The "Party of Life"

Branding is as potent a force in our politics as in any other part of our culture, and no political branding has worked better to grossly simplify and mislead the American people than the Right’s claim to being, as Rick Perry recently put it in an interview, the “party of life.” When it comes down to it, conservatives seem only interested in protecting the beginning and end of life. Rather than trying to improve the situation for those in their prime of life, conservatives use their resources to increase the number of unwanted children and to deny the terminally ill the right to die in a manner of their choosing. Why is this? And why is the protection of one stage of life placed in opposition to others. 

This distinction comes down to how one defines life and where (and when) that definition comes from. The conservative approach seems to be about as basic as you can get: nobody has the right to end the possibility of life. Nobody apart from the state, of course. This can clearly be seen as a pre-Democratic view of life. It derived from the belief that your life does not belong to you. It belongs to your Lord (God) and Master (Chief, King, Emperor, Arch Duke, etc). You are expected to live your life in services to the institution you were born into. In return you are promised safety (by the Master) and salvation (by the Lord). For those of you with a passing grasp of history, philosophy, or sociology, yes, this is the basic idea of contract theory and this is where the conservative position on life stems from. It comes from a time where the average denizen did not have control over his (and certainly not her) own life. 

Ever since the idea of government began to be serving the people rather than simply ruling them, the definition of life has become much more nuanced. Many of us now believe it includes the right to certain unalienable rights. The right the education, the right to a life free of fear and violence, the right to love whomever you please, the right to food, clean water, health care. Rather than having the focus of government be to improve the lives of the select few who rule it, it should be to improve the lives of all citizens, to give every child an equal chance to succeed and to ensure that every single human being be treated with respect and kindness. 

What the reactionary conservatives fail to realize when they call on people to ‘just take care of yourselves’ is that we already have. Government programs like public schools, medicare, and social security are the ways that we, as a nation, have decided to protect ourselves. It is not enough to protect our literal lives, we must protect and maintain the quality of those lives. What the reactionary conservatives are really saying when they tell you to take care of yourself is to do it alone. They are trying to encourage you to give up one of the most effective and most important rights of a citizen––the right to collectively bargain. They are asking you to flee the public institutions that have been created to protect us and, once again, offer ourselves into their unregulated hands. 

So why is this? Well, it’s because, when it comes down to it, the reactionary conservative movement just isn’t on board with this new definition of life. They do not believe that the government should have anything to do with quality of life, just protecting it (with anti-abortion legislation, the military, opposing the right to die) and ending it (the military, the death penalty). Do not mistake this for wanting to leave you alone. They have simply realized that it is easier to weaken a Democracy than to rule it directly. The conservative movement answers not to the rural farmers they splash all over their posters but to the massive corporations they have helped make, legally, citizens. 

I can certainly accept debating the amount the government should be doing to protect and better the lives of its citizens. What I cannot accept is the outright rejection of the idea that the role of government in protecting life has evolved. Understanding and supporting this evolution does not make you a socialist or a liberal, it means that you understand and agree with the basic tenets of Democracy. We have to face the fact that the conservative movement may not. 

America's Disaffected Youth: And why we can’t let reactionary conservatives take the moral high ground

A friend of mine suggested I check out David Brooks’ latest essay in the New York Times (which can be found here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/13/opinion/if-it-feels-right.html) and I’m very glad she did. Brooks is writing about a new book called “Lost in Translation” which deals with the moral compass of the American teenager and young adult. The book, written by Notre Dame’s Christian Smith, describes a very real problem––the listlessness that has come with an extreme adoption of moral relativism. Far too few young people are willing to take a stand on any issue, preferring the non-committal answer of ‘it just depends on your perspective.’  More information on the book can be found in an interview that Smith did with Christianity Today at www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2009/october/21.34.html?start=4 .

