Earlier today, I posted
a very lengthy diary trying to come to grips issues raised by and underlying the recent controversies at Dkos over election tampering in Ohio. It didn't work. It was just too big. So I've decided to redo it in pieces--some taken fairly directly from what I've already written, some modified significantly. In this first installment, I want to present the basic outline of my thinking, slightly adjusted from how it was first presented.
(1) A Fighting Faith In The Spirit of Martin Luther King
I begin with the basic ideas that Peter Beinart's recent hit piece, "A Fighting Faith" got one thing right--it's title. Liberalism needs to become a fighting faith again. But the model for this fight is not Cold War liberalism. Rather, it is the non-violent struggle exemplified by Martin Luther King.
The forces we fight against are very same ones he fought against. They oppose democracy, they oppose equality, they oppose justice, they oppose peace, and as Liberation Learning wrote in a recent diary, Saving Democracy Together, they oppose the Enlightenment in general.
(2) The Bowers Analysis.
After the election, Chris Bowers at MyDD.com went through a lengthy analysis, culminating in the argument that for Democrats to win we must expand support for liberalism, and attack conservatism. This is not the same thing as moving to Democratic Party to the left. It is about reviving a spirited defense of liberalism, and going on the offensive in favor of what it stands for. Just as moderate Republicans defend conservatism, without necessarily identifying as conservatives themselves, moderate Democrats must learn to do the same. They don't have to change their positions. Just stop bashing the Party's core identity and source of strength, without which it cannot win.
(3) The Right Wing Power Grab and the Battle For American Democracy
This comes out of Lakoff's analysis of the California Recall election. There were a wide range of Republican frames accompanying the election, each with some degree of truth. Yet, they all hid as much as they revealed. In contrast, there was one powerful Democratic frame, which, however, was not maintained throughout the election. This frame, the Right Wing Power Grab, revealed the manipulations behind the scenes that made most of the right wing frames appear plausible in the first place. This frame is the appropriate frame to use in talking about Ohio, as well as much else that the Republicans do-such as DeLay's redistricting power grab in Texas. Because conservatives do not fundamentally believe in democracy, such power-grabs come naturally to them. They just can't help themselves. They over-reach constantly, but we never challenge them. That has to stop. Now.
(4) Issue Entrepreneurship
Before turning to talk about Ohio and how we handle it, two more tools are needed.. The first is a concept from UCLA Professor Phil Agre, called "Issue Entrepreneurship. It is a concept of democratic social skills/identity formation. Agre explains:
[I]t is central to the political process that individual citizens, in their public personae, are able to associate themselves with issues. Citizens, whether politicians or activists, make their political careers in entrepreneurial fashion by identifying issues that are coming to prominence, researching and analyzing them, staking out public positions on them, and building social networks of other citizens who have associated themselves with related issues, especially those whose positions are ideologically compatible
I believe it is relatively easy to recognize Georgia10 and her analysis of Ohio election tampering in this description. It is equally easy, for those familiar with Markos's history, to recognize him as well. Indeed, the passage describes each of us here at Dkos to a greater or lesser degree, because this is how democratic, Enlightenment, non-authoritarian politics works.
(5) Non-Aristotelian Categories
Another tool from George Lakoff's toolbox is his theory of categories and what they tell us about the mind, laid out in his book, Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About The Mind. Categories aren't just bins that things either belong inside or outside of. They have internal structure. One aspect of this structure is prototyping, which in turn takes several forms. Differences in how we prototype can lead to very different pictures of the world and ways of prioritizing, which may vastly exaggerate differences, and distract from underlying agreement.
Issue entrepreneurship is very much involved in articulating prototypes, and organizing concepts. It is only natural that people strongly focused on particular ventures should misunderstand one another from time to time. Developing the means to deal with such situations is crucial for us on the left, particularly since we reject the notion that some outside authority should settle differences for us, and force our compliance.
(6) Ohio, Finally
The upset around Ohio has many different facets and layers, which is not to deny that there are some fairly clear-cut issues as well. But my main point in this final section is to argue that the challenges and frustrations we face (both as individuals and as a community) are in fact opportunities, just as problems always are in the process of invention. The tools and perspectives introduced before this provide a framework for solving the problems we now face.
We have a shared focus for our issue entrepreneurship, in articulating a fighting faith in liberalism, the Enlightenment, reality-based politics, and building what Martin Luther King referred to as "the Beloved Community," right here, right now, here on Dkos with one another, as well as in real life with everyone around us. The differences we have in terms of individual focus, opportunity, need, communities and relationsihips we are already embedded in, etc.-all these differencees can be sources of strength, not weakness, providing we devote sufficient energy, attention, intelligence and good will toward making it so, toward building synergy with one another as a fundamental orientation in our lives.
This is the argument I have to make, in outline. I welcome comments, and will seek to strengthen it with your insights as I rearticulate it in the days to come.