Henry Adams once described politics as " the systematic organization of hatred." There can be little doubt that, at least as far as this definition holds, the GOP is superior to the Democratic party as a political machine. I don’t mind that so much because, Adams’ cynicism notwithstanding, I, like the vast majority of Democrats, would like to make politics about something more noble. As such, I am glad to leave the hate-mongering to the GOP. That said, it never ceases to astound me how Democrats seem to believe that good intentions will solve the world’s problems. We invariably beat the Republicans when it comes to the popularity of our ideas, but when election day comes we find that they have done their homework, organized hatred with frightening efficiency, and won far more than they deserved to. I fear that future generations will look back on us and render the same harsh judgment that Theodore Roosevelt once passed on William Howard Taft, his former protégé and successor: We mean well. Feebly.
Democrats are forever whining that their approach to issues is too nuanced to be packaged into simple and easy to grasp points and so we therefore operate at a disadvantage vis-à-vis our Republican opponents. They indoctrinate while we educate. Education is a hard but necessary task in a Republic with a free citizenry. We are attacked and out come the pie charts, the pleas for understanding and weak-kneed capitulations passed off as bipartisan compromises with our Republican opponents. We have to do this because our positions are so complex that the voters cannot easily understand them.
This is only so much nonsense. Franklin Roosevelt undertook the most ambitious re-imagination of the US government since its founding and he did it all while gaining the enthusiastic and often wild support of the American people, a substantial number of them from the demographics that are now the reddest in the nation. He was able to do this because he had a gift for taking a complex issue and reducing it to an essential minimum that both captured the crux of the problem and resonated emotionally with the man on the street. He overcame neutralist and isolationist legislation by comparing fascism to a contagion and comparing military hardware to a fire hose. Sure the Republicans bitched and moaned and trotted out their well-worn talking points, but FDR proceeded in the face of their fulminations with his cigarette clenched between his teeth at a haughty, confident angle, never let them see him sweat and moved undeterred through the sound and fury raised by his opponents.
And he prevailed.
Repeatedly.
We are in the fix that we are in now in large part because Reagan had a similar talent, radiating confidence in much the same manner as FDR as he dispatched opponents as inept as Roosevelt’s with avuncular affability. And he aw-shucksed the American people into believing that he and his band of radical reactionaries were in fact the legitimate heirs of the American Revolution. The notion is simply preposterous and yet in the last thirty years the Democrats have allowed it to become the bedrock assumption on which all subsequent political debate is premised. Not surprisingly we have not fared well.
In allowing this nonsense to pass we have let the GOP has vilify good government and lionize corrupt plutocracy. They have convinced people that it is better to have incompetent corrupt political hacks in positions of responsibility than to allow a technical expert, a dreaded "bureaucrat" (shiver), to occupy the same position. Time and again they have crushed Democratic initiatives with the enthusiastic help of the very people that the initiative was meant to help. How did they do it? With a simple and very effective talking point for which the Democrats have STILL not come up with a response. How many times have you sat before your television dumbstruck and enraged while some bungling Dem failed to come up with a timely response while his haughty Republican opponent arrogantly sneered with that canned response he was waiting the whole debate to dish out? Time and again. Over and over, it’s always the same damned thing:
"Well I think that my opponent and I have a fundamental difference of opinion here. While he believes in big-government socialism to fix the world’s problems, I believe in freedom and the genius of the people."
There it is: "freedom vs. socialism." Tom Jefferson vs. Joe Stalin and somehow we are always associated with the latter. We have been facing this bogus charge now for nearly three decades and we still do not have an effective retort. How have we responded?
With nuance, pie charts and "compromise".
The fight is usually over before it begins. Many people simply respond at a gut emotional level with "I’m for freedom. God bless America" and then, with shouts of savage glee they join the mockery of the "liberal loonies" and back to the hilt some piece of legislation that gives huge companies the right to randomly abduct people off the street and harvest their internal organs.
Naturally, the GOP is wrong and we are right, but for nearly thirty years we have been unable to make that argument in the way that FDR would have, capturing the essence of our position in a simple formulation that resonates emotionally with the American people on a visceral level.
In the last several months the GOP has gift-wrapped a perfect formulation for not only this, but a number of other issues as well.
In this case I am referring to the recent incidents in which Blackwater, the "private security firm" has been involved. Democrats have, to a limited extent, pursued this issue but now that it seems that no one in the press is all that interested and so they seem to have more or less forgotten about it as they wait for the next Republican miscue as if this were just another outrage.
This is a mistake. There has been no single scandal that more perfectly encapsulates what is wrong with the GOP’s ridiculous ideology than the Blackwater fiasco. We are relying on mercenaries to protect our diplomats. We are relying on them for quite a few other missions as well.
Mercenaries.
Just take a moment to think about it and think of the visceral reaction that that word generates. No one likes mercenaries. The word is used figuratively as a derogatory term for people of low moral character and yet we have our government employing actual mercenaries and Republicans defending them. THEY have insisted on the equation that mercenaries are "private contractors" and somehow we have missed the opportunities this equation provides.
Democrats finally have an answer to the bogus "freedom vs. socialism" frame that the GOP has been using to undermine effective government for the last thirty years. What the GOP believes in is not the "free-market" but rather "the mercenary ideal," which asserts that there is nothing that is worth doing unless one is getting paid for it. Every time the GOP places one of its boondoggle privatization schemes it should be the Democrats that wait as if in ambush with the canned response:
"Well, I believe my opponent and I have a fundamental difference of philosophy here. My opponent believes in the mercenary ideal, while I believe in responsible government."
Or
"My opponent clearly believes that no one will do a job well unless someone is paying them. I have to say that I truly pity someone with that worldview -- but not enough to vote for this boondoggle. I believe that those who serve their country should do so because they love their country, not because they love money."
"Abraham Lincoln once defined the mission of this country as the establishment and maintenance of a government of the people, by the people and for the people. I believe in that American mission and believe it is the continuing charge that must be kept by every public servant in this country. My opponent has a different idea. He believes that government should answer only to shareholders and not to the people. That’s just an honest philosophical difference and I think it’s one about which the voters should decide."
The "Freedom vs. Socialism" trope of the GOP is a pernicious lie. We all know that and it is time to convince the American people.
The new frame should be "responsible government vs. the mercenary ideal."
It’s now Abe Lincoln vs. Erik Prince. And Lincoln’s on our side. We shouldn’t let anyone forget that.