I'MMA LET YOU FINISH
[wiping tear from eye]
Beautiful. Just beautiful.
my life is now complete.
i'd just like to thank all of the little people who made this possible.
Wasn't this the Dukakis campaign slogan?
You have to thank the little people.
well, wonkism won't beat right wing bokononism, which is based on living by the untruths that make one happy.
mondo dentro:
can I carry your memes for you around the hive?
Great stuff.
Every country contains a segment of the population who are able to perceive the image of the Virgin Mary in a dirty windowpane. How they can be certain it is she, since no one knows what she looked like, is something that only the observers can answer. These people, though, are not usually in charge of the government. In the case of W, one is uncertain what visions haunt his mind.
so what IS "an effective counternarrative to Apocalyptic Rightist Populism."??????
I mean what SHOULD we be saying?
Be rational withgout being wonkist?
But...but, what's a rational wonk to do?
Dman fine statement by the way.
The comment from mondo was beautifully written. In general, reciting facts only hurts the liberal cause, because as true and as factual our message may be, right-wingers are able to spin it through their narrative by pointing out how elitist we are. In the words of the so-called
Intellectual Conservative,
Liberal politicians lie so frequently and so glibly that "liberal" and "liar" ought to be one word -- libliar, perhaps.
...One of the defining characteristics of liberals is the notion that they are so much more intelligent than everyone else (particularly blacks and Hispanics)...
See, liberals just lie, spouting off lots of made-up facts just to make ourselves sound more intelligent than our opponents.
Somehow, our message has to appeal to the irrational, narcissistic fantasies of Americans. No easy task.
Alex - you took the words out of my mouth.
Well, we should tout our successes a little more, for one thing. Criticizing the other side just gives them the spotlight.
But...but, what's a rational wonk to do? - catalexis
Become a pragmatic populist...
Poetic populism ain't a bad route, either. Make it sing.
Felicitations! Mondo! Getting quoted in the main blog is every commenter's dream, but getting your own post...well,
i am not worthy
i am not worthy
i am not kareem...er, sorry, got confused there.
Interestingly enough, Clinton was often portrayed as "the Wonk President," but he usually kept it at a "retail" level while keeping his more abstract stuff as platitudinous as possible...
It's not fair to quote him out of context.
A.
The only effective counternarrative is for us to concoct more gruesome ways to fantasize about killing conservatives. The duck pit just isn't getting the job done anymore.
Read it in its context. Even better.
I up the stakes by asking whether the most viable recourse in swaying the national psyche is to subvert their position by a revision to the level of our discourse.
The vitiriol they spout sells on a visceral level to the masses in general. Would it work in our favor if we were to replace it with a vision of our own? Or is that anti-thetical to the liberal scepticism and "rational wonkism" we so cherish?
Even if so, would we give it up if that would help to win an election? Should we?
Shlomo said
Somehow, our message has to appeal to the irrational, narcissistic fantasies of Americans. No easy task.
and earlier Alex queried
so what IS "an effective counternarrative to Apocalyptic Rightist Populism."
What I was trying to say in the post was that, in the parlance of contemporary system theory, the counternarrative that works will be an "emergent property" of effective politics. We are all collectively struggling to find this narrative with all of this (one hopes intelligently guided) blog babble. I genuinely meant what I said: this is not something that can be completely centrally organized--just look at the colossal failure of the Democrats and their "sensing" (polling) and "perceptual" (political consultants) apparatus ever since Reagan/Gingrich. (And please don't give me Clinton as a success story--the biggest evidence of Progressive/DNC failure was his vulnerability to impeachment and the way this lead to the guy who is currently sitting in the White House.)
The successful campaigns that are beginning to emerge are finding ways to tap into this distributed intelligence (and money) on the left.
That being said, though, here are some items I see, with the caviat that they are admittedly rather brainstormy and horribly horribly incomplete. Probably a bit incoherent as well. Try to just see them as a gestalt. Cross your eyes a bit, and maybe it will come into focus!
First, I respectfully disagree with Shlomo. We can't get were we want to go by cynical manipulation of the body politic. Politics is always to some extent "manipulation", but we have to use "white magic" not "black magic". We have to use love and optimism, not hate and fear.
