As Ellen Dana Nagler's account of Clark's convention apperance underlines. We have a
race for 2008. Let the puns fly about Clark's star power against Hillary's, but it has begun, and this, longest and most grueling of races is going to be about a few issues. Defining the terms of the debate is going to be over these issues.
The challenge is to take the principles of the Democratic Movement - which has often, but not always acted through the Democratic Party - and make them the principles upon which the campaign shall be fought over, and through which the nation will be governed when we reach victory.
Wealth from Work versus Wealth from Privilege
The simplest of these issues is that the Democratic Party is the party of work, and of the tools that make work work. That is, the party of labor and capital. The Republican Party is the party of wealth, that is, the party of rent. The Republican Party's ownership society meme is an attempt to convince Americans that they can rent money and land to future generations, that they can force the future to pay for the present.
This is one of the oldest of Democratic Party issues: "The living must not work for the dead." Now we understand that in broadest terms: living people should not work for dead people, and the living economy should not work for the dead economy.
Thus the Republicans believe that the dead should be tax-exempt, while our posterity is to be burdened by heavy taxation. The Republicans would create a cult of debt, as to create a gread river which can be collected as rent. The Republicans would elevate a culture of deficits, claiming that the bill will never come due.
The Democratic movement has believed, from the beginning, in the wealth of nations resting in the excellence of its people, and in the tools they have created to extend the reach of work. We are not against gold, merely against crucifying people on crosses made from it.
Faith against Blind Faith
The left, whether religious or secular, believes in a very different kind of faith: namely, a faith that the universe is greater than we are, that this truth demands a moral and ethical path that does not deny that reality. This means that we recognize that what is outside of our control will not go away even if we scream at it loudly. Whether this is embodied by a metaphysical entity or not, the basis is the same: the universe is not an extension of ourselves, but we of it. In philosophy, this is an ontological faith: we have faith in that which is greater than ourselves.
The right - whether religious or secular - believes the reverse, that nature, human and otherwise, must be hammered into a shape convenient for our arrangements as people. Whether it is worship of "God" or "The Market" is immaterial: the faith of the right is a faith that there is nothing that cannot be ignored, pushed aside or pounded into shape. From the point of view of the right, if the facts are incovenient, so much the worse for them.
This distinction is crucial, because the Right wants to cleave the country along the issue of whether there is a metaphysical power that should be invoked. This is not the issue, many Republicans, including people such as Karl Rove, are not particularly believers. Instead it is what that faith is devoted to that is important.
It is for this reason that the Republicans worship a God of punishment: if the universe has no shape, then the only way to keep people on the straight and narrow is to consciously threaten and punish them. The left believes that ignorance, evil and arrogance will, inevitably, come to grief, because it is in the nature of things for it to be so. We do not need a God who demands that we become bearers of vengence and punishment, because the inevitable and irresistable forces of the universe will do so far more more thoroughly than any human agency.
The left believes, as a result, that we can solve our problems by facing them, and the right believes we can be absolved of our problems by making others pay for them.
Merit against Luck
The Republican Party worships luck: the fortunate should be tax exempt, and it is the unlucky who must be saddled with the results of every misfortune.
Thus the Republican Party's most important initiative for Bush's second term, after repeal of the estate tax, is the imposition of an odious and burdensome bankruptcy bill - but only for the poor. Corporate bankruptcy, you will notice, is as generous as it has ever been.
Professionalism against Peonism
The left sees a society of individuals who are independent, who act out of their own initiative, based on their own understanding, and are yet unified by common understandings. The right believes in a society of people who live by dodging the lashes of the stick, who are cogs in a vast machine that churns out tanks and weapons - who are free only in the sense that they are free to fear the consequences of misfortune and the state.
This difference ties together the first three points: professionalism's core is not what you have, but what you know. Peonism is about the dog eat dog struggle to enslave others or be enslaved in return. The right wants a media that repeats the propaganda of the Party, people who do not question the actions of the executive, and an economy where all good trickles down from above.
The Democratic Movement has, from the beginning, believed that the value in society comes from the actions of free people, and not from the fiat of the rich, whether it is the banks, the railroads, the corporations or the oil wells drilled in the sands of the Middle East. At each turn the right, which ever party it acts through, has promoted the belief that money is what a creditor will take in payment for debts, and that all good flows from a few sources. The right believes that the rich own the world, and the rest of us merely rent it.
