” them to watch these horrible things while they pass the popcorn. These same people listen to Rush refer to Abu Ghraib as “blowing off steam” and think that Bill O’Reilly is a salt of the earth regular guy despite his little obsession with porn stars. There’s your heartland values for you and they look surprisingly like the values you see on your television set. That’s because they are.

“Heartland values” is just another world for tribal identity. And this division is about crying Uncle.

Here’s a passage from Lincoln’s speech at the Cooper Union (thanks CRL) in 1860. Tell me if this doesn’t strike a chord:

The question recurs, what will satisfy them? Simply this: We must not only let them alone, but we must somehow, convince them that we do let them alone. This, we know by experience, is no easy task. We have been so trying to convince them from the very beginning of our organization, but with no success. In all our platforms and speeches we have constantly protested our purpose to let them alone; but this has had no tendency to convince them. Alike unavailing to convince them, is the fact that they have never detected a man of us in any attempt to disturb them.

These natural, and apparently adequate means all failing, what will convince them? This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly – done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated – we must place ourselves avowedly with them. Senator Douglas’ new sedition law must be enacted and enforced, suppressing all declarations that slavery is wrong, whether made in politics, in presses, in pulpits, or in private. We must arrest and return their fugitive slaves with greedy pleasure. We must pull down our Free State constitutions. The whole atmosphere must be disinfected from all taint of opposition to slavery, before they will cease to believe that all their troubles proceed from us.

So what else is new? We are dealing with an absolutist culture that demands total capitulation or nothing. Compromise will not work and it certainly will not work on these “values” issues. (Indeed, I think it’s part of what makes us look weak to some other factions who might be willing to vote for us.) This is the same old shit over and over and over again. We backed off on the death penalty, gun control, welfare, affirmative action and here we are with a new slate of issues about gays. Tomorrow it will be creationism. Until we realize that their condition is that we FULLY EMBRACE their cultural dominance in both word and deed, they will not be satisfied.

It is not enough that they be left alone to do what they choose. We must join them and do it thoroughly and with fervor. No amount of tweaking will work. Their real beef is psychological and tribal. Issues are fungible.

Another Winning Issue For The Future

As you know, now that the real Americans have spoken, I think it’s important that we take on the moral issue head on if we hope to win in Real America. Creationism will be our flagship, but there are many other topics we explore, like making sure that all textbooks reflect the fact that marriage is between a man and a woman as Texas just did. The books had used the words “marriage partners” but the school board luckily saw through it:

Terri Leo, a Republican, said she was pleased with the publishers’ changes. She had led the effort to get the publishers to change the texts, objecting to what she called “asexual stealth phrases” like “individuals who marry.”

It’s those stealth phrases that we have to fight against if we want to get the respect of the fine salt of the earth Real Americans. It’s not so much the positions we take, it’s the sneakiness they can’t abide.

Neither publisher made all the changes that Ms. Leo initially sought. For instance, one passage that was proposed to be added to the teacher’s editions read: “Opinions vary on why homosexuals, lesbians and bisexuals as a group are more prone to self-destructive behaviors like depression, illegal drug use and suicide.”

Watch What You Say

Via Avedon Carol, here’s a creepy story of a blogger who got turned into the FBI by a reader and was visited by the Secret Service.

A WRITER on popular blog-site LiveJournal has posted of her nightmare ordeal with the US Secret Service, an event spurred by a posting she made to her blog criticising George Bush prior to the Presidential Election earlier this week.

Whilst the offending post has been removed – to spare other users further Federal interference, according to author ‘anniesj’ – you can see her account of events in full, which has been left as a word to the wise.

The post in question is gone, so I have no way of evaluating what it said. However, this combined with the fun story we heard the other day about the romance novelist who got her computer and books confiscated because she was researching terrorism in Cambodia, I think it’s safe to say that four more years with a Justice Department that considers torture justified is not exactly comforting to those of us who write mean things about Republicans or use red flagged research terms on the internet.