The entire article left a bad taste in my mouth, but I didn’t realize quite why until the last paragraph. For all of the truths that seem to be identified in this book, namely that America’s youth doesn’t seem to have the words or education to describe moral judgements, the conclusions drawn by Brooks, Smith, and the rest of the crew are dangerously reactionary in nature. Rather than really delving into why young people today feel this way, they turn to the old standstill––the decline of religion, religious teachings, and the morals and standards of the days of yore. Ever since there have been people defining morals, there have been people decrying their downfall. It is an argument that has also traditionally been used by those in power to keep down those without it. 

The general bent of this argument is that the future of the world is in peril, morality is crumbling and we really need to go back to the way things were when things weren’t so crumbling. Since this argument has been seen in basically every generation, one has to wonder just how far back these reactionaries really want to go. What exactly do they want to go back to?

Above perhaps any other interest, I love history. My childhood memories are filled with stalking around ruins, reading “Horrible Histories,” and collecting figurines from every possible time period. The one of the first things I learned about history was that the further back you went, the cooler everything seemed to be. Imaginative religions, powerful warlords, exploration, the list goes on. As I began to actually study history, I learned that this ‘coolness’ didn’t really count for much in terms of quality of life. As much as I may have wanted to try being a Norse Warrior or  a Roman Emperor, there were plenty of people in those time periods that I knew I didn’t want to be. I didn’t want to be a boy crucified by the Romans just for stealing bread, one of the thousands of women raped by Genghis Khan, or anyone who encountered one of the famed European explorers (really, encountering most explorers seemed like a seriously bad idea).

Modern reactionary conservatives can probably laugh those examples off with an “of course we don’t want to go back that far!”. Then how far? Back far enough where there are rules blatantly denying citizens of this country the right to vote? Back to where it was nearly impossible, socially and legally, for women to get a divorce even from an abusive husband? Back to where there where sewage ran through the streets, our skies were clouded with smog and children worked twelve hour days? Historically, most average people’s lives were nasty, brutish, and short. It wasn’t until quite recently that anybody seemed to think of this as a bad thing and until even more recently that anyone began to do something about it. Where exactly is this morality of bygone years that the reactionary conservatives are yearning for? 

Of course, when it comes down to it, the Genghis Khan comparison is more apt than they realize. What these people really want is the structure of that the majority of pre-democratic societies had and still have today. They want the many to listen to the orders of the few as wholeheartedly as possible. The unspoken side of this argument is that it doesn’t really matter how the few acted as long as the many listened to their precepts, and that is why this model for society is an outdated failure. This is an argument that can be brought back to Plato’s Philosopher Kings. If there were truly a group of people who were clearly more wise, more moral, and far more incorruptible than the rest of us, then a very strong argument could be made that they alone should be given the power to decide what is right and what is wrong. However, if there is any lesson of history it is that these people are few and far between and are more likely to be hunted down and killed by their governments than to rise to rule them. This brings us back to what exactly is wrong with the moral compass of young adults in America.  America’s youth has not rejected morality outright, we have simply rejected having to follow the same paths that consigned our forebears to lives of unquestioning submission to an arbitrary authority. 

The problem, if we should really call it that, that Smith’s book is actually describing is that the old fashioned top-down version of morality hasn’t really been replaced with anything yet. We know a lot of what we do not want, but we have not yet found a suitable replacement. As long as the two choices seem to be continuing in moralistic isolation and returning to the flock (which, by nature, means constantly listening to the Shepherd, or his far more hands-on friend, the sheep-dog) much of America’s youth will remain in this moral limbo. It is the role of Progressives in society to define this as our generation’s great task and to show us that we do not have to go it alone. Individually it is impossible to create an idea for morality, but together a new type of morality can emerge. One where war crimes are punished more severely than posting a sexually explicit picture of yourself online, where transparency in the public and private sector is seen as a necessity, not an imposition, and where everyone has truly has power over themselves and their destiny. 

The Left Has an Obama Problem... and what we can do about it.

