Someone once said that bigotry is the anger of those who have no opinions.
I’m beginning to wonder.
The only organization I know of that functions well when blind acceptance is enforced on its minions is the military.
It doesn’t work well in business.
It doesn’t work well in families.
And it surely doesn’t work well in American democracy.
So, if that’s true, if blind acceptance and thoughtless sheepism are poor substitutes for thought before action, are bad replacements for questioning and loud debate, why are those of us on the disaffected left here at dKos being painted with the broad brush of bigotry?
More after the jump ...
What’s the purpose of these diaries and comments calling us out as emotional reactionaries and fools when we see ourselves as people with ideas who are finding no harbor for them in the Obama White House? Since when did contrary thought become an anti-virtue?
Is it because the president’s admirers, left to preach to the rest of us the doctrine of, "Shut up and row the boat," have let bigotry move into the space where ideas and opinions once safely docked?
I don’t know, but I have to ask the question.
I've seen us the last day or so called "knee-jerkers," "whiners and complainers," "too stupid to see ...," "blind," "fake democrats who hope we lose elections so they can bitch" and on and on.
Is it a coincidence that this is coming up on the eve of Pres. Obama’s war speech?
Hardly.
This is coming at us as a rallying cry to fall in blindly behind this president’s risky war strategy for Afghanistan, perhaps because his more fervent supporters know the consequences of failure and are readying their damage control.
I’m old enough to remember being told to fall line, shut my mouth and support another war strategy that was doomed to fail. Yes, the war was the one in Vietnam, but the politician we were all expected to blindly follow wasn’t Richard Nixon ... it was Minnesota Democrat Hubert Humphrey.
Here is some severely compressed history:
Humphrey was a brilliant mind and a great political tactician; I’d be the last one to dispute that. But, as Lyndon Johnson’s vice-president, he was caught in a vise of horrifying grip and no way to escape. Was he going to gather his moral courage and publicly split with Johnson’s failed strategy of aggression and death in Vietnam or was he going to live with what appeared to be unflagging support, even as he urged the rest of us to do the same?
He chose the latter.
"I did not become vice president with Lyndon Johnson to cause him trouble," Humphrey famously said in 1965.
And he meant it.
So, when Johnson surprised the nation by declaring himself unavailable for re-election in 1968, Humphrey, at first considered the frontrunner for the Oval Office instead saw his political career drowned in Johnson’s policies and his own words of support for them.
Had Humphrey had the courage to break away from Johnson’s failed Vietnam policies and pave a path to peace more in keeping with his own beliefs and what he had observed on numerous trips to Southeast Asia, after many meetings with the generals on the ground there, we would have been spared the Nixon nightmare.
And had the progressive left done what it was told to do ... accept Humphrey and his hawkish baggage while breaking off the antiwar activities sweeping the country ... the movement and its historical heirs would have splintered intotiny shards of discontent and malaise.
Instead, we, as much as any Republican from the Nixon camp, took the responsibility for derailing the ambitions of a corporatist Democrat who had shown so much promise as an ally, yet so little in the doing. Humphrey’s tireless work on behalf of a domestic agenda of political and social equality and serious help for the least among us led some to call him a "prairie progressive" while the rest of us, those who were repeatedly told to follow without question, saw that it wasn’t enough.
Instead, we worked hard to punish him for supporting a murderous foreign policy while presenting our own ideas of what a foreign policy should look like.
And, yes, there was anger ... anger from party leadership, anger from most corners of the soft left and mushy center, anger from Humphrey himself. It was ugly and it cost us a generation of domestic political leadership even as our country nearly came apart at its Constitutional seams.
My message? Don’t ask some of us to just fall in line and shut up. And don’t make the mistake of thinking we lack ideas or that we only complain because of some sort of unexplained, "natural" inclination. I expect your disagreement, but I reject your bigotry.