Our New Issue

This could be the one, folks, where we prove our bona fides to the red states:

A suburban American school board found itself in court Monday after it tried to placate Christian fundamentalist parents by placing a sticker on its science textbooks saying evolution was “a theory, not a fact.”

Atlanta’s Cobb County School Board, the second largest board in Georgia, added the sticker two years ago after a 2,300-strong petition attacked the presentation of “Darwinism unchallenged.” Some parents wanted creationism — the theory that God created humans as related in the Bible — to be taught alongside evolution.

[…]

The board says the stickers were motivated by a desire to establish a greater understanding of different viewpoints. “They improve the curriculum, while also promoting an attitude of tolerance for those with different religious beliefs,” said Linwood Gunn, a lawyer for Cobb County schools.

The controversy began when the school board’s textbook selection committee ordered $8 million worth of the science books in March 2002. Marjorie Rogers, a parent who does not believe in evolution, protested and petitioned the board to add a sticker and an insert setting out other explanations for the origins of life. “It is unconstitutional to teach only evolution,” she said. “The school board must allow the teaching of both theories of origin.”

Her efforts galvanized the fundamentalist community. “God created earth and man in his image,” another parent, Patricia Fuller, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “Leave this garbage out of the textbooks. I don’t want anybody taking care of me in a nursing home some day to think I came from a monkey.”

Wendi Hill, one of the parents who signed the petition, said: “We believe the Bible is correct in that God created man. I don’t expect the public school system to teach only creationism, but I think it should be given its fair share.”

Liberals bi-coastal elites once again show that they don’t have proper respect for middle America by insisting that science and religion are two different subjects. Until we learn to stop condescending and quit showing this kind of contempt for heartland beliefs we will lose.

Again, I say this should be OUR issue. Let’s run on a national pro-creationism ticket in 2006. Then maybe they will let us back into America.

Illegitimacy

Atrios has written a post about our new obsession with the voting irregularities and as a member of the reality based community he is rightly concerned that we not make assumptions without actual proof.

I’ve been grappling with how to handle this story as well. I’ve not been flogging it mostly because I think that the electoral college is a crock and that the popular vote should determine who wins elections. Since Bush won by three million or so, it’s hard for me not to see him as legitimate. I haven’t seen any voting anomolies on that kind of scale. If I’m judging by whether the will of the people was observed, then I think it’s likely that more people truly wanted Bush than wanted Kerry. To me, that is the spirit of Democracy and I can’t discount that reality.

On the other hand, the exit poll question is a real one. The explanations by Mitofsky and company are simply not adequate — that Kerry voters were so much more anxious to talk to the pollsters that they actively sought them out. Nonsense. Something else happened here and they need to figure out what it was. If vote fraud on a scale large enough to encompass millions and millions of votes took place then we are deep, deep shit. Unfortunately, I’ve seen nothing that could account for that except an extremely broad conspiracy in many states with different kinds of voting machines and there is no proof of that. (Yes, I know about the states with paper ballot vs electronic machines study, but it doesn’t prove anything, either.)

Do I think the vote in Ohio might have been manipulated? Sure. But as Atrios says, we haven’t yet seen any evidence of large scale fraud, although there is a lot of evidence that our voting systems are terribly fucked up. I have no doubt that the vote could have been fixed in the state with a partisan in charge who wanted to disallow registrations because of the paper stock they were printed on and a vote machine mamufacturer who promised to deliver the state for Republicans. But proof of a conspiracy has not emerged, nor have the numbers in any way added up to the numbers that might have changed the election. There could have been fraud, the lines were absurdly long, intimidation and vote suppression certainly took place on some level. And until we fix these problems with our voting system we will always wonder from now on if elections are rigged.

