A Mike Lux Golden Oldie
From Mar 15, 2010. Original HERE I have done a lot of writing, in my blog posts and my book, about the historic differences between conservatives and progressives in political battles, but almost equally fascinating to me is that between conservative and progressive religious traditions. The exact same fault lines, most importantly in terms of individualism vs. community, play themselves out in theological debates which sound very much like our political debates- and indeed, a lot of the same people operate in both realms.
Glenn Beck and Jim Wallis got into this debate over the last few days, and because Jim actually knows something about the Bible, he easily won the debate. Beck's classic conspiracy-minded starting point- that because both Nazis and Communists have used the phrase "social justice", that any religion that uses the term must be bad too- has a similar logic to saying that if a really bad teacher said two plus two equals four, because he or she was a bad teacher it must be false. Or saying that if a politician you don't like says "God Bless America", then any politician who says that is terrible. But leaving aside Beck's incredibly stupid logic, the point he makes about "social justice" is in keeping with conservative ideology: it is all about a self-focused view of religion and politics that, like Beck's ideological hero Ayn Rand, proclaims selfishness as the ultimate virtue.
Conservative Christians manage to ignore the literally many hundreds of Biblical quotes about social justice by making Christianity a religion solely focused on one very selfish goal: whether they get into heaven or not. That's it, that is the entire goal and purpose and meaning of their faith. And because St. Paul argued that faith is more important than "works" (what you do good in the world), they think that believing a certain doctrine is the only thing that matters in terms of whether you make it into heaven or not. Since everything is about getting themselves to heaven, and the Earth will be destroyed soon in Armageddon anyway, nothing that happens here matters very much. The one thing that matters to their God is having more people worship Him, so they try to convert people, but all that other stuff Jesus and the Old Testament prophets and Moses and James and all those other folks in the Bible talked about in terms of kindness, mercy, forgiving debts, being your brother's keeper, helping the poor, and all that other liberal socialistic stuff just isn't much of a priority to them compared to: me getting to heaven, and (second most important) converting others to my God. These so-called "Christian" conservatives live in a state of paranoia that somewhere, somehow some dollar of their taxes might go to some undeserving poor person, ignoring the fact that Jesus' entire ministry was targeted to the "undeserving" poor.
Not all Christians think this way, of course. There is another kind of thinking about the Christian faith: one that actually takes what's written in the Bible (beyond the Book of Revelations) seriously. The Jewish Torah (for Christians, that's their Old Testament) and the Christian New Testament have a wide variety of ideas and voices in their pages. Written by scores of authors over a span of probably a couple thousand years, one of the things I love about the Bible is the wide range of beliefs and perspectives within it. A lot of fundamentalists are desperate to find ways to explain away the contradictions in the Bible, because they believe every word is inspired by God and it's all literally true, but in fact the authors of the Bible disagree on both the details of what actually happened and the interpretation and philosophy behind the events they write about. If you take the Bible seriously, you see the debates and differing perspectives. Some Biblical writers were more conservative in their thinking, and some were more progressive. But the most consistent and enduring theme that runs through virtually every book in the Bible is that we are expected to love and be kind to our neighbors, especially the poor, hurting, and oppressed of the earth.
From the God of Genesis punishing Cain for not being his brother's keeper to Nathan the prophet rebuking King David for taking from the poor; from the Psalms that over and over proclaim the need to help the poor, and condemn those who judges, government officials, and wealthy people who mistreat them, from the prophets like Isaiah and Amos who deride those who engage in ritual sacrifice while refusing to help the oppressed (Isaiah I: "Cease to do evil. Learn to do good, search for justice, help the oppressed, be just to the orphan, plead for the widow.") to Jesus very first sermon proclaiming that he had come to "bring good news to the poor" and "liberty to the captives"- virtually every book of the Bible demands justice and mercy and community.
People who take the Bible seriously and respect its words, as opposed to being obsessed with whether they personally will get into heaven by following a certain kind of dogma, understand that community and compassion are in fact far more central to it than any specific metaphysical belief system. And that is what the Pat Robertsons, Glenn Becks, Sarah Palins, and the other false prophets of conservatism don't understand.
