THE GADFLYER: Getting Tough With the Right
Here's a new bookmark opportunity for all the progressives around these parts:
gadflyer.com
Let the word go forth: The age of the wimpy liberal is over.
by Paul Waldman, Editor-in-Chief
3.15.04
All across America, progressives are riled up. They saw George W. Bush lose the 2000 election yet manage, through the intercession of a friendly Supreme Court, to take control of the executive branch. They watched as he rolled over seemingly impotent Democrats again and again. Their patriotism was questioned when they raised objections to a war of dubious justification. On nearly every national issue, from abortion to economic policy to health care to environmental protection, their agenda enjoys majority support among the public, yet all three branches of government, not to mention a majority of governorships and state legislatures, are controlled by conservatives.
In short, though John Kerry has an excellent chance to wrest the White House from Bush, the left is on the canvas, battered and bruised. So it's no wonder rank-and-file progressives are demanding that their leaders get up and turn the fight around.
How has this state of affairs come to pass? The reasons are many and complex, but a great deal of credit must be given to the interlocking network of conservative think tanks, activist groups, lobbyists, media organizations, and government officials that advocates the conservative cause.
The conservative network has its roots in the wreckage of the 1964 Goldwater campaign, but its clearest manifestation is found today in the meeting held every Wednesday in the offices of Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform. Among the hundred or so people who attend are Capitol Hill staffers, reporters from the conservative press, Republican lobbyists, conservative activists, and GOP consultants. The meetings are an opportunity to share information, plot strategy, and coordinate the conservative message. George W. Bush started sending representatives to the Wednesday meetings before he even announced his candidacy for the presidency, and White House aides continue to attend. As Norquist said in early 2001, "There isn't an us and them with this administration. They is us. We is them."
Finding the warrior spirit
What progressives should learn from Norquist isn't just the power of organization and coordination, as important as they are. Rather, it's the warrior spirit that animates Norquist and his allies. As Newt Gingrich told the conservative Heritage Foundation back in 1988, "This war [between liberals and conservatives] has to be fought with the scale and duration and savagery that is only true of civil wars." After George W. Bush took office in 2001, Norquist told the crowd at a Republican fundraiser, "The Democrats are the Lefties, the takers, the coercive utopians…They are not stupid, they are evil. Evil!"
No one is suggesting that progressives go to these extremes, either in their hearts or in their rhetoric. But they need to understand what they're up against. In the 1984 film that made the career of California's current governor, a soldier sent back from the future explains to the heroine the nature of her cyborg enemy, and offers a perfect description of today's conservative movement: "It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity or remorse or fear. And it absolutely will not stop – ever – until you are dead." When this is what you're facing, you have two choices. The first choice is to run and hide. Rightly or wrongly, this is the choice progressives believe their leaders have taken in the past few years. The second choice – the only choice – is to stand and fight.
There are many on the left who are more than a little discomforted by the combativeness that rank-and-file progressives are now demanding. For too long, too many have been gripped by the fantasy of a politics that has never and will never exist, a politics of consensus and cooperation where after a good talk and a good hug all disagreement is swept away and our shared values guide us toward a single set of goals. While progressives sit around musing about how great it would be if we could all just get along, conservatives have been beating the crap out of them. The sooner they get rid of this fantasy the sooner they can start getting something accomplished.
Let's face it: in the real world, politics is not about consensus. Politics is about conflict - about out-arguing, out-thinking, and out-working your adversaries. This doesn't mean progressives should investigate conservatives' marriages, call them ugly names, or try to convince Americans that they have "666" tattooed on their foreheads. Nor does it mean precluding the possibility that there will be issues on which conservatives and progressives can agree and work together. But it does mean accepting the fact that on most issues and at most times, their goals are fundamentally at odds.
Believe me, the conservatives harbor no illusions on this score. As Norquist said, "rather than negotiate with the teachers' unions and the trial lawyers and the various leftist groups, we intend to break them." Or in the words of Rush Limbaugh – the post-arrest, not-quite-kinder-and-gentler Limbaugh, that is – "We're not trying to establish intimacy with [liberals]. We want to crush them."
The road from here
In order to fight back, progressives need to do many practical, labor-intensive things, including organizing voters and reaching out to young people. But to bring about the kind of long-term change conservatives have achieved over the last forty years, they need a set of ideas that adds up to an agenda for the future and the ability to translate those ideas into a thematically coherent message people can understand easily.
Many of these ideas are out there already – Washington is crawling with smart progressives who could tell you how to provide health insurance for every American, reform our drug laws, or give us energy independence, if only they were given the chance. So why haven't these ideas gained traction, while we now debate privatizing Social Security as though it were a reasonable thing to consider and Congress easily passes tax cuts aimed at the wealthiest Americans? In no small part, because conservatives have spent more time and energy thinking about how to communicate.
Again and again, conservatives have managed to change the terms of debate and get their preferred terminology adopted, from "tax relief" to "partial birth abortion" to "faith-based" groups. Conservatives spend more time thinking about the political effects of language in part because they have to. For example, if you want to sell Americans on eliminating a tax only paid by the wealthiest 2% of inherited estates, the names "inheritance tax" and "estate tax" present a problem, since they evoke the things that the tax actually taxes, inheritances and estates. But it you rename it the "death tax," it suddenly sounds as though it's a tax everyone has to pay, since after all, everybody dies. And that just doesn't seem fair. Conservatives understand that defining the terms of debate is the first and often most important battle in any policy war.
