Please see the end for my thanks yous and where to find me after today. I have opted to close with an attempt to describe the field of play -D
Shortly after Kerry's loss in 2004, at MyDD, Chris wrote "Conservatism is our enemy" which I think is the first time I ever encountered a direct ideological assault on conservatism itself. Along with Phil Agre's rightly famous essay on the subject, it began me on a road and mission to better understanding this beast. Everything I have learned to date from then continues to bolster Chris' original thesis. Conservativism is still the primary enemy of progress, justice, fairness and widespread happiness for humanity. It remains a destructive and corrosive force on the institutions of democracy and the single biggest obstacle to world peace.
If I have had a broad meta thesis here at Open Left, it is that the true fight is one of ideas and thus ideology. We must reject the mushy centrist claim that ideology is necessarily an evil. Not only is it not necessarily evil, ideology is necessary period. The fights over parties, the media, particular policies and tactics are important, but my read on the broad sweep of history is that when the dominant ideas are bad, the parties will behave stupidly, the media will fail to correct them and the policies will be destructive. There is a reason Canada, the UK and the US all elected right wing governments in the 80s. There is a reason Obama's team could not even consider a new WPA or even ask for a big-enough stimulus. Bad ideas are still dominant. I see no refuge in any 3rd party, because I see no reason such a party would not itself be quickly co-opted by the same bad ideas upon attaining power or in order to attain power. I want to fight bad ideas directly.
Moreover, by the 1870s, British liberals had become quite aware that their previous understanding of economic freedom was a hollow joke, producing vast legions of downtrodden urban poor, and so they began seeking another way to think about freedom, closer to that which slaves have always understood-freedom as a gaining of power for those at the bottom, not to be dominated from above, but to be lifted up by collective support for one another: in short, the New Liberalism of Britain, which 60 years later arrived in America in the form of the New Deal.
I've been meaning to write about this for some time, and now I promised Paul I would, so here's a first installment on the topic. Understanding the transition liberals made from unfettered free market economics in the mid 1800s to the interventionist government model post New Deal is key to making sense of the ideological morass which humanity transitioned through in the past 400 years. I know opinions differ on this subject, and many on the left see a meaningful distinction between progressivism and liberalism, or between classic liberalism and modern social liberalism. I do not. They're all liberals, even though there can be notable policy distinctions between various groups of liberals, there is still only one liberalism, and it is the same liberalism as began (or at least took form) with John Locke in the late 1600s.
This is a daunting topic. When I first became politically aware in my late teens, and pondered what "liberal" and "conservative" meant beyond the trite caricature presented by the contemporary political parties or newspaper discourse, I discovered that no one of any academic merit had particularly good (or widely accepted) answers to this. For example, I have written of how Conservatives cannot define "conservativism." If better read and smarter people cannot reach concurrence, forgive my temerity in making a run at it too. Ideology is at the core of what drives politics and any improvement of our understanding of the topic is worthwhile. The confusion about the topic allows a lot of people who aren't liberals (like libertarians who call themselves "classic liberals") to be confused for them, and others who should be allies to create unnecessary distinctions and look at one another with distrust over what are differences not in core ethics, but technical mechanics. It is strange that we all generally able to spot liberal and conservative ideas intuitively yet seemingly no one can can agree on what these things are. We are left with too many definitions that rest on the specific policy preferences of the ideological groups at different points in history. Just as modern conservatives who love free trade are not really different from past conservatives who loved tariffs and mercantilism, today's liberals who want limitations on trade are not a different species from their Corn Law repealing bretherin of 1846.
