Progressives need to play offense. Instead, what little media visibility they are granted (e.g., MSNBC) is used up playing defense. That is, reacting to the right-wing outrage of the day - and providing free RW propaganda by showing clips of that outrage - rather than getting out a positive progressive message. Because of this lack of pro-activity, it is easy for the corporate Democrats to marginalize progressives, easy for the Village to ignore them as whiners.
Progressives have the truth on their side. Thirty years of ruinous neoliberal and neocon policies on economics, warfare, and social engineering are proven failures. But, even when neocon/ neoliberal jackasses are dead wrong, they dominate the media, while progressives, who have been right about everything, are shoved aside. This was predicted.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
- George Orwell
It's time for progressives to get out of the defensive crouch they've been in for twenty years. Come below the orange riot gas cloud for an unapologetic progressive platform.
People say that voters are turned off by wonky policy issues, that policy doesn't make good sound bites or exciting news. I guess that's true if you think that jobs, peace, and decency are just policy issues.
Jobs and peace are clear and simple words, but "decency" is a trickier word and requires some explanation. Please excuse the inverted order of discussion.
Decency
Decency is the only word in the slogan that is abstract and cultural. It expresses the sense that society has lost its direction. I considered several words for this part of the slogan: Justice, Civility, Rationality, Common Sense, Tolerance. But each word left out something that another word expressed. In the end I felt that decency is the right word for a slogan. After all, it was good enough to use against Joe McCarthy.
At long last, have you left no sense of decency?
- Joseph Welch to Senator Joseph McCarthy
Decency has many
meanings and
more nuances.
Because parts of the definitions are vaguely self-referential - i.e.,
conforming to approved social standards
they have been the subject of intense media manipulation. The end result of the Culture Wars has been a complete re-definition and debasement of the word decency - i.e., a change in "approved social standards".
Whereas one definition used to be:
marked by moral integrity, kindness, and goodwill
we now live in an indecent society where kindness is looked upon as supporting "moochers" and goodwill is replaced by naked racism and violent homophobia. Moral integrity is hard to come by among adulterous, pedophiliac, high-living, drug-using fundamentalist "preachers".
The whole idea of "fairness" - as in a "decent" wage, a "decent" job - has been under continuous assault for decades. Unions have been smashed, jobs have been outsourced, benefits slashed, working hours turned into a computer-generated torture regimen. This is more indecency and failed social engineering.
Anyone older than the age of forty has real issues with today's idea of the nuance:
conforming to standards of propriety, good taste, or morality
Where is the propriety in the media endlessly regurgitating zombie lies about Obama's birth, lies about his being Moslem, lies about "death panels"? Where is the good taste in the scurrilous assaults on Michelle Obama being "fat" or one of the longest running lies - HRC being a lesbian.
Where is the morality in the government making billions in profits on usorious, non-dischargable student loans while too-big-to-fail banks get loans at near 0%?
It is the fundamental appeal to fairness and decency that makes Elizabeth Warren such a powerful figure. She is still a decent person in a Washington cesspool of lobbyists, warmongers, and financial crooks.
The bottom line here is that progressives need to take back the word "decency" from the cynical politicos and lunatic fundamentalists who have narrowed its meaning to the merely sexual. Even the Pope is on our side about there being more to morality than just sex. Consider this frontal assault on a major conservative code-word to be Rovian in its strategy. Hit them where they think they are strong.
How to use the platform
With that introduction to the use of the word "decency" in a progressive context, let us proceed to the other parts of the slogan. The rest of this diary will be more directly about a platform, and less in the Lakoffian mode of linguistics. What follows are a list of programs that we need to make into well-known tropes that can be used as sound-bites - the way "the free market" or "second amendment rights" are used today.
I can see a series of stump speeches, taking one topic from each of the three words in the slogan, cross-referencing them. You don't have to read every item on the jobs list below to get the point. However, the peace list does help to reframe a lot of issues as war and peace.
Jobs
We need to spend literally trillions of dollars to repair our decaying infrastructure. Things that were built in the 1950s and 60s are nearing the end of their usability and are starting to literally fall apart. We have wasted years deliberately avoiding job-producing, high-return-on-investment infrastructure spending when interest rates have been zero. The GOP have been sabotaging this. Chris Crispy killed a tunnel under the Hudson. The GOP held the highway bill (the most bipartisan pork in Congress) hostage until more indecent demands to steal from pension funds were met.
We need to stop subsidizing fossil fuel and sabotaging solar power with bogus fees. We need to promote solar and wind power. Instead, we are selling fracking to the world. To the Ukraine, to China, to anyplace ruled by venal oligarchs who care about a quick buck today, and don't care they are literally burning the world down. (See The Great Frack Forward, at Mother Jones)
We need to stop firing good teachers and privatizing schools so that hedge fund managers can take a quick rake off, while five years later the school goes bankrupt. If the FBI can look into crooked charter schools, progressives can be proactive about it.
We need to stop gutting regulatory agency jobs, so that we do not reach (perhaps we already have reached) Chinese levels of product adulteration, slipshod work, corner-cutting design. Witness the crappy bolts and welds we got from outsourcing the Bay Bridge
Quality control managers found thousands of cracks in welds produced by a Chinese contractor for the span’s signature tower and roadway. Rather than ordering all needed fixes, top California Department of Transportation managers replaced those who discovered the problems.
Millions of dollars were paid to the same Chinese contractor to speed up work after it fell behind schedule and bridge officials urgently wanted faster results.