The circuitous method by which Paul Rosenberg arrives at "a framework of understanding in which those values are naturally connected to one another," which he summarizes near the end of Part II, as the core of his argument, that "An extremely sensible, empirically-grounded way to define progressive politics is [should be carried out by optimizing] in terms of optimizing positive outcomes for humanity as a whole, not for a just a selectively favored few," leaves me exhausted, after nearly three days of examining the abundant references in his article, as well, as references in cited articles to yet further references. Obviously I can't be considered sufficiently rational to comment without have at least some cursory understanding of the background he presents. Whew!
It has become increasingly (anecdotally) evident to me that "progressive" has supplanted "liberal" as the preferred ideological term of self identication among the US left. For quite some time it appeared as if the terms were purely interchangable, but my read on the trends now is that liberal is declining. For example, just last night I recently Anderson Cooper's program introduce Media Matters as the "progressive media watch dog group" and a WSJ article also applied the term to Netroots Nation. Both indicate the greater acceptance of the term such that established media use it without irony. In the hunt of some kind of empirical data, I tried a variety of comparative searches, and settled on the Daily Kos internal search engine, because it allows for accurate date ranges on searches, allowing me to examine the trend:
The X-axis represents the number of years back from July 2010 (when I ran the searches), so 1 = the last 12 months, 2 = the 12 months before that (Jul 2008-Jul 2009), 3 is the 2007-2008 period and so on to 6, which represents (counts fingers...) 2004-2005. The engine allows one to go back one more year, but I am omitting it because I'm not that confident about the 2003-2004 data for when the site was really just taking off. What's evident here is that at least among Daily Kos contributors, progressive passed liberal in popularity some time around early 2006. Last year, use of liberal actually declined in absolute terms.
An obvious (fair) objection is that Daily Kos is not the totality of the left. The sociological advantage of the site is the ongoing wide participation of a fairly broad audience of contemporary US left activists. I have put another chart inside which shows comparisons for some other sites I thought to search against, to provide some validation on the sample represented in Daily Kos (which I think it does since the Kos figures do not appear to be an outlier). One problem with general searches (say Google or Bing) is the difficulty of sorting out the number of non-political uses of terms like "progressive" and "conservative." Existing explicitly for politics, it's a safer bet that most uses of those terms on Daily Kos will be in their ideological context.
This is going to sound counter-intuitive at first but I have become convinced in the course of discussions with both conservative and progressive people in recent months that at its core, the surge in anti-government sentiment and the progressive angst in the Obama era so far both come from the same root issue. The heart of the problem is that our government has become captured by a small number of very big and very powerful corporate interests, and that has made the federal government increasingly dysfunctional.
This dysfunction feeds the right-wing plenty of fuel for its anti-government-all-the-time narrative, helping them build their movement. Unfortunately, though, it has also created a crisis point for progressives. Progressives have always understood that government not only has an important role to play in promoting the public good in areas the market doesn't work well, but is sometimes the only entity that can be strong enough to take on monopolistic or oligarchic private corporations who can become too powerful in a free market economy. When government gets captured by these powerful interests and becomes dysfunctional as a result, it puts progressives in a bad spot: defending the role of government when it keeps screwing up doesn't play very well with voters.
Because the progressive movement got used to the federal government playing a mostly positive role in economics, civil rights, the environment, and other issues during the New Deal era and the decades after, and because we don't worship the free market in all things and at all times the way conservatives do, there has been a tendency on our side in these last three decades of brutal attack on all things government to be reflexively defensive about it. As one example, I have had friends argue that progressives should avoid using the term "government waste" because it just feeds a bad frame about government. I have also heard many people talk about how important it is for us to be spending a lot of time explaining to people the positive role of government.
As someone who wrote about the historic political debate between the conservative and progressive movements, I don't agree with these arguments. The role and size of government in our society has changed dramatically over the course of American history, as has the role and size of private corporations, but the bedrock values and goals of the progressive movement have not changed. We stand for more democracy, more equality, and a better economic situation for poor and middle-income people, and we oppose trickle-down economics and the concentration of wealth and power for economic elites. To get better results in terms of those goals, we have frequently turned to government. But government is only a means to those ends, not the ends themselves- and it is not the only means to those ends, either. I want wages to go up for poor and working class people, and that can happen because the minimum wage increases (government) or through workers organizing a union and negotiating (collective action). I want to lessen the concentration of wealth and power of big corporations, and that can happen through regulation and anti-trust and progressive taxation (government), or through class action lawsuits, consumer boycotts, and shareholder resolutions (collective action). Of course it is always better for our purposes to have government on the right side, but we are not limited to government action to improve people's lives, and we also shouldn't be stuck defending government when it is on the wrong side.