Digby calls attention to a particularly high-fallutin', disingenuous excuse for conservative mendacity and racism. Don't let its title fool you--"How web journalism can make people seem hateful"--the main focus is selectively reported cognitive science--particularly what's known as "motivated cognition"--that has relatively little to do with the Internet per se. It's written for CNN by Gregory Ferenstein, who, we are informed, is "an author and educator who writes about the intersections of technology, business and politics. He teaches at the University of California, Irvine, and is a fellow at the University of California Center for the Study of Democracy." But a search of the UCI website reveals that he is a "political science graduate student", rather than a faculty member. Nothing wrong with that in itself, but it may help explain the undigested feel of his work--and provide some hope that he can still grow out of it.
I could take a cheap shot and call attention to his cheap shot article attacking Capitalism, A Love Story ("Michael Moore ignores capitalism's blessings") in which he cites the existence of open-source software and the occasional democratic work group as proof that Moore has it all wrong. (More fundamentally, Ferenstein uses "capitalism" and "free market" interchangeably, indicating a rather severe case of not getting it.) But more illuminating than this is his earlier CNN piece, "Why the web benefits liberals more than conservatives" In this earlier article, he notices that liberals and conservatives are different:
From the micro-donation platform first popularized by Howard Dean in 2003 to the million-strong Barack Obama Facebook page to the huge audience of the Huffington Post, liberals have been the dominant political force on the internet since the digital revolution began.
Now, research out of Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society suggests that the reason behind this imbalance may be the liberal belief system itself.
Liberals, the research finds, are oriented toward community activism, employing technology to encourage debate and feature user-generated content. Conservatives, on the other hand, are more comfortable with a commanding leadership and use restrictive policies to combat disorderly speech in online forums.
But Ferenstein seems to have forgotten all about liberals and conservatives having any differences in his most recent piece, in which he adopts the "balance narrative" and writes of "a powerful psychological tendency for ideologues unwittingly to distort facts to fit their preconceived biases," going on to say:
Last weekend Kaili Joy Gray (Angry Mouse) posted a front page diary chastising liberals for not supporting the Second Amendment as an inviolable individual right. While there's much to dispute there, particularly the use of classic NRA approved fallacy arguments, (and here is an excellent reply and another poignant one) the ensuing intra-left fracas over the "original" meaning of the Second amendment reminded me how such debates are generally useless and unresolvable. It appears that along with the right's manifest victory in the US gun debate, as evidenced by convincing even large numbers of liberals to adopt their position, they also succeeded in having liberals absorb the silly pursuit of original meaning in order to resolve important social and philosophical questions around ambiguous legal language.
The Intuitive Appeal of Originalism
Like so many issues that fall into a classic left-right divide, the right wing position on Originalism benefits from simplistic "common sense" virtues. In daily life, words have meaning, usually unless someone is being clever with some kind of double entendre, poetry or witticism, their words mean one particular thing, and even if one can contrive another meaning out of the words, both parties usually know what the intended meaning was by the context. Further, most everyone despises legal pedantry in the form of intricate and nearly indecipherably dense legal contracts ostensibly made necessary by disingenuous lawyers creatively interpreting clauses to twist the intended meaning. So there's already some good reasons to favour plain language obvious interpretations coupled with the natural human tendency to believe that one's unthinking assumptions about the meanings of words are shared by all.
In daily life, this sort of originalism is useful and necessary. When it comes to interpreting an email from your boss, or a note from your spouse, they probably aren't going to write something in a deliberately ambiguous way out of some inability to decide what meaning they want to convey.
News emerged this week that Tea Party favoured Arizona Senate Republican primary challenger JD Hayworth (pictured right, picture from TPM) had previously worked as a paid endorser for the "National Grants Conference" a company that purports to help customers get access to government grants and low interest loans. John McCain's campaign is pumping this story because they think it makes a conservative look bad to have been promoting use of government funded services and programs. While I can see that aspect of it, there's something even better going on here. Hayworth is not just fleecing marks for profit (though it is a scam), this is a kind of super conservative meta-con, a con built upon a con. That's some kind of achievement.
As a journalist, isn't one supposed to report the facts, not what they think the facts mean?
