I believe that Democrats have had a can opener the whole time
But they were convinced it was a bad opener, compared to the nice new one that movement conservatives had assembled. As a result, they ignored it, or even boycotted it long enough for it become a mass of rusty metal, that doesn't work very well, and simply requires some oil, steel wool and a good sharpening.
We have a lot of factions, from the green movement to LGBT issue politics, social justice and Public education, among many others. What we need, more than a can opener, is the ability to get our two hands to work on one action.
The can opener is urban America, and a little political Jujitsu reversing the momentum created by the "Culture War" waged by conservative America (or, as they say, "Real" America) on "the other" America is long over-due.
All of the separate factions of the Democratic Party are united in large urban areas, whether they like it or not, it's where they live. The little blue islands are our home "bases," in a physical sense, and they are in need of the focus of our National Party. They are the fulcrum of the can opener, and, for that reason, are the most obvious cause for building a "movement."
Liberalism primarily evolved out of the city-based "middle classes", based in trade, small-manufacture and the professions--the bourgeoisie, although skilled workers (Tom Paine, anyone?) and even freed slaves (Frederick Douglass) played a part as well. In turn, socialism/social democracy evolved primarily out of the working class, although disaffected members of the bourgeoisie (Marx & Engels, anyone?) played a significant role as well.
[Note]: The following is written from a perspective emphasizing developmental potentials which have been at least somewhat realized. I freely acknowledge-and have elsewhere argued-that the history of liberalism is a lot more complicated and problematic than this account alone would suggest. The repeated tardiness of liberals to champion racial justice would be an obvious case in point, precisely the sort of point that as a radical I have made on various different occasions. However, that example is much less a failing of ideology than a failing to live up to the ideology. Clearly, liberalism by itself has repeatedly failed to address the broader needs of justice. However, radicals have often been most effective by challenging liberalism simply to live up to its promises, and it's in that spirit that the following is written.
In his diary, "One liberalism through the ages", Dan makes a very strong case for seeing liberalism as centrally concerned with promoting and defending autonomy. This makes considerable sense to me as a way of distinguishing liberalism from libertarianism, and as exposing some of the flaws involved in libertarian attempts to pass themselves off as "classical liberals" with a legitimate claim to the liberal tradition.
In addition to his arguments, I would point to Harvard psychologist Robert Kegan's subject/object schema of cognitive development, in which the self is understood in terms of a subject/object relationship, with the subject structures of one level becoming objects at the next higher level. In this schema, the Level 3 "traditional" self is defined by its social surround, the roles and relationships of the society around it, taking as objects the named kinds of things that the society defines as having a stable existence, not just physical objects, but also individual attributes and dispositions, which makes a great deal of sense, since cultures the world around are defined in part by how they divide up the world analytically, and put it back together synthetically into a functioning whole.
Level 4, in turn, takes as objects the traditional self and the social surround it is embedded in, it operates on a principal of autonomy, "self-authorship", which does not necessarily reject the objects of the society it lives in, but does view them critically, as capable of modification, alteration, and reinvention, as well as regarding it as quite possible to invent wholly new objects. The Level 4 self-Kegan calls it the "modern self"--is autonomous in a way that simply isn't possible for the Level 3 self, because it can step back and question the social assumptions that the Level 3 self is embedded within.
Historically, the emergence of the Level 4 self as a relatively more common phenomena corresponds with the emergence of liberalism in the development of modern Europe. It gets its first big boost in the Italian Renaissance, based in city-states that flourished on trade, which brought them in contact with a wide range of cultures, and thus creating a condition conducive to developing the capacity to reflect back on their own culture, observing it-at least partially-with eyes that had learned to observe and come to understand something of the culture of others. It gets a second big boost with the Protestant Reformation, with it's central focus on the individual Christian conscience, and the subsequent Protestant/Catholic wars, which ultimately could only be resolved by adopting a practice of religious tolerance, which further enabled people to critically reflect on religious beliefs that had once been like the ocean in which all swam together. And it got it's third big boost with the Enlightenment, which was a veritable celebration of the power of human reason to reflect upon the world, and make it anew.
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.
