This past week, Bill Maher had three avowed conservatives on his show: Joe Wurzelbacher as his opening guest, and David Frum and Reihan Salam on his panel. The sense I got in listening to them was that conservatism is a movement that no longer knows what it believes. Indeed, hearing some of the conservative rhetoric lately - and let me be clear that none of Maher's guests endorsed these views - I'm not sure some conservatives believe in democracy itself.
If their ideology is simply "We must be in power, no matter what," that's not conservative ... unless you're trying to conserve a dictatorship.
More below the fold....
Conservatism - The Rubble and the Rabble, Part I
I believe in the democratic process. I think dissent and debate are good because they force us to examine what we believe. Sometimes some of us change our minds. At the very least, we have to shore up our reasons for holding an opinion. And I believe elections are the best way to choose our leaders because the alternatives are worse. At least with elections, the people get the leadership they deserve: for better or worse.
I've taken some flak from progressives for that opinion over the past eight years. I was told the American people didn't deserve George Bush or a GOP Congress. I disagreed then and still do. When a people are complacent enough to vote for a guy they'd like to have a beer with, they deserve what they get when they elect him. The "stolen election" memes never resonated for me, because the 2000 and 2004 elections should never have been close enough to steal. And the GOP were winning in Congress, and in most state and local legislatures, for a good reason: they were more organized. They did the grunt work at the local level, operating largely but not entirely out of churches, and both got out their base and swayed independents.
I didn't like those outcomes, but I believed in the process. I was both dissatisfied enough with the outcomes and committed enough to the process that I got more involved - again - and did what little I could to help the Democrats in 2006 and 2008. Enough of us did what little each of us could that, together, we did a whole lot. Howard Dean showed us that the internet could be for us what the churches had been for the GOP: a nexus for organization, mutual encouragement, and collective activism. With a big assist from the George Bush Failure Factory, we took back Congress in 2006 and helped a black man named Barack Hussein Obama win the presidency with even bigger Congressional majorities in 2008.
That was a revolution.
Few remember it now and Newsweek has apparently deleted the story from their archives, but in June of 2004, the Bush administration floated the idea of canceling or postponing the 2004 elections in the event of a terrorist attack. Then Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge asked his department to consider the legal steps required to cancel or postpone the elections if there were another terrorist attack or a credible threat on or near election day. The idea lasted for just about as long as it took for Americans from across the political spectrum to scream "No!"
So when Newt Gingrich says that President Obama is trying to install a dictatorship, it's worth remembering that we very nearly had one from 2001-2009. In December 2001, then Attorney General John Ashcroft accused the U.S. Senate of treason for holding hearings about the Bush anti-terror policies. Ashcroft's draft of the Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003 would have given him the power to revoke our citizenship, whether natural born or naturalized, if he decided we had "given material support to terrorism" or had "renounced" our citizenship "by conduct."
George Bush and a Republican Congress voided the linchpin of our constitutional liberties, the writ of habeus corpus, with the 2006 Military Commissions Act. Add to that sweeping and illegal domestic surveillance, torture as an official policy instrument, and the Bush White House on record saying ...
There are reminders to all Americans that they need to watch what they say, watch what they do, and this is not a time for remarks like that; there never is.
... and many of us reasonably feared dictatorship. But few if any of us called for armed rebellion.
Progressives believe in democracy.
Most progressives believe in the democratic process, even when we lose, even when the system seems almost irreparably broken, because we believe the alternatives are worse. Armed revolutions, like all armed conflicts, are difficult to control and predict. What begins with a dream can easily devolve into a nightmare, and history teaches us that armed revolutions tend to do exactly that. Once the blood begins to flow and the hate and rage become internalized and celebrated - and they must in any armed conflict - it's very difficult to switch them off. Fighting an unjust and corrupt government too often leads to fighting each other to form a new government as unjust and corrupt as the one just displaced. We got very lucky in 1776. You could say we rolled double-sixes. We didn't roll lucky in 1860, and Reconstruction left scars that are still healing today. Progressives, along with most Americans, don't want to try to roll double-sixes again.
So we progressives staged both a democratic and a Democratic revolution in the elections of 2006 and 2008. We donated. We phone-banked. We talked to our neighbors. We volunteered locally in GOTV efforts. We were taught from childhood to cherish the promise and the process of democracy - that we use ballots and not bullets to stage revolutions - and we believed in that promise and acted through that process. And the specific policy issues that drew us to that revolution matter less than the kind of revolution we chose to engage: a democratic revolution with ballots, not bullets.
Do conservatives believe in democracy?
Believing in democracy means believing in a process, not an outcome. It is a commitment to ballots, not bullets. It means that even when you lose an election, you accept that outcome as the legitimate act of the vox populi. You reorganize. You recruit new voices with fresh ideas that better express your core ideals. You may be the "loyal opposition," but both of those words matter. You stay loyal to the process, even in your opposition to the outcome. And this is what concerns many of us about the increasingly violent rhetoric from some conservatives. It leaves us wondering whether those voices still believe in the process called "democracy," or whether they only believe in the outcomes they want.
Given the violence that has erupted recently, this is a litmus test for conservatism. Conservatives who believe in democracy need to say so, unequivocally. They need to disavow not only those who commit violence - disavowing them is too easy and too self-serving - but also those among their movement who advocate violence, whether directly or with metaphors like "a war for America's soul" or "I like citizens armed and dangerous."
Tomorrow we'll explore what I understand to be the conservative visions for America. I say "visions" because there are clearly fractures in the conservative movement, and right now I'm not sure there's any one issue that conservatives agree on, except that they're not progressives and they're unhappy with President Obama and the Democratic-controlled House and Senate. But the reasons they're not progressives, and the reasons they're unhappy with our current government, vary so widely that it's all but impossible to say "this is what conservatives believe."
We progressives cannot and should not expect conservatives to believe in our vision for America. That would be dangerous, for us and for our nation, because ideas should be tested in debate. We should always be willing to examine and defend our vision, and when we cannot defend it, we should be willing to modify that vision. That's what the proverbial "marketplace of ideas" is all about, and that "marketplace of ideas" is the foundation of democracy.
But we can and should expect conservatives to believe in democracy, in the process of peaceful debate and decisions made with ballots, not with bullets. We can and should expect them to be loyal to that process, even in their opposition to its outcomes.
Because the opposite of small-d democratic rule is not small-r republican rule. The opposite of democratic rule is rule by fiat, imposed by brute force, regardless of the vox populi. And that is as un-American as it gets.
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Happy Wednesday!