The point is Progressives represent true American Values. Lefties and Progressives have to once and for all detangle themselves form European style leftwing thinking. We're Americans, goddammit. We have our own progressive, socialist, collectivist ideas that go back to the founding of our country, and that have always been at war with the unpatriotic rich, but they allow for individualism, and they don't have fuckall to do with Marx.
Think of the New Deal as a model. That's a BIG meme system--really think through how it worked. But think of modernizing and adapting it to today.
Think GIs after WWII. Think GI Bill, low interest 30 year mortgages. These things created the middle class and the American Way of Life. Think hard working immigrants. Think small businessmen, shopkeepers, professionals, craftspeople practicing real capitalism, and how the crony capitalists and robber barons are completely antithetical to that way of life. Think late night TV and shlocky horror flicks. Think individualism, Pop culture, Sinatra and Elvis, Big Band music, Rock and Roll, and Jazz. Think fast cars, fast women, film noir (yes, we import ideas into our culture--even from France!), action films, and drive ins. Think Lenny Bruce. Think X
wow. cut off the last half of the post. since i was automatic writing, don't think i can get it back...
sigh.
Stop drinking so early in the day.
actually, one might argue that the problem is not drinking enough so early in the day.
sort of an interesting twist on the glass half empy/half full argument!
I think the magic hour just arrived. I'm going to toast your post, even though I don't understand it.
that's good. it should help the comprehension as well.
The point is Progressives represent true American Values.
Bam! And there is a meme we need to set in motion.
I do have slight issue with the subsequent idea of detangling ourselves with European leftist thought.
Will it might be necessary in order to strip the stigma that is attached to it, the reality is that it was precisely European progressive thought that inspired the creation of the United States of America. Sure, over time our polemics have taken on a subtle, distinct flavor, but the near root is still the same. We cannot deny it, only minimize its perceived attachment to American liberalism in order to counter conservative revulsion.
I loved the last bit of the post. The things that make (or made depending on your level of cynicism) America a beacon for the world are, by and large, the products of liberal thought.
Now I get it. Everything is clearer through the bottom of a glass.
Thanks, Niles.
Yeah, I know that the details can be quibbled over (or flat out argued over). The whole package is what matters.
I agree that the US is the product of progressive European thought. As Clark said on Bill Maher the other night, we are a product of the Enlightenment. And amen to that!
But my primary point here is that US progressives need to understand our own peculiarly American take on what it means to be a "lefty". We don't mean "State Control". We don't even mean that we are particularly against capitalism in the small, and against main street values in the main. We (as a group) are not particularly antireligious, either. And we shouldn't allow ourselves to be portrayed as such. We are, however, against prejudice, plutocracy, antidemocratic foreign intervention, and Talibanism in all of its forms...
That's what I was starting to get at. Almost everything Americans cherish as part of the greatness of our system and culture came out of liberalism. The New Deal. The public works projects that came out of the WPS. The labor movement gave us the five-day workweek. The 8 hour workday. The expectation that wages should reflect the cost of living. The expectation and legal obligation of employers to provide a safe workplace. Environmentalism gave us standards for purity in the water and air. Then there's the gains of the civil rights movement - gains that are shared by all Americans, not just minorities. The right of men who didn't own property to vote? Liberals did that. The right of former slaves to vote? Liberals did that. The right of women to vote? Conservatives fought that tooth and nail.
Then there's the cultural stuff. Could there have ever been a jazz, or an Elvis, or even country music if it weren't for the great diversity of our culture? If it weren't for hard-working immigrants would we have anything approaching the collasus of an entertainment industry that we have, among so many, many other things we have been gifted with by immigrants? These are just goofy examples, but I think there's something in tooting our own horn a little more often than we have been.
I do think that's what we need to do much more of. There's a danger in criticizing the right all the time, and that is that it turns the focus of both the people doing the criticizing and the (hopefully present) audience of the criticism away from what makes liberalism an atractive, alternative way of running things.
I also think some redefining is in order as well.
