Giving The Donkey Kick

From Kevin Mattson's article in American Prospect, "Goodbye to All That":

Younger thinkers today are going further back than the ’60s to rediscover good ideas. It’s been the Cold War liberalism of the ’40s and ’50s that has garnered the most interest. Books like Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.’s The Vital Center or Niebuhr’s The Irony of American History or John Kenneth Galbraith’s American Capitalism seem much more interesting than The Making of a Counter Culture. There’s good reason for this, because though we might feel closer to the ’60s chronologically, our own age is much more parallel to the ’40s. Then, as now, liberals faced an international enemy -- Niebuhr’s “children of darkness” -- willing to murder for salvation. Then, as now, liberals confronted conservatives who entertained dangerous ideas of launching preemptive wars abroad while slashing social programs at home. And, if we take the ’48ers up to 1952 and the election of JFK in 1960, then, as now, liberals were often an opposition party.

[...] The ’48ers, so far as I know, never marched against American actions abroad. What they did do was construct a framework for a liberal foreign policy, a robust alternative to conservative emphasis on military action and “rolling back” the enemy. The idea of containment was not simply a doctrine of realism but a moral disposition toward the demands of national power. America certainly had a strong role to play abroad, the ’48ers argued, but it had to do so with a sense of “humility.” So, for instance, Niebuhr, drawing upon Christian ethics (not yet the sole property of the right), argued against “preventive war.” Those who articulated such an idea “assume a prescience about the future which no man or nation possesses.” He went on to explain, “We would, I think, have a better chance of success in our struggle against a fanatical foe if we were less sure of our purity and virtue.” Learning this lesson required America to work with others to “reconstruct” poorer economies as much as engage with military power. This was to be a war of ideas as well as guns.

Unfortunately, Mattson fails to mention that there has been a largely successful counter-offensive against this "war of ideas" launched by the left, namely the blanket argument that this is a "changed world". A clarion call for nuance and humility in political discourse (as well as in military action abroad) has proven grossly inadequate in our present climate of fear, intimidation, and chest-thumping patriotism. Still, I agree with his larger point that the underpinnings of an intellectually secure position will ultimately pay greater dividends down the line.

If we take these lessons seriously, our biggest challenge moving ahead is how to articulate our opposition to the right’s well-developed agenda while simultaneously developing a public philosophy like that of the ’48ers. The need for this became abundantly clear in the last presidential election. John Kerry lost because Americans didn’t understand what he stood for. They understood him as an opposition candidate but not as someone who had “values” that could be articulated and explained. This wasn’t just Kerry’s problem; it is the problem of liberalism generally. The public perceives liberalism negatively, due to the long war the right waged against it from the 1960s onward. Unlike the ’48ers, we cannot assume that our ideas resonate; we need to make them resonate.

To rearticulate liberal ideals while acting in opposition is not as hard as ?rst appears. Take Social Security. Clearly, Bush is surprised by the backlash against privatization, as he scrambles around the country garnering support. This appears a dream come true for progressives, but it’s much more. It’s a challenge to articulate not just opposition but a public philosophy that can explain what liberals stand for. We shouldn’t defend a program inherited from the New Deal in a rearguard fashion but should reiterate the idea of a shared national purpose based on collective sacri?ce.

Nor should we turn this into a demographic issue and bank on the elderly supporting Democrats; that’s interest-group politics, not a long-range public philosophy. We need to explain what Social Security teaches the nation about deeper principles. Why do Americans react against the term “privatize”? Because there is still a sense of shared obligation to one another, and it’s up to liberals to articulate that public philosophy while they oppose the president. We can show how the president’s proposal re?ects the “social imbalance” the ’48ers perceived, the elevation of the self’s interest above the common good. None of this requires protest. It requires public argument. The time for protest may come, but it will undoubtedly rely on a change of leadership ?rst and serious thinking about strategy later.

Leaving aside for the moment that Republicans will argue that Kerry lost because people understood all too well what he stood for (i.e., being a French-loving pussy who desired nothing more than the unconditional surrender of American sovereignty to a corrupt U.N.) while simultaneously being a "waffler" whose opinions on his own children were incapable of being deciphered, I think we can all agree that the inability to articulate "values" is a "problem of liberalism generally". Personally, I think that the "dream come true" aspect of Bush's inept attacks on Social Security is exactly as Mattson infers; an perfectly timed opportunity to reiterate our core values of shared responsibility and collective strength. Bush has given Democrats the opportunity that they have been unable to create for themselves.

In large portions of his article, Matteson suggests that the Left has largely adopted it's template for political action from late-60's activism. I see his point, but believe that he overstates it. As someone who was born during the Vietnam war, I grew up in a world still wallowing in it's aftertaste. I was fed a steady diet of Vietnam-era films, philosophies, stories, fashions, and mythologies (I was a huge fan of The Doors in high school). Yet the term "pseudo-hippy", as applied to many of my friends and acquaintances, was universally understood as a term of derision. As fascinated as some of my contemporaries were with 60's-era protest movements, the overriding sentiment was this: it was a failed revolution. Hippies were burnouts. Losers. Incompetent sensualists. Why else would it seem like the most natural thing in the world to hang out with Young Republicans in high school? No, the problem wasn't that we were busy learning to emulate a failed movement, it was that so many of us saw it for the colossal failure that it was…and decided to join the winners.

A few years ago I found myself in a commune on Chicago's west side. There were people present who hadn't bathed in eons, who were "traveling", who nobody knew by their given names. The insipid clunking of Bongo drums and the sweet reek of marijuana completed the scene. I had shown up with my girlfriend because we had heard that there was going to be an "event"; a kind of protest/street art thing. We sat around and ate spaghetti and waited. Then we waited. Then we waited some more. Eventually we left before anything actually happened. These were lazy, boring, incompetent people. These people were all that was left of the 60's protest legacy.

The marches and protests against Bush were different. While each person brings his own unique character to a protest, the better portion of people that turned out across the world in opposition to the invasion of Iraq were not hippies for a new century. Mattson is correct insofar as he acknowledges that we haven't developed a meaningful relationship with our own core values, but he is incorrect in ascribing to us the wholesale adoption of failed strategies. There is a time to build your base, and a time to oppose tyranny. One need not hamstring the other.