By John Ballard
As I had my first cup of coffee this morning I took a few minutes to read and ponder Sara Robinson's assessment of where modern liberalism stands. Having been shamed into using the word liberal, we now use the term "Progressive," having lost any sense of what that meant applied to the movement of the same name a hundred years ago. This is a nit not worth picking, so Sara to her credit used the term progressive democracy.
She picks up a narrative using the last few weeks exhibition of right-wing extremism as the starting point.
...Those folks have tasted power, graduated from their introductory courses in Political Bullying 101, shared some camraderie and beer, and felt the heft of their own political muscle. That was fun. Now, what do we do next? Paralyze the school board over evolution in the textbooks? Intimidate the city council into shutting down the immigrants' services center -- or beat up some immigrants, so they'll just stop using it? Vandalize the cars and houses of known liberals? Get one of our own elected sheriff, so he can deputize the rest of us and make our posse official?
Nothin' but good times ahead. Now that they're organized up and had a little practice, the possibilities for further mayhem are limited only by the boundless paranoia and unfettered fantasies of the right-wing mind. Out at our local county fair this past weekend, the GOP booth was festooned with a wide array of buttons, tees, and bumper stickers proclaiming the owner's status as a "Proud Member of the Right-Wing Mob," and other similarly, um, assertively empowered sentiments. Judging from the general belligerence of the collection on offer, that seems to be the GOP's whole political identity now. They're determined to move boldly into 2010 as the party of America's union-, immigrant-, democracy-, and (if necessary) head-busting squadristi -- and they're damn proud of it all, you betcha.
In a somewhat longish but easy to read essay she outlines five steps the progressive democracy needs deliberately to take in order to meet political challenges and shape a coherent future.
First: Ironically, passing health care reform would be a colossal trust-builder... The right wing knows this, which is precisely why it's recruited the very people most likely to benefit from reform to fight as their shock troops against it....
Second: We need to re-establish the rule of law. You cannot have a credible democracy as long as there's so obviously one standard of economic and civil justice for the rich and well-connected, and a very different one that's designed to make victims out of everybody else....follow it up with a whole series of reforms, including holding corporations fully accountable for actions that destroy the commons; ending the catastrophic "war on drugs;" giving people back their access to the courts; and restoring some proportionality to our sentencing laws, which have put millions of lower-class families into the permanent thrall of the justice system.
Third: We need to get serious about investing in education. It's well understood now that our broken health care system is right on the bottom of the barrel among industrialized countries; but most of us don't realize that our schools are in the same comparatively wretched shape...the worst failure is that we went through a decades-long patch where we didn't teach civics -- and still don't much, especially in states where it's not part of the standardized tests. Which means that there are tens of millions among us who have absolutely no idea what's in the Bill of Rights, or how a law gets made, or where the limits of state power lie.
Fourth: No democracy in history has ever survived with our current levels of inequality. There's no reason for the middle and working classes to trust anything about a system that's so clearly rigged to suck money straight out of their pockets into the tax-free offshore bank accounts of the wealthy -- who, of course, turn right around and use that money to buy off our government, so they can suck up even more of our economy for themselves...if Haliburton or Wackenhut or United Health isn't getting their cut, it ain't happening, period. And that's pretty much the definition of a corporatized state...
Restoring equality also means meaningful immigration reform. As long as there's a two-tiered employment system that lets employers sidestep wage, discrimination, and safety laws by hiring undocumented workers without penalty, there's going to be a permanent trap door under the feet of American workers. To close that door, we need to shore up the border, completely revamp our utterly dysfunctional immigration process, enforce existing workplace laws and prosecute employers who violate them, and get our current crop of undocumented immigrants on the books so the laws can be applied to them, too. Until we do this, nobody is going to get a fair shake in the job market -- and there's no reason for working-class Americans to have any trust at all in the system's ability to deliver for them.
Finally: we need to focus on restoring our [4] basic liberal institutions. Back in 2005, Chris Bowers noted that progressive ideology has always been disseminated through four major cultural drivers: the universities...the media...unions...and liberal religious organizations. Knowing this, conservatives set out back in the 1970s to undermine all four of these institutions -- and over time, they've largely succeeded in blunting their historic capacity to disseminate and perpetuate the progressive worldview.
...there's still considerable misunderstanding and confusion within our own camp about the essential role liberal religion should play in lending heart and spirit to the progressive resurgence...American progressivism has always drawn its most compelling moral voices from the ranks of Catholics, Jews, Quakers, Unitarians and Universalists, and a wide collection of social gospel Evangelicals. And even now, the vast majority of Americans -- on both ends of the spectrum -- still draw their political ethics straight out of their personal religious beliefs...
Fascism is so dangerous precisely because it speaks to its believers in the language of emotion, populism, purity, redemption, and enduring values.Nobody on the progressive side knows how to speak that language -- and match that moral force and energy -- better than our own native faith groups. Secular progressives may wish it weren't true, but it is: there's simply no way we can rebuild a strong democratic system without holding up our end of a broad new culture-wide discussion about morality, meaning, priorities, passion, and values. And those conversations begin most naturally in our houses of worship.
As I read her sermon that Baptist child inside of me wanted to holler out "Amen" but I was out on the deck in the morning air with my coffee and little netbook and I was afraid someone would hear me and turn me in.
Sara Robinson's writing is refreshing for old fashioned Liberals like me as well as latter-day newbies getting beat up for the first time. Thanks to Obama's vision and the Netroots, after forty-five years we finally have a grip on the two main branches of government. But nobody said this was gonna be easy.
The ugly underside of America started before Congress broke for the August recess. The Blue Dogs will return in worse shape than they left. Those who imagined they were okay have instead been abused by frightened constituents whose ignorance is only matched by their paranoia. Senator Grassley's pitiful note reads like a prepared statement read by someone held prisoner by terrorist extremists.
Doing nothing is not an option. The only long-term antidote to our current wave of emergent fascism is a big, strong dose of trust-building progressive culture and politics, administered daily until the system's basic democratic functions come back on line. If we want to build a fascist-proof America for the long haul, we must stand up now for everything we believe, and everything we are.
Progressive Democrats can expect the coming weeks to be among the worst yet as the country inches closer than ever to fascism. Barack Obama may not be all we wanted, but at the moment he's all we have.
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