Keys To Victory #3: Constructing Liberal Identity, Values & Narrative For A Political Realignment

by: Paul Rosenberg

Wed Aug 15, 2007 at 13:22:02 PM EDT

Now, in Part 3, I address how to construct a diverse liberal identity.  The key to doing so lies in weaving together issues, values and narratives, and doing so with a diversified messaging and organizing strategy.  To bring things solidly down to earth, I will focus on two key concepts that I believe have tremendous potential for liberal politics, both in 2008, and for decades to come. These concepts can be expressed in a simple pairing: "dignity and security for all." 

As I will explain, there is more than just a rhetorical echo of another famous liberal formulation, "liberty and justice for all."  In a very real sense, dignity is the lived foundation for justice, just as security is the lived foundation for liberty (this is a key aspect of Locke's social contract theory).  What's more, when these concepts are presented together, they represent a fuller and more robust expression of Franklin D. Roosevelt's "Four Freedoms" --freedom of speech and expression, freedom of every person to worship in his own way, freedom from want and freedom from fear.

Thus, what I am arguing for is a new articulation of core liberal values in a form that pro-actively responds to 40+ years of rightwing slander, as well as the realworld challenges of the 21st Century.  To accomplish a lasting political realignment--along the lines seen in 1930/1932--we will need to change the basic contours of the politically possible, which means the politically imaginable.  Fortunately, we've done it before.  We can do it again.

The essence of liberalism is the right to dissent, to think for oneself, and to act on one's beliefs.  It is therefore only natural that liberalism is impossible to define in terms of a common pre-defined identity.  However, as Chris Bowers has repeatedly pointed out, there is a dramatic demographic correlate to this.

For example, here at OpenLeft, in "Toward A Pluralist Strategy", he wrote:

Whites who self-identify as non-Christian (Jewish, no religion, or other religion) vote for Democrats at roughly the same 70-75% rate as do non-whites. As such, the current Democratic coalition is by far the most diverse ever assembled in the history of American politics. For example, in 2006, according to exit polls, 89% of African-American voters, 87% of Jewish voters, 75% of GLBT voters, 74% of non-religious voters, 71% of voters with an "other" (non-Christian, non-Jewish) religion, 69% of Latino voters, and 62% of Asian-American voters chose the Democratic candidate for US House. Every single one of these numbers either breaks, or closely approaches, the all-time Democratic performance record with each group. Basically, if there is a minority in this country, not only did it vote for Democrats, but it did so by a super-majority. In fact, roughly 60% of all Democratic voters fit into at least one of the demographic groups listed above, compared to about only 20% of Republican voters.

and at MyDD, in "Maybe It Is a Battle Of Civilizations" (back in April 2005), he wrote:

By contrast, the liberal coalition in this country is rapidly becoming more and more pluralistic. Already, there is no majority ethnic-religious identity group within the coalition, nor one even approaching a majority. This coalition is repeatedly criticized by pundits for not taking national security seriously enough, not taking faith seriously enough, and not knowing what it stands for. You know this list of complaints by heart as well. Though caricatured by the Right Wing Noise Machine, these criticisms are probably at least somewhat accurate. How can they not be, at least when compared to the other coalition, which is waging what amounts to a war of identity against those it finds threatening? Of course they are going to talk more faith, since they have a far more singular view of faith to discuss. Of course they are going to take national security as a higher priority, since they view the world as a clash of identities rather than as pluralistic and interdependent. Of course, they are going to have clearer positions, since they are way, way more homogeneous. The liberal coalition has become so diverse that it is almost already living in a post-identity world,

Of course, the above quotes refer to Democrats generally, but no one can seriously doubt the gist of what Chris is saying applies to liberals/progressives as well. So this is the question: how do you forge a post-identity identity?  Not just for yourself, but for an entire polity?

My answer is that you do it through stories--through narratives, if you will.  Take a look at the old WWII movies to see an example of what I mean: the squad with an all-white, but ethnic mish-mash of characters was a staple of such fare.  It was what we Americans were, as opposed to the "Master Race" other of the Germans.  Our task is not quite that simple, but the same principle applies: you make a diverse population into a coherent subject by weaving their stories together, and revealing a common cause, a shared vision, a joint mission, and growing mutual respect.

One way that you do this consistently in the political realm is to articulate shared values that can be illustrated in a multi-faceted way through a wide range of different stories. And toward this end I have two prime candidates to suggest: the values of shared dignity and shared security.