We need to stop subsidizing and promoting (via deregulation) the outsourcing of jobs of all sorts. Insanely, we get some of our military supplies from China.
Peace
There are so many wars that we need to end. Eight come easily to mind.
1. First, there is the ever-growing, cancerous military/ intelligence/ internal security budget. Everyone acknowledges that America is "war weary" when it comes to yet another dip in the Middle East shark tank or the Ukrainian family feud. But, ISIS, booga, booga. Progressives need to stand up and say it is another "smoking gun/mushroom cloud" bum's rush.
2. Presidents of many Latin American countries have denounced the War on Drugs (WOD) as a failure. Many states have passed medical marijuana laws and two have outright legalized it. Yet we continue to feed the largest prison population in the world, more than half of which is in for non-violent possession, often of marijuana. Meanwhile HSBC launders billions for the drug cartels and gets off with a fine - not even a prohibition to do business in the U.S., much less actual prosecution.
3. Of course, much of the WOD is part of the War on People of Color (WoPoC) - with arrests, fines, incarcerations, and probations all falling more heavily on PoC. The WoPoC is on display this week in Ferguson, MO, NY, NY, and LA, CA. Its on display in anti-Muslim paranoia. Basically, racism is politically legitimate again. Even the country that was the victim of racism, Israel has made racism against Palestinians politically legitimate. 911 has made cops as occupiers politically legitimate, at least until Ferguson.
4. A secondary front in the WoPoC is the War on Public Safety(not anacronymed for obvious reasons). The role of ALEC in this war, while documented, is not recognized much outside the progressive community. Once again, the facts are that legalized open carry increases the murder rate, that stand your ground laws plus open carry is similar to a powder keg and a match. The WoPoC angle comes in when heavily armed "militias" protecting a notorious seditionist are not disarmed by the Feds. Of course, the NRA is the leader of the war on public safety, shrugging its shoulders as children murder children; and mental deranged individuals have easy access to semi-automatic weapons and body armor.
5. Then, there is the War on Government, the decades long de-legitimization of almost any non-military service provided by your tax dollars. The unending market fetishism, in spite of the worst economic calamity since the Great Depression, remains the ideology in charge, in charge of privatizing fire departments, prisons, parole services, national parks, prying lose any last little bit of copper plumbing or copper wire that can be looted from the abandoned husk of government. This brazen looting and social vandalism is the most indecent thing about today's America.
6. The War on the Environment is collateral damage from the War on government. Canada and Australia have already defunded and muzzled their environmental scientists. Can't have the survival of the ecosphere get in the way of next quarter's profits. In America, fracking goes on despite water pollution, earthquakes, oil trainwrecks, and groundwater depletion. The regulators have been eliminated in much the same way that Rick Perry got rid of an inconvenient DA; except that no one is investigating who trashed the EPA.
7. Meanwhile, the government we have (of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich) continues its War on a Free Press. Cases in point: the vindictive pursuit of James Risen and the refusal to acknowledge the basic patriotism of Edward Snowden; meanwhile NSA liars and people who "tortured a few folks" get a free pass. Citizens are arrested for taking a picture of public buildings or of police officers performing their public duties. This is but one facet of the SCOTUS's War on the Bill of Rights.
8. Finally, there is the Class War, a.k.a. inequality. The relentless slicing away of the infrastructure that makes for a middle class. The unending squeeze on pay and benefits in a time of record profits. Corporations, unwilling to merely park their money overseas in tax havens, have now started to do "inversions", basically saying that they want the benefits of America and they do not want to pay for them. The little folk are called moochers for behavior that is utterly trivial, but the rich crooks? Nah.
The final stage of the class war, the elevation of corporate profits above the rights of nations is rolling down its secret track - soon to surface as TPP and it's European twin - a corporate coup d'etat that will end all this foolish talk of self-government once and for all.
The Class War and the WoPoC come together in the privatized, school to prison pipeline and the subsequent prison slave labor, privatized prisons, debtors prisons, and privatized parole companies. The prisons are inhumane and indecent. Major corporations gouge on everything from phone calls to clothing. Prisoners are set to other states to "save money". The whole situation is obscene (in the correct sense of the word "decency").
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The issue in this strategy for progressives is how to deal with the hijacking of the Democratic Party elite by big money. The elites are deeply complicit in all of this. Come on down, Joe Biden - tell us about your son, who just turned up as a lawyer for a Ukrainian oil company.
One of the reasons its possible for the GOP to defend its rogues gallery of corrupt thug governors like: MacDonald (VA), Christie (NJ), Walker (WI), Perry (TX), Scott (FL), LePage (ME), and Corbett (PA) is that there are corrupt thug Democrats, like Rahm Emmanuel and Andrew Cuomo, who have very high profiles and elite approval within the party.
The game goes like this: progressives attack corrupt GOP politico. GOP point to corrupt Dem and scream "hypocrisy". Progressives, afraid of alienating centrist democrats fold. Progressives have got to stop pulling their punches.
Let me put it another way. Despite the GOP being engaged in open fratricidal warfare, pollsters are still predicting (yeah, I know, corporate pollsters) they will take the Senate. Perhaps it has something to do with the public perception of the aforementioned corruption of the Democratic leadership. With these polls out there, progressives can legitimately say: we have tried it the Third Way for two election cycles and have an entrenched, seditious GOP; let's try something different and decent instead.