They also know that a coordinated effort to control the language and themes of politics requires discipline. You will never hear the words "estate tax" pass the lips of any Republican – they know what the approved term is, and they use it unceasingly. If progressives want to succeed, they need to do the same.
But it isn't only on specific policies that the right has proven more adept at communicating. They have also done an extraordinary job at reducing their agenda to a few simple, easily grasped ideas. Ask an ordinary citizen what conservatives stand for, and he'll probably offer, "lower taxes," "strong defense," and "get government off our backs." Ask him what progressives stand for, and if he can come up with anything at all, it's likely to be the right's caricature of the left: "soft on crime," "weak on defense," or "higher taxes."
So getting tough with the right requires taking control of the thematic landscape of national debate. Specific issues need to be placed into larger themes about the meaning of politics and competing agendas that tell ordinary people – i.e., those who haven't spent hours studying the details of the Medicare bill – how each issue relates to their lives and what progressives and conservatives are seeking.
Those themes won't be all that hard to come up with – for instance, for decades the essential identity of progressives was that they stood up for ordinary people, a powerful idea that transcends any one issue. So conservatives undertook a concerted effort to chip away at this idea, in part by directing people's frustration away from the elite that matters – that of money and power, where conservatives dominate – and toward one that has a far smaller effect on people's lives, the intellectual and cultural elite, where progressives dominate. Ever wonder why conservative talk radio hosts spend so much time bitching about something stupid that some professor or actor somewhere said about something inconsequential? Because if they can get people angry about that, then they won't think about important things, like how Republicans in Congress are reaching uncharted heights of corporate whoredom. And eventually, many will come to believe that it's the conservatives who are on the side of ordinary people.
So we've come to the point where the term "elitist" is used almost exclusively to describe those on the left, at a time when the government is controlled by a party that daily demonstrates its devotion to enhancing the power of the powerful, the influence of the influential, and the wealth of the wealthy. It's not too late to reverse these images and bring them back to reality. But it won't happen by itself, particularly given how hard the right works to convince Americans that progressives are elitists who want to tell them how to run their lives. There are plenty of issues progressives can use to reverse these images – if they are presented in a coherent way around a small number of themes.
Rallying 'round
It isn't only their instinct for the jugular or their understanding of the power of language choices that gives conservatives an advantage. Progressives often lament the fact that conservatives seem so much less contentious, so much more willing to put their particular issues aside to unite for the conservative cause. This isn't because they aren't as passionate about the details, nor are they any less prone to argue among themselves. The difference is that conservatives understand the importance of power.
No less than the left, the right is an amalgamation of narrowly focused interests with disparate and often conflicting goals, from the libertarians to the anti-choicers to the gun nuts to the anti-regulation corporatists. But they never lose sight of the goal they have in common: acquiring and holding positions of power in government. They don't get caught up in making a point or remaining pure - they want to win.
So while they may fight amongst themselves, when election day approaches, conservatives get off their butts and get to work. They care less about the symbolic – did the candidate give a major speech on our issue and make it one of the central pillars of his campaign? – than they do about whether at the end of the day, the people in power are friendly or unfriendly. As Trent Lott used to say, it's better to have 80% of something than 100% of nothing.
This does not mean that progressives should seek power for its own sake or refuse to criticize Democrats. What it means is acknowledging that when progressives hold office they can do a lot of good things even if they can't do everything, and when conservatives hold office they can and will do a lot of bad things. Right now there are thousands of committed conservatives toiling in government to subvert the values that progressives hold dear. As long as they hold the reins of power, progressives lose battles every day, whether they're aware of it or not. While it doesn't guarantee success, institutional power is the sine qua non of the progressive agenda: without it, progressives' accomplishments will be measured only in the degree to which they maintain the status quo by thwarting conservative schemes.
Unfortunately, many on the left have an ambivalence about power. The progressive victories they prize are those driven by grassroots movements – the civil rights movement, the women's rights movement, the environmental movement. They've gotten so used to pushing from outside the institutions of government that they can't imagine themselves working from the inside. But if they want to effect significant, long-term change, they'll need friends on both sides.
Getting tough
Progressives had a lot of reasons to be disappointed with Bill Clinton, not least of which was all the ammunition he gave his enemies. But one thing for which Clinton should be celebrated is that he never stopped fighting. They threw everything in the world at him, up to and including impeachment, and he never for a moment did he stop looking for ways to hit back or consider giving up. And because he never stopped fighting, he beat them nine times out of ten. It's a lesson progressives need to learn.
A famous quip defines a liberal as someone who won't take his own side in an argument. But history is full of tough progressives, people who even when they worked for peace, justice, and other ideas that some on the right deride as fuzzy-headed, did so with strength and courage. Martin Luther King was a tough progressive. Mother Jones was a tough progressive. So was Robert Kennedy, and Paul Wellstone. Their heirs are ready and waiting to fight.
Laying the foundation for future victories will require money, energy, thought and patience. But if they want to help make our nation a truer reflection of the noble ideals on which it was founded, progressives will have to strap on the chain mail, jump on their horses, and ride into battle. If they do it right, the first years of the 21st century may be remembered as the end of the age of the wimpy liberal – and the beginning of the age of the progressive warrior. |
