Tuesday, November 4th, 2008

What Good Are Liberals, Anyway?

(Another post that started as a long comment at pandagon)

Jesse made the following observation:

Ideologically, I think it’s also time for us to realize that we were never a center-right nation. We simply had a much stronger conservative machine than a liberal one, which necessarily pushed our policy and politics to the right in a manner that was largely obscured by the process itself.

It just occurred to me how this dovetails in with the whole “conservatives live to piss liberals off” and “anyone who disagrees with me is liberal” attitude:

For many decades, liberal groups have concentrated on doing things: civil rights, workplace safety, consumer safety, environmental cleanup, etc. They’ve been out there on the ground fixing things that were broken. Anyone remember the ozone layer? Cars without seatbelts (much less airbags)? Tent cities in every major metropolitan area? Latch-key children (because daycare centers didn’t exist)? “Coffee, tea, or me?” Liberals were pretty damn busy.

And the whole time, conservatives sat on the sidelines and bitched about the liberals. They had nothing better to do than go complain on TV or write whinging books ridiculing those ridiculous people who were trying to make the world a better place. Anything the liberals did was STUPID!!! and WRONG!!! And the honest-to-god liberal leaders weren’t on TV engaging in abstract, philosophical arguments…because they were busy in the real world (e.g., Jimmy Carter, Al Gore, etc.). Conservatives started winning elections because they had nothing else to spend their time and energy on.

As long things were generally OK, the actual work that liberals were doing was low key from a national discourse perspective. When most people can get a decent job, advocating for the homeless doesn’t have the spotlight anymore. When companies have to compete for qualified workers, the impetus to form a strong union really isn’t there. When the stock market is good, not a lot of people are worried about Medicare or retirement benefits. The big picture policy battles had been won in theory–blacks could vote, women can work, gays aren’t arrested en masse–so the continuing problems in reality faded into the background.

And conservatives concentrated on erasing the real battles–that brought real gains to real people–fought by liberals out of our collective memory. They’ve been able to convince people that liberals are passe, unnecessary, relics, holdovers from the 60s, hippies. They’ve been able to sneer at all the “frivolous lawsuits” filed by those vile “trial lawyers” and the “nitpicking” of the ACLU and the humorless censorship of the “feminazis” and those ridiculous “midnight basketball” projects started by all those worthless “community organizers”.

Now, things aren’t so good. Those old battles are resurging, and we’re realizing that the enemy was only in a temporary retreat. Now, we have melamine in our food instead lead in our paint, but the consumer safety issue has risen from the history books and become an actual, every day “problem.” It only took a few years of deregulation to trash the environment again, and this time, there are pictures instead of “just theories.” During the campaign, sexism and racism were not only on display, they were in full regalia, too. And now that foreclosures have spiked, the homeless aren’t just lazy drug addicts and crazy people anymore: they are our neighbors, our friends, our family, us. Now we have problems to fix, and we’re looking for people who can fix them.

As a movement, conservatives have become experts at spreading their message and winning elections. Their message is “Boo! Liberals suck!” Their policies are all about looking good on TV, about turning a profit this quarter, about winning the next election. That’s all they know how to do. And after a few years, it becomes painfully obvious that they don’t actually have a long-term plan, that they are all marketing and no product.

The only thing conservatives are good at is making fun of liberals. But when they’re standing on the banks making jokes about the stupid liberals trying to pull people out of the floodwaters…well, it just isn’t that funny. And as the floodwaters expand and catch more and more people in their wake, it doesn’t take long for everyone on the sidelines to roll their eyes and say, “If you’re not going to help, shut up and get out of the way.”

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.