When our government screws up, we shouldn't be afraid to say so. When government wastes money, we should call them on it. When government officials favor big business special interests over the rest of us, we should fight them. When government caves to the demands of powerful insider lobbyists, we should raise hell about it.
Social Security and Medicare are government programs which have worked incredibly well to lift senior citizens out of poverty and give them healthier, happy lives. Public education is the only way most children are ever going to get the education they need. Police, firefighters, roads, bridges, our national defense are all functions needed to be done by government. People with mental disabilities and people trapped in long-term poverty and unemployment need a government safety net. And only government has the ability to provide the oversight and check on the power of big corporations who would otherwise wreck our economy, pollute the environment, and make unsafe products. So, yes: government has an important role to play in our modern economy, and the right wing fantasy that government is not good at anything, and that the free market is always the way to go, needs to be thoroughly rejected. But progressives also need to stop being defensive of government in general. Government does waste money sometimes; government doesn't do all things well. And a progressivism that is always defensive of a government that isn't doing its job, that isn't delivering the things people need to make their daily lives better, will find itself at exactly the kind of crisis point we find ourselves in today.
With voters angry at the establishment and incumbents in general, and deals in particular, Democrats who are defenders of the established order are working overtime to beat down the idea of winning elections by using scary populism. Using faulty historical analogies, polls with carefully designed questions in order to elicit certain answers, and the specter of far-right anti-intellectualism as reasons not to be populist, they fear what might happen if Democrats actually start listening to real voters and make the changes people were promised in 2008.
The good news is that if the Democrats running for office in this tough, tough year will respond to the anti-establishment anger that is out there and ride it, they can do better than anyone is currently predicting. Of course, if that happened, it would be a very bad thing for corporate Democrats who don't want anything to change, because it would prove the lie that the only way for Democrats to win is to kow-tow to special interest power and conventional wisdom.
We've had pundits like Matt Bai take on populism in this way, and groups like Third Way do it as well. The latest article I have seen comes from a self-described liberal named Kevin Mattson writing in The American Prospect. Mattson's idea of a modern day populism is Sarah Palin, and if you accept that premise it's easy to see why he dislikes a populist message. He makes arguments unsupported by any polling numbers or actual knowledge of political dynamics such as "since the 1960s, populism has succeeded n the right and produced few if any left-wing counterparts... There is no way to steer that boat back to left-wing shores." He dismisses "Recent attempts to paint Harry Truman as a raging populist" (apparently forgetting Truman's 1948 stump speech: "These Republican gluttons of privilege... want a return of the Wall Street economic dictatorship..."). He talks about Gore's fatal mistake of populism, conveniently forgetting that after Gore's People vs. The Powerful convention speech, he shot ahead in the polls in that race (only losing his lead after he performed badly in the debates). He ignores the fact that Clinton's winning 1992 election message was even more populist than Gore's in 2000.
However, my point here is not to argue the history of populism's political success or promise- I have done that here and here in case you want to check those arguments out. What I want to focus on today is a progressive populist platform that wins politically in our currently political environment.
Mattson's most irritating tendency is to throw out sentences like "Populism -- because it glorifies the 'common sense' of the people -- is prone to the sloppy, slapdash thinking of figures like Palin" and "too often the advice to adopt populist rhetoric becomes advice to pander" and "Populism's simplicity is its central fault". The disdain of Bai, Mattson and Third Way for progressive populism is evident in these kinds of sentences and strained historical argument. But a platform and message that does actually take on big corporate elites and an entrenched establishment does not have to wallow in simplicity, pandering and proud stupidity the way Palin-style right-wing populism does.
Anger alone does not win elections for progressives, but righteous anger combined with accurate analysis and policies that take on the corruption of wealthy elites certainly can. The way populism wins is to be angry at what the elites have done to this country and smart about how to fix it all at the same time. Here is a winning progressive populist platform for the 21st century.
During Netroots Nation, we are running Golden Oldies plus a few surprises. Regularly Scheduled programming will resume on July 26.
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.
