What's a Liberal to do?

Great Debates
1

I’m not a big John Kerry supporter. I voted for him for the same reason I suspect most of his supporters did – he wasn’t George Bush and he was the only one with a chance to win. I am not a member of any political party, though I vote for Democrats far more than Republicans.

This election has led me to some uncomfortable conclusions. The most troublesome is that America’s move to the right is much more solid than I estimated. In 2000, I could imagine a lot of people being fooled by Bush’s “compassionate conservative” rhetoric. But I believe the issues in 2004 were fairly clear cut – the people who voted for him, by and large, do in fact understand what Bush stands for and they are ok with that.

And Nader didn’t get enough votes to make the difference, so there’s no blaming him.

That is a very frightening proposition to me, as it leaves me feeling rather orphaned. My country and my people seem to have turned onto a path that is not recognizeable to me as a rational one of social, political and economic progress.

Another assumption I shared with many has gone by the wayside – the idea that a very heavy voter turnout would favor Democrats and Kerry – as alarmed citizens would rise to cast out the Evil Bush. There were apparently t least as many new voters motivated by fear of Kerry.

Let’s not even get into all the anti-gay-marriage initiatives. For sure the country is WAY more conservative, and the lines are drawn much more sharply, than I thought. It’s urbans and intellectuals on one side, everybody else on the other, speaking in broader swaths than I’m probably entitled to.

I imagine the Democrats stumbling to the right, making themselves ever less appealing to me. I see no bright future possibilities.

A friend asked me today what is the worst that can happen? My answer was an expanded war to… Iran? Syria? And a military draft. And the economy in the shitter. And maybe by then the EU and other countries with enough clout will start imposing sanctions on the US for violations of international law. Oh yeah, and more terrorist attacks, maybe some from McVeigh-clones pissed off about the Patriot Acts. And our civilians and soldiers abroad will be drawing suicide bombers like flies to a corpse.

My friend said if all that happens, the Democrats will be back in 4 years.

I thanked him for giving me a gleam of hope. :frowning:

But excluding hoping for the worst, WTF is a liberal to do?

2

Emigrate?

3

Don’t count on getting into Canada quickly.

4

Right there with you. I really thought… I don’t know. I don’t expect Americans to agree on shit like health care and the economy, but for god’s sake, we entered a war under false pretenses. When was the last time that actually happened, the Spanish American War? “Remember the Maine!” And this time it was like, “Remember 9/11!” Like that actually had anything to do with it. Like democrats were secretly happy about it or something!

Heck, I expect some disagreement about that kind of stuff. But I can’t even say that the majority of Americans agree with me… about anything. And I’m not a socialist or a communist or even a particularly startling example of a liberal. I have been thinking all day, “Is it really this bad? Surely you must agree with something about the Bush campaign…” and I’m coming up totally empty. No promise of fiscal conservativism, no promise of social liberalism. I really have nothing.

Actually, lets. I can’t seem to hunt up which states exactly had these initiatives, but if they were in states that Bush narrowly won last time, or even narrowly lost, it might account for the higher Bush turn out. Getting the anti-gay to the polls on such a hot-button issue, and you know they ain’t voting for Kerry… (Not my theory, but a coworker’s.)

The problem is: why appeal to you or I? We’ve just been shown there’s no friggin point! America WANTS to ignore traditional allies. America WANTS to abandon any hope of fiscal sense. Offshoring and health care? Fuck it! Seriously… realize this. You don’t matter anymore. No one cares. The majority has spoken: you’re wrong.

Maybe it is my emotional side still ruling me after waking up this morning and seeing the result, but… don’t bet on it. The people you thought wanted small government and hated the government intruding in their lives? Yeah, they voted for Bush this time around. To the tune of over three and a half million people.

I don’t know man. I’m too depressed to think straight right now. The majority has spoken and I am speechless. They represent me now to the rest of the world, and they don’t care.

5

I don’t really think the country has “turned” onto the path you mention. Rather, it has rather strongly reclaimed a path it has been turned from over the last 40 years or so by liberal activism.

This is not to say no good has been accomplished by liberal activism during this time. Much has. However, the propensity of the left to throw out the baby with the bath water in its efforts to effect social change has created a lot that is undesirable in our way of life today that did not exist prior to this period.

The vote yesterday was not an effort to roll back the clock in terms of women’s rights, racial equality, gay rights, and greater overall tolerance of different views and beliefs; rather it was an effort to reclaim some of the values that used to make this country great which have been needlessly cast aside in the name of social “progress.”

6

Your friend is an optimist… even if all that is described happened… voters might still put a “war chief” in power. Accountability is not a word in american politics.

7

What about being a scientific power ? What about human rights and just wars ?

I don’t know about Americans… but outside the US the first word when you thought USA… it wasn’t anti-gay… anti-science… anti-UN. It was adjectives like “modern”… technology… new fashion… change. Naturally there was moralistic and nationalist. Still the US didn’t become a great country due to the moral values only… at least not modern 20th century America.