The day Barak Hussein Obama was elected President of the United States will probably remain one of the most memorable days of my life. It seemed like every voice in my small mid-western college erupted as one as we poured out of our dorms. Screams ‘of U-S-A, U-S-A’ could be heard from every direction. Student leaders and professors gave impromptu speeches celebrating what we saw as a monumental achievement. My friends and I who had spent our teenage years in George Bush’s America had never seen this kind of joyfulness from the American Left. This, it seemed, was a brave, new world. We felt as though we hadn’t just defeated John McCain and the Republicans, we had defeated the status quo. We had defeated the racists, the bigots, the nativists, everybody who was responsible for the budget deficit, the wars in the Middle East, and meanness everywhere. 

Not only that, it seemed like the entire world felt joined in our celebrations. Rather than hearing more and more stories about how everybody hated us, every day statistics from all over the world declared Obama more popular than any domestic leadership. After the embarrassment of the Bush years, it seemed like everybody loved Americans again. Politicians, pollsters, and citizens declared the coming of a new era of politics, one where any divide could be bridged. It wasn’t just that we wanted to change the world, for a brief time during the buildup to the inauguration and in parts of the first year of the Obama presidency we felt sure that change had begun. And we were not shy about it. Perhaps no move appears, in retrospect, more impulsive and rash than Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize. After all, it was awarded for what? Saying nice things about other countries? Not having tendencies that put him in the same boat as many war criminals? Both admirable qualities that had been missing in our previous President, but certainly not deserving of one of the most supposedly distinguished humanitarian awards in the world.  This was just one of the self-congratulating actions that the left bestowed on itself and its new champion. We weren’t sure what the change was that was right around the corner, but we knew its name: Barak Obama. 

There were two major problems with this. First, like the words of Obama himself, this all sounded really great and meant about nothing. Obama was not about to declare himself President of the World. Other than the Democrats basking in the glow of their seeming-victory, little action was taken to capitalize on this. All of this pageantry freaked the hell out of the Right. Nothing scares nativists and xenophobes more than an overseas celebration of a non-military decision their country has made. The idea of Obama as ‘other’ or ‘unAmerican’ certainly began earlier, but it was certainly bolstered by the backlash to the reactions of both liberals at home and abroad. 

There was just one other problem. Obama just wasn’t quite on board. It would have been one thing if Obama’s own actions had earned this conservative reprisal. If he had say, grievously endangered our national security by closing or just increasing transparency in our internationally-based prison camps, or by starting to destroy free enterprise by nationalizing industries, increasing funding to the arts, or working to close tax loopholes, or even if he’d tried some gimmicky communist plot like introducing the metric system or suggesting that schools should focus more on teaching depth and critical thinking rather than simply focussing on standardized testing. But no, Obama is not a socialist. He’s not even a European-style Leftist. He is just a relatively inexperienced centrist neoliberal with a fantastic speaking voice. That is to say, he is the perfect embodiment of a modern American Democrat politician. 

Whenever I make this point, the usual rebuttal from my friends is ‘But look at him, he’s the one that finally passed Universal Healthcare, he’s the champion liberal!’ While that’s certainly enough to prove that he’s a Democrat, there are plenty of voices, at home and abroad, who believe in Universal Healthcare that one would not normally describe as ‘liberal.’ Even in the United States, Healthcare has been a major priority for the Democratic party at least since Hillary Clinton first tried in the 90s. And let us not forget that, for all the uproar, we still do not really have Universal Health Care as other countries would describe it. Particularly the whole ‘universal’ part of it. 

Am I suggesting, as a number of bloggers have brought up over the past few weeks, that Democrats should be regretting their choice of Obama? In a word, no. Its not that simple.  The three Democratic candidates for President with a chance to win the 2008 nomination were Barak Obama, Hillary Clinton, and the man who at the time was my choice, John Edwards. I don’t think its possible to say for sure just how a Clinton administration would have dealt with the problems Obama has been facing, but it is safe to say that the programs they might have supported would have been relatively similar. And, well, in terms of John Edwards, his extra-marital extra-political affairs make Bill Clinton look like the Pope, and the conservative backlash that would have known no bounds. Obama was and still can be the man for the job. 

