Reorienting Liberalism
My two-cents on how to go forward. I have five suggestions: get mad, get organized for 2018; start mixing it up, literally; make political reforms a priority; create a liberal defense of liberty; and crack the communications code.
As liberals/progressives/Democrats start to assemble the predictable circular firing squads in the wake of the Trumpocalypse, I offer my two cents worth of advice. This is informed among other things by having been a committed conservative for a long time, a happy voter for Reagan and other Republicans right up to Bush II, may God forgive me. So I know all the conservative arguments from the inside.
I strongly accept the lessons that liberals should have learned from the Sanders campaign: restore historic ties to the working class, stay focused on economic inequality and opportunity, and play down the identity politics that define much of modern progressivism. A serious political movement has to make choices and our country’s future as a genuine liberal democracy now hangs in the balance. And I am convinced this is necessary–not sufficient, but necessary–to reduce racism and fear of minorities. People who are deeply anxious about their lives and their children’s prospects, who see their communities drowning in addiction and suicide, are vulnerable to Republican appeals to their worst instincts—especially if no one else is standing up for them.
Get mad, get organized for 2018. Liberals have been complacent because they bought into the historic inevitably of a progressive majority. Some day, maybe. But while we wait, the country is being reshaped by enemy forces. It is vital for Democrats to at least gain back control of the Senate in two years, before Trump has a chance to appoint more Supreme Court justices or make irreversible changes to social programs or unwind US commitment to fighting climate change. Republicans did this in 2010, just two years after Obama took office. The Tea Party movement helped Republicans make huge gains in Congress and at the State and local level. How did this happen so fast? There was white-hot grassroots anger at government and Wall Street, which was channeled by money and backing from networks outside the Republican Party—the alternative conservative worlds of the Koch Brothers and talk radio and the alt-right. For liberals the Trump administration should whip up plenty of anger, but someone will have to offer some serious money and strategic direction or it will implode into bickering tribes like Occupy.
Start mixing it up, literally. Liberals are self-flagellating over being too elitist, too urban, cut off from the ‘real America’. That’s basically crap; cities are good, that’s why it’s called ‘civilization.’ But everyone needs to mix it up more. Rural and small town—and lots of suburban–Americans have no bleeping idea what it means to live with the mix of people in big American cities, and educated urbanites are equally clueless about life elsewhere. The big eye-openers that used to help this were going off to college, and going off to the military. College could introduce smart kids from small towns to the bigger world; the military threw boys from all kinds of backgrounds together. We badly need cheaper, quality higher education and more apprenticeship programs. And we badly, badly, badly need some form of mandatory national service.
Make political reforms a priority. We should tell Trump voters, you’re damn right the system isn’t working. But you’re crazy if you think it will work better if you throw out the old bums and put in some new ones. What we need is a different system. We need to get rid of the electoral college (yes, Republicans, it worked for you this time, but that’s just luck); shorten ridiculous multi-year election campaigns that ramp up partisanship; make voting mandatory; start experimenting with different electoral systems like multi-member districts and ranked voting to give voices to 3rd parties; go after the gerrymandering and closed primaries that give extremists make or break power over elected officials. Yes, and fix Citizen’s United and big money in politics. Trumpism is going to quickly bog down in the morass of special interests and veto players that define modern American democracy. That’s good, but it will end up deepening cynicism and lead to even greater extremism. Instead, let’s start thinking outside the stupidly narrow box of traditional American practices. When Democrats take back power, they need to make these changes job #1.
Create a persuasive liberal defense of liberty. We can talk all day about inequality and using government to help with jobs and opportunity, but I am 100% certain this will fail if delivered as a narrowly selfish message. Nobody likes to be told that they are only interested in themselves. Lots of conservative voters see themselves as defenders of limited government and individual liberty. Conservative strategists have successfully wrapped specific policy appeals (many of them cynically designed to help special interests) around this broad narrative—anything having to do with guns is all about standing up to the government, climate change is about fending off government expansion, etc. Liberals tend to be successful ‘foxes’ with a 10-point plan to fix every problem, while conservatives tend to be ‘hedgehogs’ with one big idea that frames how they view every problem. Unfortunately there are only so many votes you can get from policy wonks. Liberals need a powerful alternative framework that puts policy specifics in context and explains why individual liberty is better protected by liberalism. Ideas welcome.
Crack the communications code. Many of the people we need to reach are living behind a high wall of alternative media, dominated by unscrupulous people who bombard followers with are untruths and partial truths. The underlying strategy has been to delegitimize any claim to objectivity in order to make people vulnerable to lies, rumors, and conspiracy theories. (Here is a quote from a recent New Yorker piece, “Trolls for Trump,” about a very successful alt-right blogger, Mike Cernovich: “Look, I read postmodernist theory in college. If everything is a narrative, then we need alternatives to the dominant narrative.” He smiled. “I don’t seem like a guy who reads Lacan, do I?”) Long ago in a galaxy far, far away, conservatives warned that this kind of left-wing theorizing was going to lead to moral chaos. Well, they were right. Narrowing the range of what people accept as within the bounds of serious discourse is a necessary condition for success. And very difficult. It will depend on vigorous journalism, internal policing by social media, and finding trusted spokesmen for liberal ideas.