Welcome back to the special weekend edition of The One About...., known as The One About Book Club. Currently at The Book Club I'm taking an in depth look at The 48 Laws Of Power. Last week I offered an over view of the book, and delved into the first two chapters, or Laws. Today I'll be looking at Laws 3 and 4, and tomorrow Laws 5 and 6.
A Paul Rosenberg Golden Oldie
From Sun Jan 20, 2008. Original HERE.
I had a wonderful post on this subject, what got et when the site went down yesterday. It did go down, didn't it? It wasn't just me? So you'll just have to make do with this vastly inferior version.
Regardless of his intentions, Obama has been doing a pretty good job of splitting the left for some time now. Secular humanists, peace activists, Boomers, gays, all have had their turns feeling particularly spurned, while his version of triangulation has many even more nervous than the Clinton version made them. Many think he's got the perscription exactly backwards-Democrats don't suffer from being too much like the always-combatative Republicans, but from being too wimpy, too reluctant to stand up and fight for what they belive. And many think that now's not the time to reach out with a hand of friendship, just when they're sinking like a stone.
In this diary, I'm not going to try to solve all the differences just mentioned. Rather, I'm just going to look at one prominent example from the last week, and look at how it could have been handled differently, so that the divisions generated would have been among conservatives, not progressives. It's a very logical strategy to pursue on two counts: First, as a progressive, Obama should naturally want to unify progressives. Second, given that only some conservatives are genuinely interested in cooperation, while others are dedicated to oppostion, it makes perfect sense to reach out specifically to those who are reachable in a way that clarifies their differences from those who are not.
I am not suggesting a Machiavellian manoeuvre here. Quite the opposite. I am suggesting a clarifying manoeuvre to bring hidden differences out into the open, in order to preempt yet another round of Machiavellian maipulations to prevent the very sort of cooperation that Obama advocates for. What I'm going to do is recall Obama's remarks about Ronald Reagan, which have once again divided progresssives, and then I'm going to suggest two possible alternatives that could have found broad acceptance among progressives, while causing legitimate, and clarifying consternation among conservatives.
The first alternative questions the efficacy of Reagan's conservativism, and pushes the case that Eisenhower is a better, more substantial model to follow. Eisenhower isn't generally thought of as a conservative, but that's beause movement conservatives are actually reactionaries, who have kidnapped the "conservative" label. Eisenhower's model of gradual adaptation, not seeking to radically alter what has become part of the organic fabric of society (such as Social Security) is perfectly in line with the main thrust of Edmund Burke's thinking. Joseph de Maistre, not so much.
The second points out a number of liberal inconsistencies in Reagan's record, and casts doubt on whether he'd be accepted today as a true heir of himself. The example of Mike Huckabee is instructive in this regard, too.
A Daniel De Groot Golden Oldie
From Thu Jan 01, 2009. Original HERE.
As a starting point for defining conservatism, and nailing down what the real atomic core of conservatism is, I started by asking: What do conservatives think it is? How do they answer this question?
It turns out, they don't really know. Their efforts to define it are worth studying though, partly because the answers they provide are revealing, but also because their own failure to find an answer satisfactory even just to themselves points to the need for outsiders to step in and provide the answers conservatives can't or won't face.
A Paul Rosenberg Golden Oldie
From Sat Jul 25, 2009. Original HERE.
In early 2006, I began working on a book project that never really worked out. (Got a spare $20k? I'm willing to give it another shot!) I wanted to address the extreme disconnect between the conservative political climate in Washington (remember, this was about six months before the 2006 midterms) and the political attitudes of the American people, which, according to the best social science, had only changed modestly overall since the early Nixon era. During the course of researching and drafting an introductory chapter, the importance of conservative identity politics became blindingly clear as the result of a series of number-driven arguments.
As I've been wrestling with recent manifestations of conservative identity politics that I planned to blog about this weekend--the Birthers, The Family, etc.--I remembered this earlier work, and the hard foundations of data on which it rested. I thought it would make a good companion piece to my contemporary observations to go back and resurrect that argument. So I took a draft chapter, whittled it down a bit, and I'm presenting it after the jump.