I titled this introductory essay ‘The American Left has an Obama problem,’ but that it only part of the situation. The Presidency of Barak Obama has been a perfect example of what the American Left looks like today. It speaks beautifully, but when it comes to policymaking, the litmus test seems to be ‘well, at least its more liberal than what the Republicans proposed.’ I’m certainly not suggesting that the Republican alternative presented is preferable. However, since it is widely known that the Republicans now basically answer to the far right, now really the time to consign us to always just having to pick the lesser of two evils? Or, to put it another way, are we so unsure of our principals that we allow the opposition to dictate what choices are available? 

And that brings us back to our Obama problem. During the 2008 election, one of the messages of the Obama campaign was that we needed to place winning the election over pushing any individual policy point. Rather than give money to interest groups that supported a particular policy that you may have felt more strongly about, everyone was called upon to close ranks and just give to the Presidential campaign. After eight years of Bush, the idea that having a Democrat in office was the first priority rang true to many citizens and the push was a big success. This did two things. First, it left a lot of Progressive organizations with budget gaps. Money which would usually have been donated to them went instead to the Obama for President campaign. Second, it created the idea in the Obama administration that it didn’t need those organizations, it could go it alone. This is why, from the beginning, Obama has turned his back on traditional allies. He simply feels as though he does not need their support to govern. 

Since the election, local progressive groups across the country from Wisconsin to Ohio have been slowly reinvigorated almost entirely without the help of the President. In his recent Labor Day speech, Obama somewhat hypocritically paid homage to a number of local labor movements that have, for the first two years of his Presidency, captured the national attention far more than his own. Perhaps this is showing a greater appreciation for the actual desires of the people who elected him. Liberals, especially the past few months, have made it known that they are generally dissatisfied with the job Obama is doing.The question, particularly with the current candidates leading the polls for the Republican nomination, is not whether or not Progressive interest groups will support Obama in the upcoming election. A primary challenge, just like a liberal third party, would only serve to deliver the country to Rick Perry, Michelle Bachmann, Mitt Romney, or any of the other extremists vying for the most important job in the world. The only way somebody other than Obama could be supported would be if there was a process for Obama to name a successor and resign. Since that does not seem to be in the cards, it should go without saying that Progressive groups will work hard to get him re-elected. That does not mean that that support must be without conditions. Progressives cannot allow Obama to run on a campaign that is simply a mixture of ‘give me some more time’ and ‘Republicans suck!’ He has a year and half not just to give pretty speeches, but to actively pursue an agenda that reflects the desires not only of his base, but of the American people. Fixing up roads, bridges and schools, raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans, closing tax loopholes for massive corporations, expanding public transportation, ending oil and gas subsidies: these are all policies that, for the most part, enjoy massive popularity amongst the citizens of the United States. Yes, with the current state of Congress, President Obama may not be able to make gigantic progress on these issues before the election. But bills can be drafted and vetted, and ideas can be debated with a clear sense of what everybody is talking about. If Obama comes out firmly in support of these overwhelmingly popular principals, whoever is eventually nominated by the Republican party will be forced to either take a stance against these popular, populist, policies or to agree with the President. The American jobs act is a good start, but its just that. A start. Even presuming it gets passed, gigantic amounts of work must be done to put it into affect as quickly and efectively as possible. We cannot allow this to be the only piece of major legislation to be introduced that pushes these ideals. We are looking for a path, not just a first step. Let Obama’s campaign message be ‘re-elect me, return the Congress to the hands of the sane, and we can pass these bills within the first six months of the new administration’. In the next twelve months it is our job, the people’s job, to show Obama that not only is this the way for him to rebuild his connection with the people he is supposed to be representing, but the way to win the election. This is not about trying to blackmail the President into endorsing massive progressive reforms. This is about reminding him what the average American actually wants. That means that a massive effort must be put into popular civic action over the next twelve months and that we must be willing, once more, to have the audacity of hope in Barak Hussein Obama. 