For the next five days we'll mostly be at Netroots Nation or in transit. David will be doing a post a day--probably around noon, and we'll be running Golden Oldies as out mainstay. There will be guest Left Ed diary on Sunday at 1 PM. Here to start things off on a slightly different note, I'm hoping to stir some back-and-forth by republishing a comment by T. Jacobsen from an interaction primarily with fladem in my diary "Herding cats: Some thoughts on the quest for a functional progressive coalition ". The general topic under discussion is the framework of liberal political theory vs. a more ill-defined progressive alternative, which T. Jacobsen fleshes out somewhat:
The Green Mountain state profoundly shaped my perspective about how my particular progressive political views intersect with electoral politics, policy-making, and governance, though in my case from the late 90s when I lived there. There is also a wealth of experience regarding left alternative party building in the state, both good and bad.
I also agree Fladem that perhaps the biggest flashpoint between 'liberals' and 'progressives' is found in foreign policy and more or less in the way you frame it: Is American foreign policy generally imperialist or something else and something of an exception to world power politics? But as one might expect from a 'socioeconomic progressive' that is to me just a subset of the larger questions about market capitalism. US foreign policy is at its core about extending and protecting a US-dominated global capitalist system. There really is not much room to debate that, it seems to me, only whether or not that is a good thing.
Up thread you ask 'what is the alternative'? By way of quick response I'd start with:
(1) nothing is more unrealistic or unsustainable than global capitalism and the longer the delay to transition away the rougher it will be and the worse will be the outcomes - presumption is against the status quo;
(2) much of human social experience right now - today - is not subjected, or at least not willingly and readily, to market logic. In my view, the challenge is to 'protect' those areas as much as possible from the application of market logic. These include things like family life and public goods, and market promoters are relentless in their efforts to extend the logic of the market to new profitable areas. Enclosure continues as the market reaches and consumes ever more of human social life. A litmus test of a sort is for me water: should water resources and their delivery be privatized or not? One cannot support privatization of water and be a progressive, in my judgment, under any conditions whatsoever;
(3) the possibility of alternatives and the worst consequences of the current system are most visible from outside the US political context, for the most part. Something to think about;
(4) there is The Market and there is the market. Free market advocates often perceive critics as somehow anti-trade. That is not entirely unfair in some cases in as much as many progressives (and ecologists) encourage local production and consumption over disaggregated production and consumption systems across the entire globe. But that is really just a shift in the locus of trade. But more generally, and in a highly, and perhaps uselessly, abstract way, progressives can embrace a market in which monetized trading practices are permitted but which are embedded in and subordinate to larger social structures and rituals that reflect communal values. Then there is The Market, which is the thing US and most global elites promote as the highest and best form of human organization that can ever be achieved, so don't even contemplate alternatives because there are none (that is the ideological function of the TINA refrain);
(5) the long term alternative - in my own view - is to leverage our way into social democracy and greater ecological restraint on our way over many generations to bioregional political federations as a type of libertarian socialist socio-economic configuration. But that is so far off it is usually pointless to engage in discussions about such matter, at least not until the wee hours of the morning after a lively evening.
Plenty of ideas to comment on there, IMHO. What think you?
Note I had planned a longer diary for this slot responding to an issue raised by fladem in the discussion of "Why is it so complicated to be a progressive?". But because Mike's diary was so meaty, I've decided to postpone that diary till tomorrow. Instead, this diary deals with another imporant issue in the same broad discussion, but one that I can write about more succinctly, largely by recycling a comment I recently wrote in a near-dead thread.
If you set "progressives" in opposition to the "individual" you will not succeed, IMHO.
You need to demonstrate to the individuals that comprise your society/culture that the collective society will benefit them. Unless you plan to compel individuals to participate in your collective, you have to figure out how to get them involved by choice. Setting your "movement" in opposition to them is not the way to accomplish such.
This is a very important point, and even as I responded, I thought I should be writing a diary instead, because the issue SpitBall raised deserved a broader debate, and I thought I had a pretty good framework to make that debate more fruitful. What follows is my response, with an addendum on the flip.
Trying Thinking of It This Way, And See If It Makes Sense
In particle physics, there is no such thing as a particle in isolation. Every particle creates a cloud of virtual particles surrounding it.
There are theoretical models of the "bare particle" and these are the basis of conceiving of the real particle as a combination of the bare particle and its virtual cloud. But in the real world, the bare particle simply doesn't exist by itself.
What's more, philosophically, the individual particle simply cannot exist apart from the entire universe. The particle is the carrier of properties (or forces) that are inherently universal in nature.