Before I explain them, however, I'd like to quote another passage as a set-up to reprise the point of my previous post in this series.  Just days after the 2004 election, Chris quoted at length from a piece in TNR by Brad Carson, the Democrat who had just lost the race for US Senate from Oklahoma. Here is an excerpt:

The culture war is real, and it is a conflict not merely about some particular policy or legislative item, but about modernity itself. Banning gay marriage or abortion would not be sufficient to heal the cultural gulf that exists in this nation. The culture war is about matters more fundamental still: whether nationality is, in a globalized world, a random fact of no more significance than what hospital one was born in or whether it is the source of identity and even political legitimacy; whether one's self is a matter of choice or whether it is predetermined, before birth, by the cultural membership of one's family; whether an individual is just that--a free-floating atom--or whether the individual is part of a long chain that both predates and continues long after any particular person; whether concepts like honor and shame, which seem so quaint, are still relevant in a world that values only "tolerance." These are questions not for politicians but for philosophers, and, in the end, it is the failure of liberal philosophy that we saw on November 2.

Carson is mistaken, but understandably so. Liberals have not matched conservatives in pouring so many resources into building idea factories to churn out political narratives by the truckload.  But we do have a narrative that not only binds people together, it explains how to create new bonds and repair old ones when they are ruptured.  It is a narrative about inhabiting roles--and even honoring them--without being trapped in them. It is a narrative about pride and honor without the need to make others feel shame and dishonor.

If liberalism is about the individual as "a free-floating atom," it is even moreso about the individual as creator of new bonds, bonds like our own Constitution, or the bonds of immigrants who adopt a new nation, or the bonds of marriage partners who marry for love, not because their families decree it.  These are bonds that are all the more powerful because they are ones we author ourselves. They are from us, not from others. They are not sources of chaos and destruction, as fearful conservatives would have it.  They are sources of new order, and new creation, as well as extensions of the old.

This is the very essence of what it means to create a Stage Four, modernist identity.  Doing this collaboratively with the diverse coalition of people who make up the liberal/Democratic coalition  elevates it to the very essence of creating a Stage Five, post-modernist identity.

Dignity for All

The concept of shared dignity, of dignity as a human right, is presented by author Robert Fuller in his book, All Rise: Somebodies, Nobodies, and the Politics of Dignity.  Fuller argues that rankism--the abuse of hierarchical power--is a generalized affront to human dignity, which is, in turn a fundamental human right.  All the specific liberation movements for oppressed groups are but separate facets of the same broad struggle against the same transgression in different garb.

But rankism involves much more than simply the collection of all forms of group oppression.  Hierarchical environments give rise to all sorts of personal abuse that anyone can experience--even born-again white males with 2.3 kids and 3.2 cars in the garage.  Thus, the concept of dignity as a human right, and the vision of creating a dignitarian culture is one that not only conceptually unifies the diverse liberal coalition, it explicitly includes the proverbial "angry white male" whose misdirected resentment has been a cornerstone of the conservative movement since the 1960s.

Note also that Fuller is not opposed to hierarchy per se.  There are, after all, good reasons to respect accomplishment, particularly when its fruits are justly enjoyed.  Rankism is the abuse of rank--whether it be individual, institutional, or systemic throughout society.  There is nothing in Fuller's vision that can honestly be construed as attacking, disrespecting or dishonoring actual achievements.  To the contrary, by organizing against the abuse of rank, we remove legitimate generalized suspicions that can unfairly cloud specific achievements.  In particular, the more trustworthy institutions are in treating everyone fairly, the more solid a foundation there is for trusting both the institutions and those who rise to positions of trust within them.

Here is what Fuller has to say about the costs of rankism:

Rankism's Toll

On Personal Relationships

In personal relations, the abuse of rank is experienced subjectively as an insult to dignity. Our antennae are tuned to detect the slightest trace of condescension or indignity in others' treatment of us. Pulling rank takes the form of disrespect, insults, disdain, 'dissing', berating, snobbism, and humiliation. It is meant to demean, to exploit, to wound, to harm, and to damage - and it does. Even when not deliberately malicious, rank abuse can still warp and deform our interactions.

On Productivity

While on a visit to Philadelphia, George Washington noticed that free men there could do in "two or three days what would employ [his slaves] a month or more." His explanation that slaves had no chance "to establish a good name [and so were] too regardless of a bad one" was that of a practical man concerned with the bottom line, not that of a moralizer, and therefore all the more telling.

Today, employers are not dealing with slaves, though it is sometimes argued that wage-earners are wage-slaves and salaried employees are only marginally more independent. Negative motivation - fear of demotion or job loss - is now dwarfed by the positive motivation that comes from being part of a team of responsible professionals. Eliminating recognition deficiencies in the work place is proving as good for the bottom line as eliminating nutritional deficiencies was for the productivity of day laborers.

On Learning

The real and imagined threat of rank abuse pervades all our educational institutions from kindergarten through graduate school. Finding and holding one's position in a hierarchy takes priority over all else. In any institution with gradations of rank, protecting one's dignity from insult and injury siphons attention and energy away from learning.

