This past election has me thinking of Thomas Kinkaide,
The Painter of Light, quite a bit. People who know even a little bit about art look at Kinkaide's work and are horrified but all across America, sweet, worthwhile women look at those paintings and say, "Oh, I wish I could live there. Buy me that, darling, so I can pretend a little" and their doting husbands kindly oblige. Meantime, you and I are left standing there asking, "What the fuck is that?"
Kinkaide's charm can only be interpreted through a lens of.....I want to be nice here, I really do, let's say.....artistic naiveté. Meaning that if you have any artistic sophistication at all, you can't see ANY art in his work. You simply see cynicism, hokey sentimentality and a lightly skilled opportunist making way too much money. But for those who have a more simplistic expectation of art, they see a dream and an identity. They see an ode to a cozy family life in a safe little village nestled in the blossoming pink beauty of the fecund earth. In their fifties ranch houses and their seventies apartments all across suburban America, hanging above the tv, blocked by the rabbit ears, is a Kinkaide, and underneath their cottage cheese ceiling, illuminated by the light from the aluminum sliding window, the owners imagine themselves snug as bug in a tiny, ancient English village. Nice dream. Too bad it has nothing to do with reality.
And that's the same way the Republican big picture works. They paint this fantastic picture of a generous America filled with happy, industrious American families, Horatio Algier stories and painted with "the sacred blood of our soldiers spilt at the tree of liberty". And that's what those red state voters voting against their own interests see that you and I don't - that big, beautiful painting the Republicans are selling. You and I, and anyone with any political sophistication, see economic policies that drain our nation's resources, we see cynical uses of the military, we see pandering to the worst instincts of our countrymen. In other words, the big picture the red state voters see, is invisible to you and I.
And that point is the beginning of the split between us and why we have lost voters who should be voting with us. It's the big picture that sells them - not the details. To them, it's red team/blue team - neither of us knows more than the other about what works. Clinton was extra-lucky (except when he was extra-unlucky). Reagan was lucky. Bush has been unlucky. Bush Sr. was real unlucky. Bush is moral because he says he is and Clinton wasn't moral because he was unfaithful. You and I see that as the most simplistic take on morality imaginable, but they see it as simple truth. And those interpretations play out over and over again - the complications of economics and foreign and domestic policy are diminished by the razzle dazzle of the big picture. We know that the vignettes in the painting that endears the Republicans to so many Americans are phony, cynical representations of the human experience - as ridiculous as the claims they make about the success of their policies. But red state voters, who's sole protection against exploitation is cynicism, don't know that. What they experience is that we, as progressives, aren't challenging the big picture painted by the Republicans, we're squabbling over messy, probably partisan details, and since the Republicans painted the picture that they love, the Republicans get their vote.
Clinton was good at painting a big picture but the rest of the party is terrible at it. We're terrible at it for a noble reason though. Our big picture is painted vignette by vignette - economic policies are refigured as our economy changes, foreign policy is jiggled around to accommodate the moral or strategic growth of a particular nation, environmentalism rethought as science makes new discovers; that's what we're interested in - getting each of those things right and then.... we allow the big picture to reveal itself.
We know what our big picture is - it's drives each of us to advocate policies that we know benefit us as a nation, even when we don't benefit as individuals. It's as moral as anything envisioned by the most enlightened of Christ's disciples and can be spoken of in the same language. But with our simultaneous respect for civil laws and our understanding of the sanctity and diversity of spiritual life, we address each with its own language. And leave red state voters unaware of the moral underpinnings of our arguments.
What holds the Republican's big picture together is the notion that the only generosity that is productive, wholesome and beneficial to the nation is generosity to the wealthy. But like most structural elements, that philosophy is invisible to the less sophisticated viewer - particularly those who mistake hierarchal status for accomplishment. And that's how that very ugly platform is dressed up; wealth = accomplishment. Why should some billionaire with his big hard working personality pay more in taxes than the school teacher down the street who gets summers off? How, in America, could that possibly be fair? Why shouldn't that business-minded bruiser get to keep what he earns? "Admit it," the Republicans ask those voters, "if you were a billionaire, would you want to pay taxes?" Of course not. "And this is America," the Republicans remind them, "anyone can get rich - filthy, stinking rich." Dress up the opportunity to be a bigot of one kind or another in the name of equal opportunity, cut off school lunches in the name of good parenting, invade sovereign nations in the name of freedom and it's turned into a classic con - make an overt appeal to your victim's better angels while indulging their demons and get them lying on your behalf. They'll get your back to prevent exposing themselves, or perhaps simply learning, what fools they really are. It hurts to be conned. And to raise the stakes, the Republicans have conned the media as well.
Lawrence O'Donnell launched sputtering and furious into a new paradigm the other night - he simply called John O'Neill, who was lying, a liar and didn't back down when O'Neill kept lying. How novel. How unexpected. How bold. While we need more finesse and humor than O'Donnell managed in his newly born state, we need to be that direct and state without any equivocation or surrender of canvas, our position. We desperately need leaders able to make our case in traditional American language - full of spiritual reference, Americana and bolted to the fully articulated moral structure of our philosophy.
No more ceding the big picture to the Republicans. No more apologies. No more being afraid to beat up on lying, puny thugs. They want to keep "liberal" a dirty word - fine, let's remind America with all due vigor what liberals have accomplished starting with the Declaration of Independence up through the Family Leave Act.
The raison d'être of progressivism is a genuinely moral vision for government. We must learn to articulate that moral structure first and in language that is clear and uncompromised. The articulation of our policies must then be the substance that fleshes out our vision. No more painting vignette by vignette.