In this manner, the particles are both the "foundation of everything" and yet at the same time they are also entirely relational in nature.
The same is true of individuals in human society, IMHO. And we need a political philosophy framework that encompasses this dual reality.
The field of relationships is fundamental, because one simply can't build up from isolated points to a broader continuum. Similarly, per Locke's Social Contract, there can be no rights-bearing individuals until there is a social contract to make those rights secure.
However, the whole point of the framework is precisely that it makes true individualism (as opposed to immature fantasy versions) possible.
Thus, each is fundamental for different purposes. And philosophically, Jamesian pluralism is the natural fit for encompassing a framework that takes distinct different purposes each as equally valid in their own rights.
I have enjoyed reading the (mostly) thoughtful reactions to my post a couple of days back entitled "Time for a new conversation", and have to admit that I was convinced by some of the arguments people made. Debcoop, Paul Rosenberg, and several others made really cogent, compelling arguments about the need for building a progressive narrative separate from the Obama narrative, and the need for having a strategic foundation underpinned with an understanding of where Obama is coming from and trying to get to.
Here are some further thoughts about narrative and strategy for progressives in the Obama era:
1) I was intentionally trying to be provocative in "Time for a new conversation", and it clearly worked. I agree with debcoop that it would be helpful to know more about where Obama intends to end up on key issues in terms of plotting our own progressive strategy. But it is always hard to read Presidential tea leaves and motivations. What we can base our strategy on is what we know about the nature of modern Democratic coalitions.
Unfortunately, the Democratic coalition in the modern era has shifted more toward the corporate side. However, the progressive elements of that coalition still have enough collective strength that they ought to be using what juice they have to force more concessions than they generally get, wherever Obama personally may be on a given issue. Every single fight needs to be analyzed more in advance to see what we think we have the capacity to win.
2) We need to do better at keeping hope alive, as Jesse Jackson used to say. I know this may not seem like it is related very much to a discussion about how much we should be arguing about whether Obama is a progressive or not, but it seems to me that a lot of the Obama arguments are weighted with a sense of hopelessness and a level of cynicism that makes hope impossible. Now just to be clear before people start attacking me as being an apologist for Obama: I don't believe Obama is a strong progressive, I have been disappointed in a great many things he has done, and I think his political strategy so far has mostly sucked. But I also believe what I was taught in my first organizing workshop (by Saul Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation) 35 years ago: the only way you can organize people and win victories is if people have hope. Thinking that all is lost, that all Democrats suck, that Obama will each and every time screw us, that the forces of corporations and the right will win every single battle, or that none of the things we do win matter, is not conducive to winning anything important that matters in real people's lives, or getting people to take action.
Read, if you can bear it, Eric Alterman's 17,000 word piece on why the Obama administration has been a disappointment (he's more on the "it's not Obama, it's the system" side of things). Page after page after page of unmitigated depression about how horrible things are for our side- and he likes Obama! If I believed it was as hopeless as all that, I would quit politics all together and just try to figure out how much money I could make. It is not a great way to inspire people to action. While I think we need to be realistic about the very big challenges we face as progressives, looking at what is possible and at the good trends is useful as well. Here's some examples:
Eric was dismissive of the blogosphere and the potential for new media, and he didn't even mention most of the exciting organizing going on in the field. When I came to DC with Clinton in 1992, progressives were a scattered bunch of mostly weak single issue or constituency groups, whose main membership was an aging and passive direct mail list. MoveOn, the Huffington Post, Media Matters, the Center for American Progress, the Daily Kos, and Campaign for America's future didn't exist. And there were no major media figures with platforms on the progressive side of things. Now we have Rachel Maddow, Keith Olbermann, Ed Shultz, the Young Turks, Dylan Ratigan, and the ever evolving, incredibly creative blogosphere.
In the 1990's, gays in the military and a tiny stimulus jobs program were crushed early, health care reform was a flaming disaster, and Democrats as well as Republicans were speeding down the track in the wrong direction on financial regulation. For all the flaws and compromises, in the last 18 months we have seen by far the biggest stimulus jobs package in history, a bill providing near universal coverage and some protections against the worst abuses of insurance companies, and a financial reform bill that audits the Fed, has an independent consumer protection agency, and wins some other solid regulatory victories.