This is where the real problem is and why I’ve been reluctant to push this story. Many Democrats are coming close to believing that our elections are broadly illegitimate. Except for Florida in 2000 I have not yet seen proof of that although I’m certainly suspicious. What I fear is that if we continue down this path of doubting election results — as opposed to mounting a serious effort to revamp voting procedures in order to ensure fairness — then I think we will begin to lose voters. People have to believe their vote counts in order to participate. If we push this illegitimacy issue beyond situations like Florida in 2000, where the machinations are proven and observable, I think it will hurt us in the long run.

I am absolutely in favor of insisting on an audit trail for vote counts. (And it seems to me that as with any accounting procedure we should audit some portion of the vote on a regular basis to make sure that hanky panky isn’t happening.) If we don’t, then stealing millions of votes really will no longer require a vast right wing conspiracy but merely Roger Stone and a laptop. But, I think we need to be careful to frame this issue in a way that doesn’t give people the excuse to drop out because they “know” the vote is rigged. Once that happens, it might as well be.

Update: I don’t mean in any way to demean those who are pursuing this story. I think it’s vital to find out what happened and pursue remedies. I hope the Democratic party makes it a top priority. It’s clear that our voting system is unreliable. But, I haven’t yet seen evidence that would overturn these election results, so I’m not prepared at this point to say it was stolen. I’m worried that doing that might just make it harder for us in the future.

Update II: A commenter makes the good point that the blogs are the very vehicle by which this story should be flogged, just as talk radio flogged Vince Foster and the like. To be clear, I have no real moral or ethical problem with pushing this story. Idon’t see much evidence that Bush didn’t win the popular vote, but after watching the GOP operate these last dozen years, I have absolutely no loyalty to those sort of lofty ideals anymore. If the vote was stolen in Ohio or Florida, then the election was stolen, period.

But, as I said, my problem with flogging the idea that the election was stolen on the basis of what we know now is that I think it might end up lowering voter participation on our side if people feel the system is rigged and we can’t prove it. I just don’t think it works in our favor to push this kind of electoral impotence two elections in a row. If we keep our powder dry proof may emerge and maybe we can make a serious case to the public. Otherwise, I think it’s best to frame this not as a stolen election but rather as a hideously run election system that must be fixed or we may be cutting off our nose to spite our face.

For the best round-up of these election stories, I would recommend the Sideshow and Bradblog. They have the most comprehensive overviews of all the stories and analysis that I’ve seen.

So, Whaddo We Do Now

The Progress Report asked readers to tell them what they thought the Party should do now in light of this loss. They had thousands of responses and picked forty of them to post.

It’s quite and interesting array of ideas. Sadly, nobody sent in my idea that we desperately need to put on a better “campaign show” with solid gold dancers, sky divers and lion tamers (metaphrically speaking) in order to get people’s attention in this raucous, disjointed post modern world. We are such an earnest bunch. Oh well. Maybe somebody will at least think to hire away Bush’s sound guy. The sound compression on the cheers at his rallies was masterful.

And, nobody recognized that negative, ugly, hateful campaigning was what worked. It seems that we all feel that if we had just reached out and touched people we could have made a difference. We don’t “connect,” which may be true, but let’s face facts — Bush doesn’t “connect” with people’s better natures, he “connects” directly to their id. And, I’m afraid that the id trumps finer feelings in many, many people. Yet a large number of these suggestions have to do with sincere appeals to try harder to empathise and relate to those who didn’t vote for us. Hey, maybe it’ll work. We are the “nurturant parent,” after all.

On a practical level, I have no problem with voting for southerners or westerners, never have. Contrary to the new myth emerging about the godless heathens on the coasts, we elitists have quite happily voted for Texans and southern, gospel preaching Democrats quite often in the last 40 years. The fact that we voted in huge numbers for Johnson, Carter, Clinton and Gore would seem to put the lie to this belief that we hold southerners in contempt, but what do I know? It certainly does appear that we heathen blue staters quite willingly vote for people outside of our alleged latte-liberal bicoastal culture, yet those heartland middle American red states who are complaining about our condescension refuse to ever vote for someone outside their own region. (Except, of course, those rock-ribbed Hollywood movie stars.) Just who holds who in contempt again?

