In the May 2nd edition of the Dallas Morning News, in
a piece excerpted from
Mother Jones, Garrett Keizer discusses the problem the Left faces in battling the deconstruction of America by neo-theo-nazi-cons. He starts by describing the difficulties faced by those hard-working and troubled members of another world, which, in another time, we called "the lower middle class". Those are the folks like my son-in-law, an unemployed machinist who only wants a job, health insurance for his family, and a six-pack on Friday night. He would like to be able to provide a private education for his daughter who is learning disabled, and to take his son fishing every few weeks. He would be really happy if most folks he knows had jobs, a decent place to live and enough to eat. He would think there would be heaven on earth if folks didn't kill each other, kids didn't do drugs, everybody got happily and healthily laid, and there was a river of margaritas nearby to drink from when there was a fajita barbecue goin' on. About folks like my Ned, my son-in-law, Keizer says:
Those without the privilege of mobility must learn instead the rigid disciplines of standing still, that is, of making a stand. Often those engaged in this kind of struggle will turn to religion. People go to church for all kinds of reasons, but the main reason that people of a certain age start going to church is that their kids are starting to overdose on the dominant culture. They go to church hoping to find solid ground.
And then Kreizer goes on to say, apropos of the "values thing":
Sometimes they go to the polls hoping for the same thing.
"You know where I stand," George W. Bush said any number of times before his 2004 electoral victory, and I certainly did: on the wrong side of every issue. But did voters know where the Democratic Party stood or, more to the point, on what it stood? Did it stand on anything?
If the question offends you, permit me to ask another. Had Howard Dean been an evangelical Christian with an evangelical Christian base, would his followers have deserted him because his Iowa holler made him "unelectable"? Or would they have closed ranks behind him because his stand on the Iraq war made him right?
Now, at Easter we had a big knock-down, drag-out fight with Ned because he refused to vote for John Kerry on November 2. He stubbornly refused to budge about his choice, speaking with tears about the guy working the machine next to his voting for Bush "over abortion". After reading Keizer, I know I read those tears wrong. Ned's eyes were wet with tears of solidarity for his buddy. He disagreed with him about abortion, but "stood" with him, a man like himself, who was suffering an internal agony over "values". We pounded poor Ned for 5 hours, explaining to him the policies of the Democratic party and the plans the Republicans have for guys like him. He was reluctantly moved from his position, very reluctantly, and I continued to be mystified until I read Keizer's article. Keizer goes on to say, quite accurately, that the neo-theo-asshole-cons are as evil as we know them to be:
The solution of the right, which now masquerades in the costume of "values," is to locate a domain of bogus moral absolutes while pursuing a foreign policy based on pre-emptive violence and a domestic policy based on theft (or whatever is the preferred value-neutral term for the disinheritance of an entire country unto the third and fourth generations).
He then describes how weak and bleating is the liberal response:
The current liberal solution is slightly more subtle and perhaps more benign: a multicultural caste system in which people of all races, creeds, genders and sexual orientations eat dinner at the same upscale restaurant (where I eat, too), while people of all races, creeds, genders and sexual orientations eat dinner out of the garbage out back. And the only thing more global than the menu is the crew scrubbing the pots.
He then lays it out - and it hurts. The Left is as secretly class-driven as the Right:
Both solutions are marked by a wily propensity to talk about any kind of conflict except class conflict. Having duly explored the polarities of black and white, male and female, gay and straight, we now distract ourselves by talking ad nauseam about blue states and red states, a construction that wants only a Dr. Seuss or a special edition of Dungeons & Dragons to achieve its final apotheosis in the realm of Whoozits and elves.
And then, well, then, right there in black and white, he throws down the gauntlet to the Comfortable Left:
It might mean that we have to relinquish more of our disposable income in order to reduce the numbers of disposable people. It might mean something as radical as saying so.
And he explains why we on the Left are short on values - and it has nothing to do with faith in God, it has to do with faith in something other than policies:
Democrats seem prepared to subordinate every value to that of winning, failing to realize that they can never win - especially in a time of international terror and domestic disarray - until they subordinate winning to conviction. This is where jabs at Mr. Bush's intellect prove to be every bit as lame as their target. Nobody thinks Mr. Bush has a brain. They think he has a backbone.
The fact is, the right is right when it says that certain problems cannot be addressed by what we on the left like to call "systemic change." The right is right when it says that certain social problems can be addressed only by a change in our cultural values.
We need to hold, as well as articulate, cultural values, and we have to be ready to pay the price of doing so. There will be no creating justice on the cheap - like "found art":
Where the right is wrong is in trying to impose a single set of cultural values on a pluralistic society. But an alternative set of values cannot be forged in a seminar or welded together from various cross-cultural scrap like a work of found art. Values are a codification of the experience of shared struggle - be it in the Sinai Desert or the coalfields of Appalachia. The best way for the left to discover the values suitable to a pluralistic society is in a committed struggle with forces hell-bent on reshaping America as a sentimental Victorian empire where Mammon is Lord ... and all the luck that any poor person needs is for a rich man to be visited by four ghosts on Christmas Eve.
He concludes by saying if the sacrifice that is needed from us is too great, we deserve whatever we get, even if guys like Ned don't:
This is a struggle that promises to be hard and protracted. But if we on the left can conceive of no value worthy of sacrifice, then we live for no worthier purpose than to grouse and grow old.
Now, when I was attempting to make the point in
a comment a few days ago, I was misunderstood, probably because I am not very articulate. But I think, truly, the time has come for those of us on the Left who value justice, freedom, and peace, to make some sacrifices to ensure those values are a concrete, "incarnational" fact in America. We must make the sacrifices necessary to ensure those are not words, but realities. What sacrifice are you willing to make?