Here's the other thing: as Chris has done such a good job of pointing out, the long term demographic trends play very much in our favor. People of color are rising dramatically as a percentage of the electorate, as are unmarried folks and non-Christian and/or less traditionally religious people. All of those demographic groups tend toward progressive politics, as does this generation of young people coming into the electorate right now.
I understand all the challenges, and I totally get the frustrations with Obama. But hope springs eternal, and history shows that progressive breakthroughs are possible even in tough times (sometimes especially in tough times).
3) The narrative thing on Obama is very tricky. I completely agree that we need to project a progressivism that is not Obamaism, an ideological center of gravity stronger, clearer, and more idealistic than Obama's. But the experience from my earliest days in politics with the Carter presidency is not especially positive on this scene. Carter had a bad relationship with most progressives, got a strong primary challenge from the left, and had a general election third party candidate (Barry Commoner) with some major progressive endorsements running on his left. But Republicans and their allies in the media still pegged Carter as the personification of liberalism for a generation. And Carter did not push through a major deficit spending jobs bill, a universal health care bill, and a big re-structuring of bank regulations as Obama has. Not that we don't have a great case, and not that we shouldn't try to create a progressive narrative separate from Obama, but it will be a serious challenge.
That's enough for one sitting. I have enjoyed the discussion on this topic, and have definitely moved as a result. I look forward to more dialogue on how to react to Obama, and- more importantly in my mind- how to win more progressive victories in the Obama era.
Conservatives have historically argued against progressive policies on a variety of fronts: the unintended consequences of change, the primacy of the individual over government, the dangers of a growing bureaucracy (or more generically, "big government"), the importance of traditional values and local control, the worry of people growing too dependent on government, etc. With increasing vehemence, though, conservatives have begun to argue that kind-heartedness, compassion, and a sense of community are actually evil: that they lead inevitably to Nazism and death camps.
Political debate has always been hot and heavy in this country, with conservatives swinging hard and heavy and making some pretty wild claims: the pro-British Tories in the 1770s decried the "rats of democracy"; the pro-slavery Southern planters in the first half of the 1800s said that slaves were better off than if they were free; the Social Darwinists said society would be better off if the poor were allowed to starve to death, because their death would improve the gene pool. But the compassion equals evil argument didn't really get laid out in detail until Ayn Rand's writings, where she actually did argue that people with compassion and concern for others were leeches who drained society of its competitive life blood.
Just as Ayn Rand took the Social Darwinist argument and made it more virulent, the conservative author Jonah Goldberg brought a new, more extreme twist to the argument, literally saying that progressives like FDR were ideological soul mates of Hitler and Mussolini's brand of fascism. This easily debunked book has become the right's excuse for accusing everyone arguing for progressive causes of being a Nazi.
Glenn Beck is, of course, the present day leader of the pack when it comes to this kind of invective. Here's his latest insight on the subject:
I know Glenn Beck is an easy target for ridicule, and others including Keith Olbermann and Stewart himself have done great send-ups on him before, but this extended Jon Stewart throw-down last night may be the funniest piece of satire I have ever seen:
I have to give Glen Beck credit. Yes, I will grant you that he is a nativist, race-baiting, neo-fascist, Social Darwinist, 9/11-victim-hating, not-very-good-at-figuring-out-the-meaning-of-obvious-lyrics, apparently-has-never-read-the-actual-Bible kind of guy, but I do admire his willingness to openly make the case for the far-right wing historical worldview- the worldview of the truly out there conservatives like John C. Calhoun and Robert Welch and Ayn Rand. When I see his attacks on progressivism, I kind of feel like he read my book, The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be, and felt like he identified with all the goats in my narrative and is attacking all the heroes. He seems to want to glorify all the pro-slavery, anti-democracy, anti-women's rights, Social Darwinists, pro-big business, anti-worker people I mention, and attack all the reformers, Bill-of-Rights agitators, abolitionists, suffragists, labor organizers, pro-national parks, anti-child labor, anti-big trust, pro-regulation of Wall Street I like. It is truly fascinating to see him trash people like Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt, who did so much to advance progress in this country, and glorify a President like Calvin Coolidge, whose policies led us directly into the Great Depression. I haven't yet heard him do a history lesson praising John C. Calhoun for standing up for slavery as a part of the states' rights doctrine, or hear him approvingly quote Social Darwinist William Graham Sumner talking about how it's best for society if poor people are allowed to die, but I eagerly await for this to happen.