The other day in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Salena Zito penned a piece headlined "Young Voters Increasingly Identify with Conservative Politics." Not surprisingly (especially considering the paper's conservative editorial page), that conclusion is flawed.
Moreover, by the 1870s, British liberals had become quite aware that their previous understanding of economic freedom was a hollow joke, producing vast legions of downtrodden urban poor, and so they began seeking another way to think about freedom, closer to that which slaves have always understood-freedom as a gaining of power for those at the bottom, not to be dominated from above, but to be lifted up by collective support for one another: in short, the New Liberalism of Britain, which 60 years later arrived in America in the form of the New Deal.
I've been meaning to write about this for some time, and now I promised Paul I would, so here's a first installment on the topic. Understanding the transition liberals made from unfettered free market economics in the mid 1800s to the interventionist government model post New Deal is key to making sense of the ideological morass which humanity transitioned through in the past 400 years. I know opinions differ on this subject, and many on the left see a meaningful distinction between progressivism and liberalism, or between classic liberalism and modern social liberalism. I do not. They're all liberals, even though there can be notable policy distinctions between various groups of liberals, there is still only one liberalism, and it is the same liberalism as began (or at least took form) with John Locke in the late 1600s.
This is a daunting topic. When I first became politically aware in my late teens, and pondered what "liberal" and "conservative" meant beyond the trite caricature presented by the contemporary political parties or newspaper discourse, I discovered that no one of any academic merit had particularly good (or widely accepted) answers to this. For example, I have written of how Conservatives cannot define "conservativism." If better read and smarter people cannot reach concurrence, forgive my temerity in making a run at it too. Ideology is at the core of what drives politics and any improvement of our understanding of the topic is worthwhile. The confusion about the topic allows a lot of people who aren't liberals (like libertarians who call themselves "classic liberals") to be confused for them, and others who should be allies to create unnecessary distinctions and look at one another with distrust over what are differences not in core ethics, but technical mechanics. It is strange that we all generally able to spot liberal and conservative ideas intuitively yet seemingly no one can can agree on what these things are. We are left with too many definitions that rest on the specific policy preferences of the ideological groups at different points in history. Just as modern conservatives who love free trade are not really different from past conservatives who loved tariffs and mercantilism, today's liberals who want limitations on trade are not a different species from their Corn Law repealing bretherin of 1846.
Republicans understand opposition politics: when you're in the opposition, you don't smile bipartisanly, you gnaw at the ankles of the ruling party. Nothing they do is right, everything they do is wrong.
Generally Ian is spot on, and he's right in terms of the burnt earth style of Republican opposition to Obama/Democrats but I'm going to quibble on this one because I've detected a dog that is not barking, and I think the silence of this particular hound says a lot about the utter sham and fraud that is movement conservativism. Namely, where is the conservative/Republican opposition to the Democratic proposal to enforce individual mandates to purchase health insurance?
Noted conservative intellectual Arthur Laffer on CNN Tuesday:
If you like the post office and the department of motor vehicles and you think they're run well, just wait until you see medicare, medicaid and health care done by the government.
He's not a moron, just deceitful. Forget the pandering to people who don't know who pays for Medicare/caid, are the Post office and DMV really that unpopular?
The answer seems to be that, they're not. Laffer is playing out of a Reagan era movement conservative playbook. I couldn't locate any national polling for the DMV (New York State's DMV is well liked), but as for the old USPS, survey says:
"I'd like your opinion on some organizations and institutions. For each of the following, please tell me if you have a favorable or unfavorable impression of the organization or institution. Let's start with [see below]." If "favorable" or "unfavorable": "Is that very favorable/unfavorable or somewhat favorable/unfavorable?" If unsure: "Do you mean you've never heard of [see below] or you just can't rate it?"
