As depressed and angry as I am about the election, I'd like to argue that this is a gift. And not just in the way that many have made, arguing that Bush will have to deal with his mess in Iraq, ballooning debt, and about a dozen other fuck ups. You see, in these next four years with political involvement among educated liberals at an all-time high, we must deal with THE fundamental problem with the left: we have no vision. As crazed, delusional and wrong as it might be, Bush has a vision and it seems to speak to a surprisingly wide swath of the populace.
The left rose in the 20s and 30s with the labor movement, which had as its intellectual underpinning the ideas of Karl Marx. I'm not saying that we should all become Communists, but I'm saying that the idea of Communism (rather the reality in Stalin's Soviet Union) was critical to the left then if only because it presented a viable alternative to the social-Darwinist capitalism of the early 1900s. It excited the imagination not just of the intellectual elite but also the factory workers. I'd argue that the left began to lose its vision in the 1950s, when because of, McCarthyism, ideas of Socialism was rendered politically toxic. Since then, Democratic candidates have been offering a Chinese menu of plans and policies but without a clear coherent vision to excite the populace. Since 1964, the Republicans have had one. They have been brilliant at channeling anger over the exporting of manufacturing jobs and the rise of crappy low-paying service jobs into hot button issues that appeal to the American people's basest resentments. Add to that a nostalgia for a fictional past when America wasn't plagued by uppity women, blacks, or gays and when everyone believed in the literal word of the Bible, and you have a pretty heady brew for the nation's disenfranchised. The left must be able to articulate a utopian vision of functioning society as vividly as the right. And this vision must be the left's north star.
Make no mistake about it: this is war. They are religious zealots, they are utterly amoral, and if we do not fight them with an equally compelling vision, they will win. The battleground is the disenfranchised middle and lower middle class. We must recreate a sense of class-consciousness among them, just as union workers did in the 1910s, 20s and 30s. The single mother working two jobs who voted for Bush because of his "family values" must be informed, using vocabulary that she will accept, that Bush's policies are the cause of her economic and social woes. Using grassroots efforts, we must push this vision into the mainstream. And we start doing this now.
[This is a repost from a open thread]