Soon after Kerry conceded, my 54-year old mom e-mailed me from the DC suburbs with a fearful and dejected letter. The following is my reply, which I thought Kos folks might like to consider.
Please comment and recommend.
Mom, don't forget that whatever else you think about the pope, he did condemn the Iraq war as unjust. [A lifelong Roman Catholic, she's mad at the Church for playing politics]. Having stayed up far later than I'm accustomed to last night [I'm in England], I thought I'd try to go to bed early tonight. But no luck. I keep thinking about the 60 million people who voted Bush. 60 million! Yes, 56 million voted Kerry, but there are 60 million people for whom Bush makes the most sense. What makes it most frustrating to me is that Kerry ran such a good race -- he was right on the issues, better in the debates, and relentless on Bush's many, many failures. You're right that he would have made a very good -- possibly even great -- president. Yet there's 60 million people who thought not.
Bush has managed to convince people from Nebraskan farmlands and Ohioan suburbs that they're potential terrorist targets. And that he'll keep them "safe." As though OBL is plotting to take out small farming communities and local Wal-marts. "The terrorists hate me for my freedom," people seem to be saying in an absurd chorus line between chapters of the "Left Behind Series." It is, of course, heretical to say this (and we can only imagine the ire if a presidential candidate were to) but the truth is that Sept. 11, 2001 was merely one day, one event. History will show it to be a day that determined the courses of whole nations, but we need to remember that it needn't have, necessarily. We might have conceived it as an Oklahoma city bombing -- a terrible, terrible, crime and tragedy. Does anyone remember the date of Oklahmoma city? September 11. War on Terror. Sept. 11. War on Terror. Each has been reified to such an extent as to make both seem unassailable; the first in its literally earth shattering import, the second in its utter inevitability. But isn't this how power works? Always sweeping up after itself to make the choices of life and death it makes -- conscious, political choices -- seem preordained, "necessary," or, at its most effective, "natural"? (See war, Iraq).
That said, "September 11" and "War on Terror," as proven yesterday, are now part of the legitimate political vocabulary. However contingent that state of affairs may be, however crafted and produced, when we use those terms, we apparently say something. We say something, and people hear something. And when they hear it, they vote Bush. There are, of course, lots of other reasons people voted for Bush. There's a book that all the pundits seem to like called "What's the Matter With Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America," which apparently talks about how conservatives successfully painted the party of poor people's economic self-interest (Democrats) as eastern, liberal elitism incarnate. Interestingly, that same book goes by another title here in England: "What's the Matter with America." But the scariest part is the "War on Terror," because it is a fundamentally flexible phrase, and is large enough to accommodate whatever whims the Bush administration has. Like "pre-emptive war," it is an elastic concept that can stretch to justify just about any foreseeable conflict. I'm saddened to say that I can only really feel how dangerous this is the day after the election. Knowing, now, that it was apparently good enough to justify the last war is a suddenly frightening position.
It seems to me that our biggest challenge, starting right now, is to find a language that might compete with that language, or, at least working to set limits on its applicability, adopt that language for specifically Democratic aims. Longer term, we need the echo chamber to legitimize our language and our uses -- to say what we say back to us, and out to the world; that is, to use language. And this time, a language specifically constructed for democratic aims rather than for republican ones. I have no idea what this language is at the moment. I can only imagine it in its antithesis --- an anti-9/11 or anti-War-on-Terror. But I can imagine the echo chamber. It's movies, country song lyrics, novels, video games, think tanks, academic chairs, magazines, and blogs. In short, it's everywhere that language is used and norms are communicated.
Historically, change of this sort has usually been achieved when groups take words and ideas popularly associated with the good and apply them to their aims. What words are available to us? Protection? Choice? Liberty? Freedom? Let me think for a moment about the last of these. What if freedom comes to be understood not as a situation in which government leaves me alone (the current understanding that cuts both ways, legitimizing both tax cuts and abortion), but as a status where I am not subject to the goodwill of an authority. Insofar as the government doesn't mess around with me (at least in ways I know about), I may now perhaps be "free" or "at liberty" in the former sense but I am (we are) in fact forever susceptible to Bush's, or Ashcroft's, or whoever's arbitrary decisions. Consider for a moment what it would mean if whole masses of people understood this to mean (in a way they clearly do not now) that they were not "free." I'm borrowing from an academic here, Philip Pettit. He wonders what might happen if we start to define liberty, as many classical authors did, as a status where someone is not dominated, rather than one where someone is not interfered with. I join him in wondering whether whole classes of abuses might then seem intolerable and deplorable (again, in a way they apparently do not seem now). How could America tolerate imperialism, when the whole idea rests on American domination? How could we tolerate corporate exploitation of workers? Or gender and racial inequality, all of which permit domination of one kind or another? It seems to me that our current notion of freedom -- a notion in which it even makes sense to talk about a corporation's freedom to "use" labor, or an employer's "freedom to choose" someone of one race over another -- doesn't get the job done.
But that's just one example. More broadly, the task of changing and using language is both easy and hard. Easy because we do it every day. Hard because everyone thinks they know what words mean already. It can only work in small increments. The Republicans know this. Think Bush and the classification of murdering a pregnant woman as "double murder." Or "tax relief," which implies that taxes are a malady, an affliction. What the Republicans seem to understand is that a subtle linguistic shift, thoughtfully placed to enter the omphalos of the American body politic can alter things dramatically. Our challenge is particularly difficult being out of power. Mother Government is the prime producer and consumer of language, so that whatever efforts we make, we'll be making them in the face of the Republicans' own attempts to keep the current definitions stable. Those definitions are clearly working for them.
Where else, and how else, can we change the terms? I want to be clear. The phrase "change the terms" has largely become trite. But it needn't be. I'm proposing that Democrats work to change the internal dynamics of specific, undeniably positively charged words ("freedom," "liberty," "protection,") so that they work for us rather than against us. We have four years. Let's start today.