The Democratic movement has wanted a nation of leaders, and of leadership. The right demands that society be reduce to a parcel of peons, an armed mob in search of the next bad job, living in fear of misfortune and punishment.
Enlightened Populism against Reactionary Mobocracy
The Democratic Party is the party which believes in decision by enlightened means, and by and for the whole of the people - as a whole.
The Republican Party has elevated Ann Coulter to sainthood, and would have us be a country that makes every decision based on the screaming heads on the radio. People like Rush Limbaugh who churn out drool fuel for crank head porn monkeys, and Bill Frist, who leads a legion of Darwin denying dead enders in pursuit of theocracy. The Republican Party does not want people to act, but react. They want to give people not the facts, but merely the anecdotes.
This again goes to the roots of the Democratic movement, to Jefferson's warning "A country that is ignorant and free never has been and never will be."
Nation not just Country
The republican party, as a result, is infected with a pervasive xenophobia, a love of borders, boundaries and the machines that create them.
While the Democratic Party loves America, it is not America of borders and boundaries, but an America of spirit, one which represents the right, not merely the fruits of might. We hold our country dear, not because we can shoot those who would enter it.
The Surplus Society against Culture of Deficit
From the beginning the Democratic Party has warned that a passing majority cannot vote itself a subsidy out of the public treasury - Madison warned that it would be "the end of free government." More broadly, the Democratic Movement has believed that it is our duty to create a better world, and to leave the world better than the one we found. The Republican Party believes that all is permissible, so long as you are dead when the bill comes due.
It is for this reason that the Democratic Party is the party who should be the home for those who believe in the environment, in innovation, in education, in basic human dignity - because these are the fruits of surplus. It is for this reason that whoever labors to create more, and not merely more for himself at the expense of others, should see the Democratic Movement as their movement, and the Democratic Party as their party.
A Constitution of Conscience against a Constitution of Conspiracy
It is this that is the summation of all of the rest: the Republicans would impose a new constitutional order, one based on deceit and deals made far from the public eye. They would have a currency propped up by collusion of a few other nations, a policy conceived in secret, conducted by fiat and composed of the benefits that flow only to the few. It is behind their attack on the judiciary, their centralization of power, their turning every organ of government into an instrument of their party and its pursuit of power.
Against this is a constitution of conscience - conscience in that it will not take more from the world than the world can sustain, that it will not take more from the future than it gives, that it will not take from others. The Democratic Party must become the party of a constitution of conscience, a culture of conscience and a country of conscience.
The Democratic Agenda
The Democratic movement has believed that the ultimate truth stand with how people live in a world that is larger and greater than they are. From this flows a duty to our fellow human beings, present and future. From this flows a society that is based on creating surplus and not deficits. From this flows a nation whose constitution is rooted in conscience and not collusion. From this flows an economy which does not inflict torments by blind misfortune, and which gives everyone everywhere all that they need to achieve at their highest level.
It is a belief in open government, openly arrived at, so that we may attain this end. So that we have a government of the people, by the people and for the people, and not goverment of the many by the few and for the wealthy.
It is for this reason that the Democratic movement raises up leaders who lead a nation of leadership. It is for this reason that the Democratic Party believes that it is the united mainstream of society, and not the collection of wealthy at its apex, creates the value and worth of the whole.
The Democratic Party has an agenda, some of whose planks go back to 1941, when we committed ourselves to a world free of want and fear, and free for conscience and expression. Not merely for us, but for "everyone everywhere in the world". It is time to renew that faith, that faith that we can bring the greatest good to everyone everywhere in the world, and add to it the the faith that we may advance on the frontiers of human accomplishment and human knowledge - that we may undo the evils of the past, not merely trade one evil for another. That we must take up the banner of those who have advanced the Democratic movement from its beginnings all the way through the present.
Because that is what is at stake: we believe, as surely as we believe in anything at all, that should we turn our back on conscience, reality and humanity, that there will be a terrible price to pay. Perhaps not today or tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of our lives, and the lives of those who follow us. In the dark days of the Depression, John Maynard Keynes was asked was their any precedent in history for the economic and political torments of that time, he replied "yes, it was called the Dark Ages." And so it is, there are always those who would renew the Dark Ages by burning out the world, a Dark Age that hovers at the corners of the light, ready to swirl in and suffocate it. as it was then, so it is now.