There are two overarching points that I hope will clearly emerge from this. The first is that my contemporary focus on conservative identity politics is not just some arbitrary whim. It emerges out of an inquiry that was not originally concerned with it at all. In fact, I was taken by surprise as the logic of it virtually ambushed me. The second point--closely related--is that conservative identity politics cannot simply be ignored, or factored out of other discussions. It lies at the very heart of understanding conservative hostility to liberals, which is the main driving force polarizing our politics today, and interfering with the important work of solving major problems that confront us as a society--such as meeting the challenge of climate change.
This is a long diary, over 4000 words, so feel free to skim the parts that may seem tangential to you. I wanted to preserve enough of the original to accurately reflect the range of factors that I had considered. And I hope that even if this is a bit long for you to read online all at one go, you'll want to bookmark it and return to it again. Heck, maybe even as soon as my next diary posts.
The disease, for which no effective treatment was ever developed, killed as many as 30% of those infected. Between 65-80% of survivors were marked with deep pitted scars (pockmarks), most prominent on the face.
In some ancient cultures, smallpox was such a major killer of infants that custom forbade the naming of a newborn until the infant had caught the disease and proved it would survive. WHO fact sheet on smallpox
In a conservative estimate by experts, in the 20th Century, smallpox killed 300 million people. More than Hitler, Stalin and Mao combined. It left about twice as many as it killed, scarred (literally) for life. By 1967, there had been a number of failed efforts to eradicate diseases from humanity, including an effort at US behest on malaria. Defying expectations, a shoestring operation run out of that inefficient and (if you listen to conservatives) useless organization, the United Nations, managed to organize a program of vaccination and isolation that resulted in smallpox afflicting its last victim in 1977 (excepting a tragic case in a British research lab).
If the UN never did another useful thing (it has done many), this alone would justify its existence. It is past time that liberals remember this marvellous achievement, and begin to reference it more often. This is the potential of big (read: "effective") government, and speaks to the proven capacity for coordinated global cooperation to solve humanity's most pressing (and depressing) problems.
You have to love the pluck and persistence and creativity of the conservative movement. They always give us something to talk about.
Earlier today, I was debating as to whether to write about health care (my most frequent topic these days), or jobs, an incredibly urgent issue there's been some important articles about in the last 48 hours. And I will of course get back to those centrally important topics soon. But before I do, I have to spend a minute focused on my conservative movement friends. I really have to congratulate them on their creativity.
Some folks I know have been surprised at the level of violent and vitriolic rhetoric they have worked themselves into since Obama took office. Bringing assault weapons to Presidential events, while wearing t-shirts referencing quotes about spilling the blood of tyrants? Talking openly about secession and armed rebellion? Saying that giving women the right to vote was a bad idea? Saying that Obama hated white people? It's all been done in recent weeks by movement conservatives, openly, publicly. I haven't been surprised, because as a student of history, and a staffer for Bill Clinton, I have seen all of these rhetorical flourishes before throughout history.
But every once in a while, folks in the conservative movement surprise me and come up with something new. And this one is a doozy. Apparently the folks at Conservapedia are re-translating the Bible to make it fit better with conservative ideology.
Since there will be plenty of (vital) analysis on the policy and public option aspects of the speech, I'll eschew that, and highlight the ending, which I was extremely pleased to hear from a powerful American elected official.
I think he sets it up well by mentioning "liberalism" in connection to Ted Kennedy (thus allowing an excuse for the dreaded "l" word to be spoken aloud), and tying that to the fear of big government:
For some of Ted Kennedy's critics, his brand of liberalism represented an affront to American liberty. In their mind, his passion for universal health care was nothing more than a passion for big government.
After a couple paragraphs extolling Kennedy and his work with various Republicans (which I will omit for brevity), he pivots from the specific to the general, and despite just praising Kennedy for his ideological flexibility, launches into a full bore defence of liberalism as a universal value:
That large-heartedness - that concern and regard for the plight of others - is not a partisan feeling. It is not a Republican or a Democratic feeling. It, too, is part of the American character. Our ability to stand in other people's shoes. A recognition that we are all in this together; that when fortune turns against one of us, others are there to lend a helping hand. A belief that in this country, hard work and responsibility should be rewarded by some measure of security and fair play; and an acknowledgement that sometimes government has to step in to help deliver on that promise.