For one, we can't refer to what they're doing with no-bid Halliburton contracts and billions to study zip codes as capitalism any more. In a larger sense, we have to stop calling large corporations capitalist. And that's mainly because I don't think that they truly are, and also because I think that mom and pop business and modestly-sized companies competing with each other, and not against behemoths like Walmart or Starbucks, is what true American capitalism is REALLY all about.
Right, Monica.
I guess (to further respond to Niles) what I meant by advocating a distancing from Eurocentric leftism is that we need to purge ourselves of anti-Americanism. What is often called the "extreme left" (e.g. Chomsky and those who love him--including, at times, me) seems to have absorbed this through our pores unconsciously. But... this is not even accurate... Let me try again...
What I mean is, the left often makes the mistake of being "anti-American", "anti-War", "anti-Capitalist", "anti-Christian" because we associate these things with the appalling behavior and policies of the rightist power elites that we seek to fight. This is a huge error, because it hands over entire meme systems to the Right, with which they then proceed to kick the shit out of us.
We need to define these things in progressive terms. What is America? What is Capitalism? What is Patriotism? What is War and when is it legitimate? What is National Security? What were the actual values of Jesus?
How about something like this (on the business angle):
We have strayed from our values of free competition and hometown entrepenurialism. We need to take America back from greedy big business fat cats and Wall Street corporations so the little guy on Mainstreet can go after the American dream again.
How about something like this (on the business angle):
We have strayed from our values of free competition and hometown entrepenurialism. We need to take America back from greedy big business fat cats and Wall Street corporations so the little guy on Mainstreet can go after the American dream again.
Yes!! Exactly!
I come from strong immigrant petit bourgeois stock: three generations of drug store owners--a profession destroyed by the discount store. It always really pisses me off when I hear people like my late father compared to, say, the CEO of GM.
What a steaming pile of dung that is!
The problem is this kind of comparison happens from the right (who romanticize the small capitalist as a sort of populist ruse) and from the left (who see all capitalists as the same).
Mondo, I don't fully disagree with you. All of the things you mention as "true American values" are values that I view as truly American. But does the general public view it that way? Perhaps. If so, you're on to something.
The problem, from my perspective, is that much of the prosperity that has been the result of the New Deal and related policies has encouraged a sense of complacency and entitlement. Many, if not most, of the right-wing Bush supporters owe their comfort to the "big government" of the last century, yet they seem so willfully ignorant of that fact.
I'm really not advocating a "black magic", manipulative approach to politics. Such a cynical, ends-justifies-the-means approach would destroy the value of our message. But I worry about whether this generation of Americans is open to hearing about "true American values."
Many, if not most, of the right-wing Bush supporters owe their comfort to the "big government" of the last century, yet they seem so willfully ignorant of that fact.
Sad but true. And the truth is, the complacency (and even decadence) was there in the post-civil rights center-left establishment, which is why it was vulnerable when Reagan came along.
Look, you're right. We're in deep shit, and I don't know if we can turn things around fast enough to avoid a meltdown. But, my gut tells me that these values would resonate with Americans. It will require a lot of work and CREATIVE THINKING to make it happen.
"...I worry about whether this generation of Americans is open to hearing about "true American values." "
Of course they are. This generation is beginning to feel the bite of Republican service cuts more than it is the benefit of New Deal policy. Point this out to them by describing how things were better - instead of how things are worse now. Couch it in terms of a return to normalcy and feeling pride in one's own work and people will listen. One thing I think American's DON'T like to hear is negativity. Think "Morning in America", but apply traditional American Progressive attitudes, phrased positively. Negate the other side's position by stealing their phraseology to describe yours, and you can beat them at their own game without having to stoop to their level of nastiness.
Of course that's only if we're not in too deep shit. 'Cause we are, I agree, too. It's hard to bear sometimes, and easier to give up than fight it, but if we really do go down the crapper, and you and me and all the rest of here did nothing out of the ordinary to try and stop them from pulling down the handle, we'll be just as guilty for everything as they are. We have to fight. And we can do it. Gahndi took down the British Raj peacefully, MLK and other civil rights leaders brought an end to Jim Crow segregation through peaceful means. Shit, I mean, really, you think it's going to be more of a task for us to bring about a change in America?
