Going Forward

There's a lot of reflection and advice on what Democrats should be doing. There are questions about "message":

How did it come to pass that of the two political parties, the Democrats — who have long fought for the underdog, civil rights, consumer protections, universal health care, the minimum wage and for unions against powerful interests that try to crush them — have now been branded in large swaths of the country as the party of the establishment and the elites?

And how did it come to pass that Republicans — whose policies, regardless of stated intent, benefit polluters, entrenched interests and the upper brackets of American wealth — are now seen by many as the anti-establishment populist party which delights in flipping off elites on behalf of the Everyman?

More important for Democrats is whether they can rewrite the political narrative that now has them on the side of the establishment and Republicans on the side of sticking it to the man.

A poll shows that while support for the president continues to decline,

fewer than 4 in 10 say the Democratic Party currently stands for something, while a slight majority say it “just stands against [von Clownstick].”

D. Watkins notes after six months of the new administration

nothing of substance has happened — other than multiple attempts to undo everything that had been accomplished by the previous administration.

What’s worse, many of these Obama undos are being underreported overall, because [von Clownstick's] crass tweets and his campaign’s collection of Russia scandals makes for better TV.

It’s amazing to remember that before Jan. 20 we were talking about things that mattered, like the environment, ending the war on drugs, and prison reform.

And now we have to sit back and wait for four more years — in a realistic best-case scenario — to accomplish anything progressive on the federal level. That’s four more years of big talk, mean tweets, golf trips and fresh scandals.

I'm also coming across items that strike me as somewhat alarming. An e-mail from MoveOn makes reference to the language of Martin Niemoller in a pitch for volunteers.

As the investigation into Russia's interference with our 2016 election pushes [von Clownstick] deeper into a corner, he may be actively looking for an emergency that can be exploited to turn the country's attention away from his misdeeds.

[We are] assembling a group of trained MoveOn members in every state who will be ready to jump into action and help respond within a matter of hours in the event of a national or international emergency.

Are you someone who could take action to stop a rush to war or help stop an unconstitutional domestic crackdown? If you're raising your hand, then click here to help your community respond in an emergency.

There's even a list of seven products with increased sales since the election. One of them is bomb shelters which gave me the morbid thought that increased automation and the extermination of billions might be rich people's preferred solution to climate change.

There's a call for conservatives to remember their history and stand up to the new right, as well as arguments for a return to a moral vision.

Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg "do not believe that reason has been entirely extinguished in American political society".

Town hall meetings bring out the real victims of Republican policies. The “silent majority” will meet its match in this “affected majority,” who increasingly demand a certain humility as well as responsiveness from their dissimulating congressmen. Like Niebuhr in 1952, they recognize that ideological rigidity is counterproductive. The forward-thinking who look beyond the empty and ignorant promises of the current president, and the empty and inactive poses of their Republican representatives, see that the mythical market cannot solve our problems without help from somewhere else.

Beyond the ballot box itself, then, where does hope lie?                            

As long as the practical-minded, improvement-oriented moral philosophy underlying the founders’ vision directs the liberal imagination (the same that Niebuhr refused to dismiss), an obvious scenario presents itself: computer technology.

Oh, oh.

[W]e are casting a vote for the good effects of technology as managed by fair and balanced humans committed only to the laws of science. Harnessed technology will help rescue the political future – but we say this with one crucial caveat. As Niebuhr wrote in “The Irony of American History”: “The evil in human history is regarded as the consequence of man’s wrong use of his unique capabilities.” The same species that built the gleaming U.S. Capitol created the atomic bomb.

Yeah.

Paul Rosenberg looks to a different tradition. Referring to the Senate health care bill:

It’s astonishing to see a major party so committed to something so profoundly unpopular. The only way the Republican Party has gotten here is by decades of running on an ideological vision. ... That ideology, in turn, is founded on presumptions of moral superiority: “real Americans,” “makers vs. takers,” “the Moral Majority,” etc. Conservatism is always about defense of hierarchy, with different flavors of moral superiority playing to different branches of the conservative movement.

He quotes Paul Krugman.

“The thing I keep returning to on the Senate bill is the contrast between the intense hardship it imposes and the triviality of the gains. ... So vast suffering imposed to hand the rich a favor they’ll barely even notice. How do we make sense of this, politically or morally?”

Krugman’s comment highlights the need to make moral arguments in general — a need that liberals and Democrats have neglected far too long. Sure, they make moral arguments all the time, but they don’t make them central in their politics, and that has helped conservatives falsely claim to have a lock on moral politics. Now with the GOP’s plans to deprive 22 million of health insurance — perhaps leading to nearly 29,000 premature deaths every year — that claim of moral superiority has become patently absurd.

The past still informs the present.

With far too little awareness of how modern liberalism came to be, we fail to appreciate what monstrous moral evils it struggled against, and how precious and worthy of defense its moral heritage is. Those who tend to remember it best are those who continue the struggle to expand it — women, minorities, gays and lesbians, the disabled, etc. A vital part of this ongoing struggle is the philosophy and practice of nonviolent civil disobedience, as formulated by Henry David Thoreau in response to the Mexican-American War, transformed into a philosophy of mass struggle by Mahatma Gandhi in the struggle for India’s independence, brought back to America by Bayard Rustin, James Lawson and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and taken up around the world by figures ranging from Thich Nhat Hanh to Nelson Mandela, as well as countless nonviolent movements that have flourished over the past 50 years.

Indeed, the whole history of nonviolent civil disobedience ... from Thoreau, Gandhi, King and Mandela through Occupy, the Arab Spring and Black Lives Matter — is in part a history of an unfolding, dynamic character ethic whose power may still be only in its infancy.

After hundreds of generations, it would be foolish of us to expect a sudden, final resolution of the “right way” to do ethics. But by laying out the moral basis of our arguments we can be more honest, self-aware, deliberative and responsive to the views of others, all of which are desirable in a democracy. The more fully we engage in advancing and debating moral arguments, the more likely we become to make beneficial decisions that gain broad support over time, rather than losing support because people’s differing views and interests were not adequately considered.

This is hardly a new idea. It’s arguably what most of the leading Founders believed: If it’s “traditional values” you want, that’s what they actually look like. Liberals should not only be proud to claim such values, they should forcefully reject conservatives’ attempts to distort or pervert them.