This is not being vague. I frequent the comments sections of non-partisan news sources, and right wingers frequently use the pejorative term "bleeding hearts" to disparage liberals, so opening with "large-heartedness" is a direct assault on the selfishness of conservativism.
In early 2006, I began working on a book project that never really worked out. (Got a spare $20k? I'm willing to give it another shot!) I wanted to address the extreme disconnect between the conservative political climate in Washington (remember, this was about six months before the 2006 midterms) and the political attitudes of the American people, which, according to the best social science, had only changed modestly overall since the early Nixon era. During the course of researching and drafting an introductory chapter, the importance of conservative identity politics became blindingly clear as the result of a series of number-driven arguments.
As I've been wrestling with recent manifestations of conservative identity politics that I planned to blog about this weekend--the Birthers, The Family, etc.--I remembered this earlier work, and the hard foundations of data on which it rested. I thought it would make a good companion piece to my contemporary observations to go back and resurrect that argument. So I took a draft chapter, whittled it down a bit, and I'm presenting it after the jump.
There are two overarching points that I hope will clearly emerge from this. The first is that my contemporary focus on conservative identity politics is not just some arbitrary whim. It emerges out of an inquiry that was not originally concerned with it at all. In fact, I was taken by surprise as the logic of it virtually ambushed me. The second point--closely related--is that conservative identity politics cannot simply be ignored, or factored out of other discussions. It lies at the very heart of understanding conservative hostility to liberals, which is the main driving force polarizing our politics today, and interfering with the important work of solving major problems that confront us as a society--such as meeting the challenge of climate change.
This is a long diary, over 4000 words, so feel free to skim the parts that may seem tangential to you. I wanted to preserve enough of the original to accurately reflect the range of factors that I had considered. And I hope that even if this is a bit long for you to read online all at one go, you'll want to bookmark it and return to it again. Heck, maybe even as soon as my next diary posts.
observers who want to lay a guilt trip on us about falling for Mousavi's smooth upper middle class schtick are simply ignoring the last 12 years of Iranian history.
Today, the situation in Iran seems very much in flux, as street demonstrations continued for a second day. Before discussing Iran specifically, though, I want to address the the larger world historical background.
In yesterday's discussion of what's happening in Iran, there was a lot of back and forth that seemed to me to be of the "Blind Men and the Elephant" kind--the Elephant being liberal social democracy. The diary I wrote was about the events unfolding in Iran as part of a centuries-long struggle for liberal social democracy punctuated with several such crucial moments which I referred to, and since it seems the Elephant got lost a bit in that discussion, I thought it worthwhile to begin saying a few words about it.
First off, stealing elections is not democratic. That's more or less ground zero for me. Democracy that's not liberal does not protect individual rights. It would allow a democratic majority to arbitrarily put someone to death. And, of course, the right to vote--which of course includes the right to have it counted--os one of those rights. Democracy that's not social does not recognize protect social and economic rights. It would allow any number of people to starve to death.
That's why I see liberal social democracy as the minimal acceptable form of government. And I see the struggle to achieve LSD on a worldwide basis as the great struggle of the past 250 years--a struggle we are still very much in the midst of.
The post-WWII expansion of widespread prosperity, leading to the first truly mass middle class, first centered in Western Europe and North America, then spreading around the globe, has seen a reorientation toward what are called "post-materialist values". There is a great potential here, as this represents a great maturing in the potential for collective self-government, but there is a danger as well, to the extent that people born into conditions of basic material security may not appreciate what it has taken to achieve that state, or what it means that so many still live outside of it.
In my earlier post, "No, Obama, Conservatives Are NOT Just Liberals With A Different Set Of Ideas", I concluded by arguing that there are two levels of confusion to Obama's quest for cross-ideological progress. The first I described thus:
(1) Obama expects the general possibility of good-faith rational negotiations, producing consensus between liberals and conservatives "of good will." He mistakes the reality of specific cooperative achievements-of the sort that even flaming liberals like Ted Kennedy and Paul Wellstone managed to achieve-for a viable paradigm applicable across the boards.