No child - no human being - is expendable. Everyone has something to contribute, and when that contribution is made and acknowledged, he or she feels like a somebody. Helping individuals locate that something and contribute it is the proper business of education.

On Leadership

In any institution, rank-based discrimination limits the access of potential high performers to better jobs by inhibiting movement among ranks. It also puts those holding high rank under the kind of stress that gradually undercuts the creativity that brought them success in the first place.

Repeating themselves gradually separates somebodies from their creative source, depleting them until they become empty shells. With enough repetitions, they begin to wonder why they ever thought they had anything to offer. Burnout is the occupational hazard of somebodyness.

On Spirit

Our passions are unique and personal. They grow out of our questions, out of the contradictions we feel with other people, with others' work, or with society. Initially we wonder Who's right? What's beautiful? What's fair? What's true? We're not sure. Our questions generate our individuality. Through our response to them, we define ourselves, we become someone in particular. Rank, social and otherwise, still keeps many from cultivating their questions into life-altering quests.

It is clear that the issue of combating rankism and upholding dignity for all as a human right goes far beyond the normal scope of politics.  And this is just as it should be.  It is a profound expression of what liberalism has always, in some sense, been about, but which it has never previously expressed so clearly.  And as such, it is a clear answer to Brad Carlson's charge that liberalism has failed as a philosophy.  Upholding dignity as a human right is a means for us not simply to "win" the culture war, but to end it.  To render it moot.

Dignity: A Practical Addendum

Within the larger context of dignity for all, it will also become much easier to address environmental racism and other structural, institutional forms of rankism.  We will much more easily adopt the perspective articulated by the Applied Research Center in its Racial Justice Scorecards, that we benefit the entire society as a whole when we address the particular needs of any group whose needs have been neglected because of rankism.

Thus, we need to work both at the "big picture" level, fighting rankism on behalf of dignity for all, and at the level of specific issues as well, incorporating that big picture language into the everyday fabric of the political work we do.

Security For All

In his book The Great Risk Shift: The Assault on American Jobs, Families, Health Care, and Retirement--And How You Can Fight Back, Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker argues that economic insecurity has expanded even more rapidly than economic inequality, and that it forms a devastating threat to the American people, collectively as well as individually.

A most basic measure of insecurity--of risk--is the volatility of income, the degree to which income fluctuates from year to year.  If your income fluctuates wildly, it is difficult, if not impossible, to feel secure in making any sort of financial decision.  On page 2 of The Great Risk Shift, Hacker makes this point:

Family incomes now rise and fall ever more sharply.  In fact, over the past generation the economic instability of American families has actually risen much faster than economic inequality--the growing gap between rich and poor that is often taken as a defining feature of the contemporary U.S. economy.

Although this is a fundamental fact, it is part of a much larger pattern.  At the same time that income insecurity is growing, other forms of protection against risk are being eroded as well--pensions, health care coverage, fixed-rate mortgages.  Taken all together, these are not changes that "just happened," Hacker argues.  They are the intentional result of conservative policies--and the blocking of liberal alternatives.  As a review at Crooked Timber notes:

Hacker's account is twofold. First, he looks at the various ways in which risk has increased over the last few decades....

At least some of this increase in risk is secular - it's hard to trace it back to specific decisions made by particular people or groups. But what isn't hard to trace back are the decisions made by policy makers to exacerbate these risks by aiding and abetting the transfer of risks to individuals rather than countering it. This is the second prong of Hacker's argument. We know that policy makers could have done differently - they have done differently in other countries. But in the US, thanks to Gingrich and others like him, government has sought to increase individuals' exposure to risk rather than to decrease it, typically under the mantra of increasing 'choice' or 'freedom.' Thus, for example, the abovementioned individual Health Savings Accounts. Thus too, the effort to tear down Social Security, and replace it with a system of 'private' or 'personalized' (depending on which buzzword works better with focus groups) accounts, regardless of the enormous switchover costs. Instead of trying to mitigate risk, government under conservatives has sought to pile ever more risk on individuals, even if the fiscal consequences are horrendous.

Hacker argues that not only are these policies ideologically loaded - they transfer risk from corporations to the middle and working classes - but they don't make any sense in their own terms. High degrees of personal risk are a hindrance rather than a spur to beneficial economic activity. If people perceive that their jobs are risky, they're likely to underinvest in specialized training (here, there is a well established literature in political economy which suggests that an extensive welfare state goes hand-in-hand with the development of specialized skills). Personal investments in education are less attractive if the rewards from education are highly uncertain.

In short, the conservative language of freedom and personal choice masks an outcome that results in far less actual freedom and personal choice.  Security enhances freedom, risk undermines it. Government enhances personal freedom by protecting against unnecessary risk.  Of course, it's very different with risk that is truly voluntary.  But that's the point: by providing for fundamental security, government creates conditions where people are more likely to take on voluntary risk--for example, to defer current earnings and consumption to get more education and training, making them all the more productive in the long run.  There is risk in self-investment, as there is in all investment.  Future earnings are never guaranteed.  But when the costs of betting on yourself are managable, many more people will make the bet, and the country will flourish as a result.