I could write another long post like this one analyzing Beck's rather stunning philosophy, but I have to admit that Jon Stewart's send-up is far more fun, so I will leave it at that.
I have done a lot of writing, in my blog posts and my book, about the historic differences between conservatives and progressives in political battles, but almost equally fascinating to me is that between conservative and progressive religious traditions. The exact same fault lines, most importantly in terms of individualism vs. community, play themselves out in theological debates which sound very much like our political debates- and indeed, a lot of the same people operate in both realms.
Glenn Beck and Jim Wallis got into this debate over the last few days, and because Jim actually knows something about the Bible, he easily won the debate. Beck's classic conspiracy-minded starting point- that because both Nazis and Communists have used the phrase "social justice", that any religion that uses the term must be bad too- has a similar logic to saying that if a really bad teacher said two plus two equals four, because he or she was a bad teacher it must be false. Or saying that if a politician you don't like says "God Bless America", then any politician who says that is terrible. But leaving aside Beck's incredibly stupid logic, the point he makes about "social justice" is in keeping with conservative ideology: it is all about a self-focused view of religion and politics that, like Beck's ideological hero Ayn Rand, proclaims selfishness as the ultimate virtue.
Conservative Christians manage to ignore the literally many hundreds of Biblical quotes about social justice by making Christianity a religion solely focused on one very selfish goal: whether they get into heaven or not. That's it, that is the entire goal and purpose and meaning of their faith. And because St. Paul argued that faith is more important than "works" (what you do good in the world), they think that believing a certain doctrine is the only thing that matters in terms of whether you make it into heaven or not. Since everything is about getting themselves to heaven, and the Earth will be destroyed soon in Armageddon anyway, nothing that happens here matters very much. The one thing that matters to their God is having more people worship Him, so they try to convert people, but all that other stuff Jesus and the Old Testament prophets and Moses and James and all those other folks in the Bible talked about in terms of kindness, mercy, forgiving debts, being your brother's keeper, helping the poor, and all that other liberal socialistic stuff just isn't much of a priority to them compared to: me getting to heaven, and (second most important) converting others to my God. These so-called "Christian" conservatives live in a state of paranoia that somewhere, somehow some dollar of their taxes might go to some undeserving poor person, ignoring the fact that Jesus' entire ministry was targeted to the "undeserving" poor.
Not all Christians think this way, of course. There is another kind of thinking about the Christian faith: one that actually takes what's written in the Bible (beyond the Book of Revelations) seriously. The Jewish Torah (for Christians, that's their Old Testament) and the Christian New Testament have a wide variety of ideas and voices in their pages. Written by scores of authors over a span of probably a couple thousand years, one of the things I love about the Bible is the wide range of beliefs and perspectives within it. A lot of fundamentalists are desperate to find ways to explain away the contradictions in the Bible, because they believe every word is inspired by God and it's all literally true, but in fact the authors of the Bible disagree on both the details of what actually happened and the interpretation and philosophy behind the events they write about. If you take the Bible seriously, you see the debates and differing perspectives. Some Biblical writers were more conservative in their thinking, and some were more progressive. But the most consistent and enduring theme that runs through virtually every book in the Bible is that we are expected to love and be kind to our neighbors, especially the poor, hurting, and oppressed of the earth.
From the God of Genesis punishing Cain for not being his brother's keeper to Nathan the prophet rebuking King David for taking from the poor; from the Psalms that over and over proclaim the need to help the poor, and condemn those who judges, government officials, and wealthy people who mistreat them, from the prophets like Isaiah and Amos who deride those who engage in ritual sacrifice while refusing to help the oppressed (Isaiah I: "Cease to do evil. Learn to do good, search for justice, help the oppressed, be just to the orphan, plead for the widow.") to Jesus very first sermon proclaiming that he had come to "bring good news to the poor" and "liberty to the captives"- virtually every book of the Bible demands justice and mercy and community.
People who take the Bible seriously and respect its words, as opposed to being obsessed with whether they personally will get into heaven by following a certain kind of dogma, understand that community and compassion are in fact far more central to it than any specific metaphysical belief system. And that is what the Pat Robertsons, Glenn Becks, Sarah Palins, and the other false prophets of conservatism don't understand.