8

Except, of course, that the platform very explicitly included anti-abortion overtones, an anti-homosexual amendment, and intolerance of dissent by calling people traitors for questioning the war? Or was it the old-fashioned values of taking a war hero and smearing him?

Do tell. What great values are we reclaiming? Returning to the time of the most excellent Andrew Jackson who knew where to stick those darned activist judges?

9

Such as? I don’t mean that in a smart-assed way, either. Can you give me some examples of what you’re referring to?

10

Rolling back the clock in terms of women’s rights, racial equality, gay rights, and greater overall tolerance of different views and beliefs, of course.

11

I assume you’re talking about LBJ and the Great Sociaty Programs? Or what? The Civil Rights Act? Or how about the EPA (a Nixon creation)?

I think your timeline is WAY off. These programs are an outgrowth the FDRs Depression era social security and public works projects. The far right called it socialist or communist.

And those roots go back even farther, to Teddy Roosevelt, who began intervening in the affairs of business in favor of citizen as consumers, before the term was even invented.

This is the rational pathif of social progress I envisioned preceding us.

12

“Never give up, never surrender!” :wink:

13

Concede that Bush and the Republicans won this one, but keep a damn sharp eye on them for the next four years so they can’t run away with the whole store.

14

I feel like calling their bluff. The blue states generate tons more tax revenue than they get back in benefits. Lets cut the damn federal taxes, raise state income taxes in the blue states, and let the red states rot in hell. I don’t care if their kids end up working at McDonalds because they think dinosaurs went extinct because there wasn’t enough room in Noah’s Ark.

Let the rural yahoos pay the full cost of delivering mail to Hooterville and build their own damn roads so that six tractors and a pickup truck can use it once a day.

15

The best explanation I think I could give you is an explanation I offered in another thread. I never learned the coding thing, but the post can be found here:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=5361578

16

Rashak Mani: The last Canadian election was all about accountability. Some people stole seven dollars from all of us, and so we had to punish the party that the people who stole the seven dollars belonged to. They did lose a lot of support over the seven dollars; remember this doesn’t even involve one person getting killed.

DanBlaster: Creationists have to fit the dinosaurs in Noah’s Ark because God commanded Noah to put two of each kind of animal on the Ark. (Or seven, if they were clean animals, in one version of Genesis.) So the dinosaurs had to have become extinct for some other reason.

Some reasonable, non-insane things are likely to happen in the next four years that may not be good for Bush. Iraq will probably not get better because he wills it so, and it will definitely not get better because they’re having elections. This will probably ensure that the war does not expand outside Iraq. In 2008 the Republicans, and not the Democrats, will be held responsible for anything bad that happens with respect to Iraq, the Middle East and terrorism in the crucial four years ahead. The majority of Americans do not actually subscribe to the conservative, evangelical worldview Bush represents (though about 40% or so do), and this number will not likely increase substantially in the next four years.

Read both parties’ platforms and try to find where anywhere they might hold radically different views. American politics are already kind of right-wing, so it’s not like Kerry would have created a Norway-style social-democratic state. It’s more likely that the slight differences between the candidates and their parties have been exaggerated for the sake of reassuring everyone that there are some. (Also, Kerry was a better public speaker.)

17

Here’s my take, for what it’s worth.

I don’t think that most people who voted for Bush did so because they truly, intellectually, embrace his agenda in its entirety. Some, certainly, but not most. And there are still millions of people who didn’t vote.

We think of ourselves as resolute individuals who are impervious to influence. And that’s balderdash. Most people are malleable as all get out. Tell them something 10 times a day, and it magically becomes true. Why else would advertising and marketing be huge businesses? The Bush administration has been playing this quality for years, quite successfully. Iraq’s a pretty clear example.

Start off with a bell curve, that wondrous statistical illustration of most things human. On either end you’ve got people with fixed behaviors regarding beliefs and convictions. The ones on the far right, a couple of deviations out, are strongly driven by them; the ones on the far left, rarely so. And in the middle is the vast majority of Americans. Their sense of reality is in flux.

The Bush campaign succeeded in reaching those people by appealing to their fear. The public has been played like a Stradivarious the last 3 years with these warnings and threats. The Kerry campaign wasn’t able to drown it out. Democrats rely too heavily on reason. We need to run a visual and audio game that sells our beliefs, like Coca-Cola commercials. That’s what Bush did, only he sold fear. That’s why he won.

18

Fight the culture war. Stop pretending it doesn’t exist and start fighting it. Never pass up a chance to grab hold of a fundie by the lapels and scream in his face. literally or metaphorically. Tell them why they’re wrong. Tell them and tell them and keep on telling them. The essence of propaganda is repetition.

19

I can’t help thinking this will have the opposite effect - it’ll just harden attitudes.

20

A lot less than you think, and a lot of it will actually feel good to do. I can’t help you get back to the majority, what with you being wrong about everything and all ;), but I can offer some pointers that will at least get you back to the loyal opposition and maybe make it so you stop losing congressional seats and governors’ offices.