With these incompetant money-grubbers tripping all over themselves?
One thing I think American's DON'T like to hear is negativity.
Monica, I agree with the basic point. Really, I do. The problem is, though, that, currently, the "don't be negative" strategy is being applied in a way that makes Dems look passionless and only enhances their wonkish negative charisma (Dean excepted). For example, Daschle is so busy bending over backwards trying to be "not negative" [sic] that he is nothing more than a cypher.
Furthermore, any time a guy like Frank Luntz tells me that "the people don't like negativity", I immediately know to be on my guard: he's actually just trying to declaw his opposition.
So, let's agree that it is not "negative" to deconstruct the faulty reasoning and corruption of the rightist/neocon agenda. An important aspect of leadership, and of framing our positive message, is being willing to exhibit righteous anger.
Ultimately, you are correct--we need to show passion and conviction in framing and expressing our values affirmatively. But we can't do this if we are always trying to avoid conflict. We have to be prepared, while framing this positive vision, to also choose our enemies.
This generation is beginning to feel the bite of Republican service cuts more than it is the benefit of New Deal policy.
If that's the case, then maybe there has been a tiny spec of good that has come out of the current administration.
Mondo, I hope your gut is right. My gut (admittedly a wee bit apocalyptic) tells me we have to fall a bit lower before people wake up and realize what's going on. Hopefully, this will happen in the next 6 months.
This is just a little anecdote to explain my grumpy mood:
I went to a party last weekend and talked to a guy who was recently laid off. I felt bad for him. A group of us then started talking about the economy, and then it came out that both he and his (male) partner voted for Bush and were *still* defending his tax policy! ("Double taxation is unfair...") I lost all sympathy for him. I mean, these two gay guys, who have benefitted socially and economically from the liberalism of the past, in bed with the Republicans because they don't want to pay the price of admission (taxes) into a liberal, orderly, prosperous society.
My gut (admittedly a wee bit apocalyptic) tells me we have to fall a bit lower before people wake up and realize what's going on.
Mine, too, unfortunately. Maybe sometime we can discuss the concept of an armed liberal populace...
Well, two things we need to emphasize.
1) Liberalism is good. The freedom to be an individual, so highly prized in our society, especially among younger Americans, has been brought to you by liberals and, by-and-large, Democrats.
2) Taxes are a necessary "price of admission" into a liberal, prosperous, and orderly society. Like your car and your road trips? Interstate system brought to you by taxes. Like a cold glass of water after a long hot showers? Clean water brought to you by taxes. Like your Prozac? Antivirals saved your life? Brought to you by the NIH, funded through your tax dollars.
Oh, I forgot this important one:
Lost your job but still feeding your family and paying your mortgage? Unemployment benefits, brought to you by your tax dollars....
For effective liberal rhetoric, I recommend reading "Moral Politics", by George Lakoff...
http://www.alternet.org/story.ht...l?
StoryID=15414
http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/b...62-0226467716-
0
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obido...ASIN/
0226467716
Oh, I'm a strong believer in being passionate about your beliefs. I do think we need to be careful to describe our positions in positive terms that don't use negative verbage.
The coining of the phrase Pro-choice to combat the right's Pro-life, and then turning their rhetoric around on them by calling them Anti-choice is, I think, a good example of a successful way to do this.
It isn't about not being negative about the other guy - and I think that's where a lot of Democrats (especially Capitl Hill Democrats) have missed the point. It's about using language that shows how your position really is more attractive that the opposition's.
Monica, no argument from me there.
Okay so let's all form a cabal... we'll need a few hundred billion, a lot of legislators and media outlets on our side and -- oh, yeah, we aren't supposed to be playing by their rules, are we?
Hmm...
george soros give just kicked in a big pile of seed money!
me speak talk good in correct grammar way!
friend me and talk about soros money give to save democracy weekend last time. Yes. Good.
Nice thread, people. You all make good points. The only problem I see is that no matter how you frame it, the Repubs will always distort "our" position to make us look bad-- and they have a bigger media voice. So we HAVE to get more money and more mdeia-- Soros helps, but I don't know if it is enough.
sorry: more money and more media...
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