Hello again. Well yesterday we took a look at laws seven and eight, of The 48 Laws Of Power. Today we look at the next two laws, one of which is incredibly important for Progressives to start following.
Hi all. Welcome back to The One About....'s special weekend feature, The One About Book Club. For those of you who are new readers to The One About...., let me recap for you. On the weekends I write in depth about a book that I feel is of significance to Progressives, looking at one or more chapters per post. For the complete introduction to the project you can go here. My pick to inaugurate this project is The 48 Laws Of Power. So far I've offered an introduction and overview of the book, and written about Chapters(or in keeping with the tone of the book Laws) 1 and 2, 3 and 4, and 5 and 6. So I bet you can guess what comes next.
Glenn Beck's CPAC speech was a rare gem of political discourse. I encourage everyone to read it so that they really understand where modern conservatism is going. Some of my friends are quite accurately comparing his "progressivism is cancer" screed to fascist rhetoric by people like Mussolini and Franco, because the parallels are striking, but I want to focus more on how the speech's philosophy is a template for the conservative cause right now.
Beck's essential message was that I crawled my way from the dung pile without any help, and that's what makes America great ,so we shouldn't help anyone in trouble. From his twisted personal story to his twisted vision of American history, Beck took rapturous CPACers on a classic tour of American conservative ideology. From his paranoid delusional ranting about how liberals hate anyone successful to his Social Darwinist view of society and nature, he laid out the conservative line and took it to its logical conclusion. And the audience loved it. The quintessential moment in the speech? When Beck explained why we shouldn't be helping anyone in need: "There's some sort of element of competition to life. Oh that's not natural. Really? Go watch the lions eat the weakest." And the audience burst into laughter and applause- as I wrote the other day, these conservatives really are into cruelty, so the idea of lions eating the weak got them going.
Beyond the celebration of eating the weakest, they money paragraph on the speech was this classic rendition of conservative thought:
We believe in the right of the individual. We believe in the right of the individual. We believe in the right, you can speak out, you can disagree with me, you can make your own path. But I'm not going to pay for your mistakes, and I don't expect you to pay for my mistakes. We're all going to make them, but we all have the right to move down that road. What we don't have a right to is: health care, housing, or handouts. We don't have those rights. Every time the government grows we lose more of who we are. When you give up your right to struggle... you're giving more of your freedom away.
In the conservative world view, each individual is on their own. The best society will be created if each of us goes our own way, with absolutely no help from anyone, and does exactly what we want to do, no matter who it hurts. Because that invisible hand of the marketplace makes individual greed a source of strength, and because if the weak are not "eaten", society itself becomes weaker. Like the Social Darwinists of the post-Civil War era, conservatives such as Beck clearly believe, as William Graham Sumner put it back in 1893, that every society faces only two alternatives: "liberty, survival of the fittest" or "liberty, equality, survival of the unfittest." Beck said, "As I read the Constitution...the only job of the United States government is to save us from bad guys." The way Sumner put it was that government had only one purpose, which was to protect "the property of men and the honor of women."
Conservatives' answer to the question "Am I my brother's keeper?" is a resounding Hell NO. And that is the essential divide between them and the progressivism which Beck describes as a cancer: progressives believe that all of us are in this together. When our child is weakened by a chronic illness, or our parent by old age, we don't abandon them in the wilderness so that the lion can eat them up (and then laugh about it). When our brother stumbles and hits bottom, we don't stand back and see if he can pull himself up by his own bootstraps, we lend him a helping hand. When our sister is abused and treated unfairly by an employer, we don't tell her she's on her own, we work with her to make things fairer. We believe in a community that helps each other survive and prosper, because we don't want to live in a world where only the strongest and wealthiest and - yes - luckiest survive. We don't have fantasies that all our success is of our own making because we know that without good families, good neighbors, good school and libraries and roads and bridges paid for by public dollars, that without all that, we'd be much less likely to make it on our own. In spite of Beck's paranoia, we have no problem with people being successful. I have never once heard any progressive attack Steve Jobs or Eric Schmidt for their success, or attack the local small businessperson making a good living because he or she is supplying products a community wants. But what we do believe is that those lucky enough to be successful have a responsibility to give something back to their fellow citizens.
I will choose the "weakness" of a compassionate society over the brutal kind of "let the lions eat the weak" vision of Glenn Beck's perfect society any day of the week. Am I my brother's keeper? My answer is yes.
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