An Introduction

The modern American world, for all of its infinite possibilities, has few actual forums to debate its merits. During the latter half of the twentieth century for the first time our country saw an increase in the civil rights paired with a decrease in civil society. This kind of match obviously completely turns the traditional view of culture on its head. So far, the young twenty first century has seen an even worse though predictable trend, with civil rights as well as civil society under attack. Political dialog has not simply been suppressed, it has become seen, for the most part, as a subject non grata for the average American. For every Tea Party or Amnesty International activist there are hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of Americans who shy away from political and civil discourse of any kind. They fear ‘unnecessary’ arguments, or feel a lack of knowledge or simply a lack of interest. These attitudes, particularly that last one, are not simply dangerous for Democracy, they are antithetical to its very purpose. The maintenance, upkeep, and stewardship of a Democracy lies not within the hands of powerful families or vast corporations but within the hands of its citizens. Active civic participation is the bedrock of the modern Democratic system, yet we have allowed a political and cultural establishment to develop that actively seeks to limit such activity. If we are still committed to the values this country was based on and those which have defined it as a leader of the Democratic world this is an unwise and, frankly, unpatriotic path to tread. 

Though many factors have contributed to the development of our current culture and though many of them are out of our control, the first step is accepting some degree of personal responsibility for the current state of affairs. No, you did not create the conditions under which the world operates, and no, you do not have the sway of Rupert Murdock or William Gallacher. But you do have some control over your little sliver of our world. All too often is the statement ‘but what can I do, I’m just one person’ used as an excuse for inaction. This is not a call for gigantic structural change to your life. It is a call to do what you can, however minutely, to influence and involve yourself in the sociopolitical world we live in. Perhaps this means listening to the old ‘in a capitalist system you vote with your dollar’ idea: If your politics agrees with mine, the changes you make might include carpooling to work, eating more local food, or trying to not support the organizations that rely on child labor. However, in our capitalist system, there is more than enough on the shelves to help reflect any political bent. Perhaps it means the more ‘old school’ methods of being heard: running for local election, writing petitions, joining marches. These methods too are not only for lefties. The opposition to this kind of call to action is not Democratic Conservatism. It is Authoritarianism, Despotism, Anarchism, or Stalinism––basically all of the types of governmental structure we have supposedly rejected in favor of Democracy. Yet the activism that we objectively view as necessary to Democracy has been actively restricted by our government and discouraged by our media and popular culture. 

Individual lifestyle change alone is not enough. It must be joined with an eagerness to continually educate oneself, a commitment to community,  and a belief in the power of collective organization. Congratulations! Simply by skimming over this blog you are taking part in that first step and may be contemplating ways to accomplish the other two. It does not require reading thousands of pages a week. Maybe it means clicking around on news sites rather than clicking ‘stumble’ every so often or listening to a podcast on your way to work rather than to the same top 40 hits that will be playing at your office. While it is true that the mainstream media has, like our politicians, been bought out by corporate interests, the internet provides an opportunity to level the playing field. Much has been made of the internet’s ability to help unite people from all around the world. However, it can be used just as well for helping kickstart local campaigns in your own particular neighborhoods, towns, and cities. The internet has the ability to be a publicly controlled medium that we can use to circumvent the increasingly corporate controlled television and radio airwaves. What I hope to do with this blog is to be a small part of continuing that movement and to try to encourage more active citizenship. Now is not the time to forget the lessons of history. 

Sometimes in the blog I will discuss a specific news story, sometimes I will respond directly to a comment on a previous post, and other times the topic will be somewhat more philosophical. I hope to encourage as much active dialog here as possible, so if you have a strong opinion, or any kind of opinion, about anything you read here please share it either in a public comment or in an email. If you are driven to write a detailed response and would like it posted on its own, I will, most likely, be more than happy to do so.