Anyway, read all the suggestions. They are all good hearted and sincere and many contain good ideas. Only cynics like me subscribe to the dazzle ’em with bullshit school and that’s probably a good thing.

Ronnie, Junior and Arnie tell me that it’s not about anything more than a certain macho style that gets these people. None of those guys have the remotest relationship to salt of the earth middle America, but they play the archetypal leadership role of All American manly man very well.

Whose Coalition Is It Anyway?

Xan over at corrente has a very interesting post up about “The Prosperity Project.” I wrote a long piece about it last year and blogger ate it (before I learned to save my posts.) I didn’t have the heart to re-write it and the moment passed.

But, Xan has researched this very interesting and (so far) underreported story of a soft intimidation project on the part of Republican businessmen.This is a very sophisticated operation under the auspices of BIPAC, a long time Republican business organization. I don’t know how many of you have had a boss who was a vociferous Republican, but I have. They couldn’t tell me for whom to vote, but they sure made it clear that if I spoke out it wouldn’t be looked upon kindly. And plenty of others, who normally wouldn’t care a bit about politics, suddenly found that they were favored employees by going out of their way to push the bosses political agenda. This Prosperity Project works on the assumption that managers will perform to their bosses orders and recommended Prosperity Project materials (particularly its marvelously misleading web site) to “educate” workers on issues of concern to them. It looks like they pulled out the stops in this election:

Managers at more than 50,000 companies in Ohio urged employees to vote, while trying to coax them in e-mails to look at customized internal Web sites rating politicians’ votes on business issues, a project leader said. One rating gave Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry a zero last year on votes affecting manufacturers.

Greg Casey, a former U.S. Senate sergeant-at-arms who headed what he calls business’ “below-the-radar” national effort, said it resulted in 30 million electronic contacts with workers, about 700,000 the day before the election.

Casey believes that the “Prosperity Project” had a big impact in Ohio, citing research suggesting that for every 10 employees who scanned company Web sites, one was motivated to vote. He said Ohio companies made 1.3 million employee contacts, more than nine times Bush’s 136,483-vote victory margin in the state.

Prosperity Project officials, however, say they are “respectful” to employees and merely offer them access to information affecting their companies’ prospects in a tough global economy.

I think that we are beginning to get the outlines of an election that had a number of under the radar GOP “grassroots” campaigns with little overt national direction. The Republicans seem to have been successful by presenting a candidate who wasn’t specific, but rather presented an image of leadership that people felt comfortable with. Various groups then ran a series of campaigns aimed at specific constituencies that applied their particular policy preference to this vague agenda.

But the untold story of the 2004 election, according to national religious leaders and grass-roots activists, is that evangelical Christian groups were often more aggressive and sometimes better organized on the ground than the Bush campaign. The White House struggled to stay abreast of the Christian right and consulted with the movement’s leaders in weekly conference calls. But in many respects, Christian activists led the charge that GOP operatives followed and capitalized upon.

This was particularly true of the same-sex marriage issue. One of the most successful tactics of social conservatives — the ballot referendums against same-sex marriage in 13 states — bubbled up from below and initially met resistance from White House aides, Christian leaders said.

In dozens of interviews since the election, grass-roots activists in Ohio, Michigan and Florida credited President Bush’s chief political adviser, Karl Rove, with setting a clear goal that became a mantra among conservatives: To win, Bush had to draw 4 million more evangelicals to the polls than he did in 2000. But they also described a mobilization of evangelical Protestants and conservative Roman Catholics that took off under its own power.