Item
Very Favorable
Somewhat favorable
Somewhat unfavorable
Very unfavorable
Never Heard Of
Can't Rate
The Postal Service
58
31
5
5
-
1
the FBI
31
46
10
7
1
5
Defense Department
31
34
14
15
2
4
Social Security Administration
24
40
19
13
-
4
Transportation Security Administration
15
41
16
9
9
9
Internal Revenue Service
14
42
21
18
1
4
Associated Press poll conducted by Ipsos Public Affairs. Dec. 17-19, 2007. N=1,004 adults nationwide. MoE ± 3.1.
edited for brevity
How effective can this talking point be, when even the IRS manages to have a majority admitting to positive feelings for it? I agree with Tremayne, all this needs is some courageous Democrats (dare I say "liberals"?) to stand up for the USPS and DMV. It's just not 1994 and government bashing needs to be countered.
Last night, Rachel Maddow uses this NY Times article about privatized food safety inspections to explicitly lay out the core liberal ideological rationale for regulation:
I'm going to break the rules for a standard "What Digby Said" post by actually adding a couple things. First, go read her eviscerate the notion that Bush was sailing in popularity until God Himself smote him with Katrina, forgetting the little matter of Terri Schiavo.
Back? Ok, check out Bush's comprehensive approval chart:
It isn't a coincidence that Bush's disapproval rating shot past his approval rating for the first time at the end of Q1 in 2005. The Act for the relief of the parents of Theresa Marie Schiavo was passed on a special session of Congress on March 20th, a Sunday and Bush actually interrupted one of his many vacations to fly to DC and sign the bill just after 1am on Monday morning. He even stayed up past his bedtime.
What a surprise: Federal employees favor Obama, according to the always-interesting "Federal Diary" in the Washington Post. Is there a better reason to vote against the guy?
[...]
I rather like Derb's suggestion that we disenfranchise the tax-eaters:
Take away their vote. If you let public employees vote, what do you think they are going to vote for? For more public spending, more government jobs, higher government wages. Can you vote yourself a pay raise? No, and neither can I. Bill Bureaucrat and Pam Paperpusher can, though, and they do. Bill and Pam have no problem at all with ever-swelling public budgets, with ever-expanding public services, with the creeping socialism that is slowly throttling our liberties out of existence.
There we have it. Conservatives are quite literally reduced to arguing that the franchise should only extend to people likely to vote the right way.
(In defeat, truthfulness) It is instructive watching the conservative movement suffer a second crushing defeat in 2 years. Losing has become a crucible where anyone who hasn't been paying attention should see the ugly truth about conservativism laid bare. I well remember election night, 2004. I watched the results at a Democrats Abroad event here in Toronto. When Ohio looked well beyond reach of any reasonable recount effort, there was palpable disappointment in the room. We drifted out, back home. I remember one woman's parting comment to me (a total stranger) "Oh well, we'll get 'em next time." And that was it. The people had decided on Bush, and nothing for it but to wait for 2008 in her mind. Well let's take a look at how each side has faced near-certain defeat over the years:
Often as we have watched the ongoing catastrophe that results from the implementation of conservative philosophy some defenders will appeal to some kind of "true conservativism" to say that what we have seen is some kind of aberration rather than the natural and inevitable result of putting conservatives in charge.
One of the most often cited people held up as paragons of true conservativism is George F. Will. Will wrote a column in this week's Newsweek which is pretty telling. If this is true conservativism's champion, that's pretty sad.
Sarah Palin has through a number of incidents in her past revealed an array of views that seem pretty extreme to us hemorrhaging liberals. More than one person has witnessed Palin asking the librarian about "removing" books from the library. What books did she want to ban? Turns out she was incensed about some gay-positive books.
So what do conservatives think about this idea of banning pro-gay books from libraries? Well, if we asked them today, it would be hard to trust the answer given the incentive they have to support Palin. Fortunately, it turns out the GSS has been asking this for many years, so conservatives are on record. Survey says:
STATE BLOGS
News emerged this week that Tea Party favoured Arizona Senate Republican primary challenger JD Hayworth (pictured right, picture from 