He fails to recognize that such specific achievements only appear as potentially paradigmatic on the liberal/procedural side of the ledger, and only there among those, such as himself, who are blind to the topography of the conservative value space. In reality, such cross-ideological agreements are not possible in general, but are only specifically possible because they do not intrude into the realm of core normative principles on the conservative side.
If this were Obama's only confusion, then enough repetitions of the total rejection he's already experienced would eventually lead him to some sort of rethinking-such as, for example, refocusing on reaching out to conservative voters, rather than political leaders who either answer to, or directly come from the movement conservative core, who are far more ideologically rigid. What keeps Obama from making such a sensible adjustment is, at least in part, a second level of confusion, which I described thus:
(2) Having failed to make these crucial distinctions, Obama consequently sets himself up for a second level of confusions. This level consists of abandoning the liberal/procedural framework for achieving cross-ideological consensus, and accepting instead elements-from micro- to macro- of the conservative characterization of potential consensus (such as letting torturers off the hook as simple fairness.) This effort is doomed to failure, as I will describe in a followup post.
This is that post. It will also draw on the intervening post on conservative/authoritarian psychology.
I don't know when I first thought it, but as soon as I did, it became deeply etched in mind: "Obama thinks that conservatives are just liberals with a different set of ideas." For me, this captured one of his fundamental misapprehensions-though one that is surely broadly shared among establishment liberals, neo-liberals and the like. This is such a typically narrowminded thing for a liberal to think-all the while thinking he's being broadminded--quite unlike the DFHs such as you and me.
But as a whole liberals and conservatives don't just differ in their ideas-as Obama himself well knows in a different compartment of his brain. They differ in attitudes, in sensibilities, in ways of thinking about ideas, as well as in larger life purposes. The origins of modern conservatism lie in the European landed aristocracy, descended from a predatory warrior class. Although tens of millions of self-identified conservatives today are culturally, historically, and/or genetically far removed from those origins, there is nonetheless a continuity in the kinds of life activities that such a culture breeds.
Similarly, the origins of modern liberalism lie in the European urban middle class-the burghers, or bourgeoisie, who inhabited a very different life-world, with some very different kinds of activity, much of which centers around the finding of facts, and all manner of intellectual pursuits that flow from or depend on factual knowledge. This includes all manner of occupations dating back centuries, even millennia-from artisans to shopkeepers, traders, lawyers, bankers, doctors and teachers-as well as occupations that scarcely existed as such more than two to five generations ago, such as scientists, technicians, engineers, etc.
From the conservative aristocracy's point of view, all such occupations are inherently servile: the aristocracy rules, it exists to rule, and all the factually-oriented occupations exist solely to serve the ruling aristocracy.
Over the weekend, Mark Leibovich had an interesting an entertaining piece in the Times on how "socialism" has become the Republicans' new all-purpose smear word attacking Obama in particular and Democrats generally.
Now, you can have a whole conversation about whether ramping marginal tax rates back to where they were in the go-go 1990s really constitutes socialism. But a different point occurred to me when I read the piece. I think this is probably the best evidence there is that the 'liberal' label simply doesn't have the punch that it had going back a good thirty years in American politics.
If it did, they'd still be using it, since it at least has some relationship to reality. But it doesn't, so they're not.
This is an astute observation in the form of noting Holmes' "dogs that do not bark." It appears conservatives have used up all the residual antipathy toward the liberal label. There is polling we can piece together to back up Josh's shrewd guess:
There are millions of perfectly competent, perfectly decent individual conservatives. You can find them almost everywhere, in every neighborhood, in every city and town across America. But when you shift your gaze from their individual lives to the philosophy they share, and its historical record, the conclusion is inescapable: It's a complete disaster, utterly incapable of producing sound, sustainable policies. Worse yet, the political leadership it produces is incompetent at anything, except for making excuses for itself, and shifting blame onto others--not exactly the sort of behavior that squares with the famed conservative mantra of "personal responsibility."
First, consider the macro record, which goes way beyond "heckuva job, Brownie!" Conservatives have dominated the federal government on two separate occasions over the past 100 years. The first was 1921-1933, the second was 2001-2009. (Although the GOP did not control Congress throughout all of 2001-2009, its post-2006 ability to filibuster in the Senate, combined with an Executive Branch that conceived of itself as accountable to no one effectively marginalized any Democratic influence.) Both these periods ended in financial crises of unprecedented proportions, for which conservatives disavowed any responsibility whatsoever.