This is interesting because it’s exactly what the Democrats have been criticized for all these years — being a coalition of single issue consituencies developing their own agendas, not working well with others and creating havoc on the ability to govern when the party is in power. When each group thinks they are the single reason the party won an election, they tend to think they have priority and it’s a big headache. The Republicans have been pretty good at keeping their coalition together with appeals to patriotism and fear of the other. We’ll see how long that works for them. Trying to keep the New Deal coalition together was very difficult — and that was with a very impressive record of achievement that materially changed peoples lives and brought the country through a depression and WWII to a period of unprecedented prosperity.

Meanwhile, for the first time in memory, the Democrats put away their differences and worked together. And much to my surprise and delight, I’m not seeing the circular firing squad nearly as vicious as it usually is after a loss. Perhaps we can hang tough long enough for the Republicans to get a taste of governing with single issue constituencies for a while. Good luck with that.

Tribal Confusion

May I just point out that if you are not reading James Wolcott every day you are missing out on life. Today, he takes Lil’ Andy to task for his strange appearance on Bill Maher in which he seemed terribly confused about who he is now that he’s voted for a losing Democrat in a time of right wing ascendancy. It’s not easy being a conservative gay catholic in this big old Red State monolith.

Wolcott says:

Like an infant banging his spoon on the high-chair tray, Sullivan threw quite a tantrum last night after Maher had the GALL to interview Noam Chomsky. Sullivan sputtered that Chomsky made “millions” going around the world telling audiences America was “evil.” Now I don’t pretend to have read or heard all of the millions of words Chomsky has written and spoken, but “evil” doesn’t seem to be a prominent word in his vocabulary, being so theological; he tends to talk in terms of brutal realpolitick and self-interest. And it’s highly unlikely he’s raking in “millions”–if he is, he isn’t splurging on wardrobe and pimpmobiles.

Since every war criminal in the current Bush administration will be able to command huge honoraria on the lecture circuit and lucrative positions on corporate boards once they leave the bloodshed behind, working up ire over a professor’s speaking fees seems a bit much.

Unable to impart the red depths of Chomsky’s villainy to host and panel, Sullivan attacked Chomsky for being symptomatic of an America-hating elitist left. “That’s why you lost this week!” Sullivan said.*

“You said you voted for Kerry!” Maher shot back. “You lost too!”

As Wolcott says, Maher was particularly good this show. (Last week’s freakish appearance by what seemed to be a brain damaged Kevin Costner still hasn’t quite worked its way through my system yet.) Andrew Sullivan’s outburst about Chomsky was uncomfortably out of sync with what Chomsky had said. I’m no particular fan (or student) of Chomsky, but his actual influence on lives here and around the world is somewhat less real and palpable than that of the people who just voted to enshrine Sullivan’s second class citizen status into their state constitutions. I can’t help but feel that this enraged reaction may have been just a bit of desperate psychological misdirection — not a pretty thing to watch on a Friday night with a couple of glasses of wine in you. Ugh.

Wolcott also noted the strange fact that Sullivan turned his back to the audience and gave himself a thorough butt massage right on camera at the end of the show. I noticed it, but I chalked it up to the wine and the long sleepless week I’d just had. Now I’m really freaked out.

Update: It was no drunken hallucination. Here’s the video courtesy of One Good Move

The Casio

Atrios mentioned last week that interesting things are going to happen here in the blogosphere and I have heard some of the same rumblings. I don’t know how it will shake out, but it’s clear that the nascent media infrastructure that we see is not going to fold tent but rather be expanded and grow, both from individual effort and institutional support.

This election was a heartbreaker, and the country is in for a very bumpy four years I’m afraid. But I don’t get the sense that Democrats are seriously thinking of dropping out or folding up tent. Indeed, I see the opposite.

One of the great lessons of history is that magnanimity in victory is a much wiser path to peace than rubbing the losers nose in their defeat. From what I’m seeing and hearing, some people haven’t learned that lesson very well. I suspect they will come to regret it.