This is a striking example of Nurturant Parent logic triumphing over Strict Father logic.  Although the Strict Parent child-rearing model says that it's all about creating self-reliant individuals, the data from studies of child-rearing practice show that it fails by its own criteria.  Nurturant Parenting does much better at producing the sort of morally autonomous individuals that the Strict Parent model promises to deliver, but generally cannot.  Hacker's argument shows that the same results are produced when the logic of both models is applied to the economic realm as well.

Important as Hacker's work is--and I've only begun to scratch the surface of his book--it only represents one aspect of an even larger argument about the importance of security in promoting human well-being.  This is an argument that encompasses foreign policy as well as domestic. Much of the turmoil in the world today--including that which has given birth to al Qaeda and similar terrorists groups--is directly traceable to a lack of security.  This is not to excuse or justify attacks such as 9/11.  But it is to explain how our failure to prioritize the security of others leaves them extremely vulnerable to violent appeals.  People who lose all rational hope of improving their desperate situations will turn desperate themselves, and cling to irrational hopes.

We may have missed important opportunities to prevent things from getting so far out of hand.  We certainly missed the opportunity to prevent the original growth of al Qaeda--indeed, we assisted in it.  We also missed the post-9/11 opportunity, when we had the sympathy of the entire world, to mobilize that sympathy to crush al Qaeda while simultaneously addressing the desperate conditions that al Qaeda had exploited for its own ends.  Instead, we created even more desperate conditions.

The idea of security for all needs to be approached and explained in new ways--of which Hacker's book is a prime example.  But the basic idea is not a new one. Security for all is one of the most fundamental ideas in modern liberalism.  It lies at the very foundation of John Locke's social contract theory: in a state of nature, all people are free in theory, but their freedom is insecure.

Unlike Hobbes, Locke saw the state of nature as one ruled by an innate sense of moral order, but without civil provisions to enforce that order, it was subject to breakdown into a state of war. Government was formed to prevent this from happening. This is a justification for representative government, as well as for the right of revolution when government becomes despotic.  This is why America itself is rightfully seen as the first fruits of modern liberalism.

The scope of Locke's argument was limited, and focused excessively on property, but the inherent two-fold logic can readily be expanded: first, that any freedom we possess is only as good as our capacity to exercise it without fear; second that we secure our own freedom by securing the freedom of others.

This logic is widely recognized in different forms, for example, in the observation that democracies rarely go to war with one another.  It is up to us to elaborate these insights in new ways, but also to stress how deeply rooted they are in our own history.  In the earliest history of the United States, for example, the federal government had little real power.  It was in no way clear that states would actually cede sovereignty.  They might well make war on one another if pushed to far--or simply threaten it.  There simply was no historical precedent for such a vast relinquishment of power, not to a dominant military power, but to a merely theoretical union.

It is virtually impossible for us today to grasp what a truly unimaginable thing it was that our Founders created.  Which is why we should have a little patriotic faith in taking similar steps today to set aside the use of force between nations, to enhance the security of all.

Concluding Thoughts

The concept of security for all is closely linked to the concept of dignity for all.  When the Bible says, "the labourer is worthy of his hire" (Luke 10:7) this is both a recognition of dignity and its tie to security.  In turn, "dignity and security for all" are linked to "liberty and justice for all"--a phrase coined by Bellamy, a socialist Baptist minister committed to opposing the "rugged individualism" of the Guilded Age.  The link between dignity and security I have just indicated. The link between security and liberty I have described above.  The link between dignity and justice should be self-evident: dignity requires treating people with respect, respect demands that they be treated justly.

In turn, these four concepts--liberty, justice, dignity and security for all--echo and ramify Franklin D. Roosevelt's "Four Freedoms," enunciated even before we entered World War II as the cause we fought for: freedom of speech and expression, freedom of every person to worship in his own way, freedom from want and freedom from fear.  The first two freedoms highlight the value of liberty, the second two freedoms highlight security.  All four collectively stand for a just order, based on the dignity of all.

In his 1941 State of the Union, Roosevelt presented the Four Freedoms thus:

"In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.

The first is freedom of speech and expression--everywhere in the world.

The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way--everywhere in the world.

The third is freedom from want--which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants-everywhere in the world.

The fourth is freedom from fear--which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor--anywhere in the world.

That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb."

This is what liberal identity politics must ultimately be based upon--an inclusive vision of creating both a domestic and a global order that recognizes us all as equal partners in creating a future that our children will bless us for creating for them.

Let's see the conservatives match that, when it comes to talk of personal responsibility.  I welcome them to join us.