Cast out the Chompskyites: It’s possible to have had a problem with the President’s choice to choose Iraq as the next military choice in the war on terror without being disloyal. I’m proud to say that both of my senators, among the most liberal in the country, have been fine examples of a loyal opposition. But that’s not what your party did. The second Dean started to get any traction, you turned the rhetoric of the party over to the anti-American Chompskyite assholes. Completely apart from it being disgusting and wrong on its face, you addled the candidate you eventually nominated to the point where he voted against funding a troop authorization he had previously supported, which denied him the opportunity to portray his earlier pro-war vote as a principled change of mind instead of a flip-flop. By the time the convention rolled around, you had relegated Mrs. Clinton, one of the true rock stars of your cause, to a tiny role introducing her husband at least in part because she wasn’t anti-American and anti-Military enough. Mistake.

You ever want to win an election again? Find the anti-Americans and tell them to get right or get out. How can you find them? If someone clicked on Kos at any time after his “screw ‘em” remark, that’s your guy. Likewise, someone who refers to suicide bombers as “martyrs” has no place in civilized society. Kick them to the curb.

When the Republicans ostracized Buchanan after he ruined things with his primary challenge and convention speech in 1992, some party insiders and no end of pundits worried that it would cost the party votes. It didn’t. The vast majority of his supporters, when told to get right or get out, got right. People take criticism more seriously when it comes from a friend. And the ones who didn’t get right were overwhelmed by the new people who came in to the party. The same will be true of the Democrats and liberalism if you take my advice. And you’ll feel a lot better not having to abide those guys any more. Trust me.

Americans don’t much like dictators: That phrase will doubtless get a bunch of people in here to claim George Bush is a dictator. Treat those people like they’re in the above category – everything Bush has done has been well within the normal course of well-established law, and most of it was done after a broad, bi-partisan vote. Massachusetts Chief Justice Margaret H. Marshall, on the other hand, is a dictator. The era of judge-made law is over. Lament it if you want, look back fondly on the good things the prior era allowed, but realize it. The American people are done being told what to do by unelected officials. You are free to pretend that all those people who voted for anti-gay marriage amendments are religious bigots and idiots; a lot of them are. But consider this: in Ohio 400,000 more people voted for the ban than voted for President Bush. It passed in Oregon, which Senator Kerry won, and again got more votes than the President (or Senator Kerry). Same in Michigan. When an amendment comes up in Massachusetts, it will pass there too. An awful lot of those votes weren’t about bigotry, or even opposition to gay marriage. They were about being ordered rather than persuaded what to do. Americans don’t like it. I’m telling you this as a friend on this particular issue– I support same-sex marriages, not just civil unions. Future wins for liberalism on this issue or elsewhere will come at the ballot box, not from the bench. This is also an opportunity. Once more liberals realize that they can’t sit on their asses and wait for a judge to do their work for them, they’ll get more active and start trying to persuade the other side rather than demonizing them. Succeed, and not only do you get what you want you get to live in a country where most people agree with you.

Lose the hate: Osama is evil. Hussein was evil. George Bush is not evil, he just disagrees with your world view a lot. You guys made the same mistake with Reagan (full disclosure – back then, it was “us guys”). It cost you, and it’s been costing you for almost 30 years now. Hate the sin, love the sinner and all that. This ties in with the dictator thing above. Your wins will come at ballot boxes, not benches, and telling someone how evil he is has about the effectiveness as a Chick Tract in terms of gaining converts.

New vocabulary word: Accountability: One of the core tenets of liberalism is to take more of the peoples’ money (at least more than is being taken now) and redistributing it somehow. Obviously I disagree with that, but not everyone does. What everyone does disagree with is throwing their money down a rathole. And that’s what people, correctly or not, think happens to a lot of the discretionary budget. Accountability is going to be the new watchword for the next couple of decades. Just as corporations adopt Sarbanes-Oxley and bring in black belts to measure everything in the plant, government will have to do a better job of knowing when it is doing a good job and when it is doing a poor one. That’s the crux of NCLB – “you want this big pot of federal money? Prove it’s helping students.” Quibble if you want about whether the specific measurements are appropriate – that’s good, loyal opposition and will help the process for everybody. But realize that each and every time you want to expand spending, you will be expected to have an accompanying measurement regime so that people have a scorecard to let them know if the announced goals are being achieved. Again, this is a good thing for your side, too. It’ll help you achieve your actual goals, reduce waste and maybe even prevent some of those unintended consequences which always accompany change (on either side).

Grow the tent, just a little: Liberals are pro-choice. That’s fine; in fact, I’m pro-choice too. But you’ve become so pro-choice that you’ll brook no dissent whatsoever. That’s unhealthy, and it works against you gaining majorities. Box out opponents to first-trimester abortions, fine, but realize that there are a lot of people – including liberal people – who recognize the obvious and indisputable fact that a fetus becomes a child at some point and believe that that point is not necessarily when the doctor spanks it. Realize, too, that for some people a woman’s right to choose includes their right to choose to see their fetus as a baby and they want legal protections for their choice, too. Not all slopes are as slippery as you think, and little give on some issues could gain you tons and tons of people.
And that’s about it, I think. See? Mostly painless.