Indeed, conservatives today are still trying to deny any credit whatsoever to FDR's remarkable record of saving the nation the last time conservatives screwed up this badly. And their two-fold purpose in doing that is to (a) continue absolving themselves of any blame and to (b) block us from dealing with the crisis they've produced this time around.
Individually, I doubt that one conservative in ten would act this irresponsibly. But as a group, it's virtually impossible for them to act any other way.
As a starting point for defining conservatism, and nailing down what the real atomic core of conservatism is, I started by asking: What do conservatives think it is? How do they answer this question?
It turns out, they don't really know. Their efforts to define it are worth studying though, partly because the answers they provide are revealing, but also because their own failure to find an answer satisfactory even just to themselves points to the need for outsiders to step in and provide the answers conservatives can't or won't face.
It's not just that they failed catastrophically the last two times they were tried in the last 100 years. There are fundamental reasons why conservative ideas CANNOT work. This diary briefly explains why.
Put simply, the GOP has basically had TWO ideas since 1932: (1) Kill the New Deal and anything related to it. (2) Promote Republicans as heroic saviors and attack Democrats as depraved traitors who hate America and are trying to destroy it.... All the other ideas Republicans have had since then have simply been tactical or strategic weaponry to advance those two basic ideas, split the Democratic base, shift blame, or otherwise gain political advantage, regardless of any real-world policy consequences. In short, Republican ideas revolve around the long-term struggle for political power, based on controlling political and quasi-political institutions, and thus controlling the political discourse.
I now want to go deeper into why conservative ideas cannot work. Without claiming to be exhaustive, I advance four main arguments:
(1) Conservative ideas cannot work, because they are faith-based, rather than reason and evidence/experience-based.
(2) Conservative ideas cannot work, because they are accepted-and liberal/progressive ideas are rejected-based on authoritarian obedience.
(3) Conservative ideas cannot work, because they are based on an objectively false model of the world, reflected in a false moral model for human action.
(4) Conservative ideas cannot work, because they are based on a limited level of causal connectedness, which is functionally inadequate to understand the world.
I will spell these out at somewhat greater length on the flip.
David's been doing excellent push-back against the "center-right nation" meme that's exploded post-election, just like 2006, but on steroids. While it's vitally important to keep up this fight, I'd like suggest opening up a second front--to wit, thinking about how to coopt all the building centrist narratives. Doing so goes back to one of the most important 2004 post-election analyses, Chris's "Eureka! Or How To Break the Republican Majority Coalition", in which he distinguished a form of moderate that really didn't fit on the traditional liberal/conservative spectrum. He identified these moderates with states that had a history of strong support for third parties, whose outward ideologies varied from populist to progressive to socialist to Perot's reform party.
At the time, Chris wrote:
While it is currently non-ideological, this segment of the population, which has existed in large numbers since at least the 1880's, has an outlook on politics that is far more closely allied with liberalism than conservatism because of its emphasis on reform. It is, to put it one way, latently liberal. This segment of the electorate can be swung toward the liberal camp, thus breaking the Republican majority coalition, if the pragmatic, non-dogmatic, reformer, anti-status quo, entrepreneurial aspects of liberalism are foregrounded and turned into a national narrative and platform.
So familiar? Maybe even prophetic? Not only that, but put this way it exposes precisely why those pushing the "center-right nation" narrative are just as opposed to Obama's message as they are to ideological progressives. For they are not only arguing against traditional progressive politics, but against any disruption to the status quo.
With the prospect of a new Great Depression now more than laughable hyperbole, it would be well to examine the ideological impacts of the last one. We tend to implicitly believe that liberals were a decisive majority during the New Deal, given the astounding Congressional majorities given to the Democrats of the period. We need to understand the nature and shifts in ideology better because this is the water in which our politicians swim. So many great policy options are unattainable because the prevailing conservative sludge has polluted the waters too much. This also allows us to be clearer eyed about the failings of the elected Democrats. Even FDR sometimes needed activists to generate popular will for the programs he favoured.
