Crossposted from My Left Wing
If all goes according to plan today, I'll be speaking with John Gibson on his radio show again this evening (circa 5:15pm pacific, 8:15pm eastern).
According to his producer, we'll be discussing a couple articles: The Boston Globe's piece on Kerry's posts at DKos and the WSJ Online editorial on ideology.
So I figured I'd get a head start on this thing and tackle my response to the WSJ editorial, in print, before the show airs.
Sick of Sausage
Today's voters crave ideology
BY DANIEL HENNINGER
Friday, February 3, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST
The most significant moment in Tuesday evening's State of the Union speech did not occur while President Bush was speaking. It was just before the speech, when TV cameras caught the two new Supreme Court justices, John Roberts and Samuel Alito. They are conservatives. They are what the Republican voting base wanted on the court and what George Bush promised he would nominate if elected.
Liberals are appalled. Those who are not appalled are apoplectic, filling Web forums with denunciations of the justices and the president whose election victory entitled him to name them. This is a fight over ideology.
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Looks to me like the pragmatists are running out of covering shade. Ideology is back at the center of American politics. It is going to stay there through the 2008 presidential election. This is what happens when the reigning political class abandons ideology--as now.
What preoccupies the Beltway's conventional wisdom today and what interests voters could not be more different. What matters most to the Beltway is who gets caught by the Abramoff scandals, the legal dicta of al Qaeda surveillance, and who takes the fall for Hurricane Katrina. These things can be fun but alone they reduce politics to an Xbox game.
What interests the most motivated Democratic voters now is "progressive justice," "our values," "our rights," "public needs," Roe v. Wade. What interests their GOP opponents is "big government," "spending," patriotism, the "ethics" of cloning, "activist" judges, Roe v. Wade.
At a time when the Democratic elites no longer have a vibrant ideology and the Republicans in Washington are deserting theirs, the public across the spectrum seems to be screaming for recognizable signposts, shared political principles.
Back in 1960, the sociologist Daniel Bell wrote a book remembered for its title, "The End of Ideology." Years later he said...
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... "I said specifically that there is always an emotional hunger and yearning for ideology and that these impulses are always present among young intellectuals."
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... what they're hungering for can only be called ideology. One might prefer a less fanatic, less foul-mouthed faction than this, and their Democratic principles may seem a tad antique, but the unmistakable fact is that the Web Democrats are ideologues--proudly and defiantly so.
They're insisting that the party nominate a candidate who'll run unashamedly on "progressive ideas."
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... they've proven they can use the Web to raise millions to support or punish Democratic politicians. Even ideologues on the left need capital.
This is what John Kerry's obviously quixotic filibuster was about, not stopping Sam Alito. When Al Gore gives a speech that strikes you as crazy ("How dare they drag the good name of the United States of America through the mud of Saddam Hussein's torture prison"), it's about this internal ideological competition, not you.
Karl Rove in a speech last month to the Republican National Committee said that "a party's governing philosophy should be at the heart of our political debates." The Web Democrats agree with this.
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John Boehner's upset defeat of Roy Blunt in yesterday's House leadership vote suggests the Shadegg insurgency woke up House Republicans to the fact that their voting base was prepared to abandon them in November after they abandoned their ideological moorings.
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In the new media world, the political sausage factory is always on view. Ugh.
Many candidates in the off-year election this November will still try to hide from ideology. That will be hard.
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In our time the Web Democrats' search for an ideology ensures that the president's every move will be subject to challenge. The fact that they're fighting the Bush surveillance policy on hapless legal grounds rather than separation of powers suggests it may take until 2008 to make the primal Web scream ideologically coherent.
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I do not disagree with most of Mr. Henninger's assertions here -- though I must note:
This is what John Kerry's obviously quixotic filibuster was about, not stopping Sam Alito. When Al Gore gives a speech that strikes you as crazy ("How dare they drag the good name of the United States of America through the mud of Saddam Hussein's torture prison"), it's about this internal ideological competition, not you.
This particular paragraph of specious characterisations couldn't possibly be more indicative of lazy and inaccurate reportage. But I suppose the editorialist has more license with that sort of thing than does, say, your actual journalist. Good thing I'm not a journalist, either.
As I said, I agree with the overriding thesis here, that voters are more ideological than anyone in the Beltway wants to think.
HOWEVER...
Henninger is correct about candidates running away from ideology, but it is simply factually incorrect to ascribe to that fact the cause as being an incoherent ideological scream from the left on the Web.
Ideological coherence is not our problem, we political activists of the Internet. Our problem is twofold: entrenched Democratic (And Republican, come to that) dinosaurs who are, to put it mildly, reluctant to accept the fact that the world has changed, gentlemen... and that these self-same dinosaurs are terribly unmotivated to accept that fact.
And it is that secondary prong for which we can hold only ourselves to blame. It is we who should provide the motivation for these dinosaurs, and that motivation is painfully, simply obvious: political survival. It would be so awfully nice if they could be motivated by anything other than naked self-interest - say, by altruism and a deep, abiding desire to be actual SERVANTS of the citizenry, instead of de facto overseers; but, sadly, nothing could be plainer than these politicians' craven willingness to sacrifice anything and everything to the mere fact of their own elections.
So be it, we say. If you need a carrot and a stick, then far be it from us to abandon entirely the methods of getting anything done in Washington, D.C. We will reward those of you who do what we want you to do, and punish those of you who do not. Couldn't be simpler, really. By jove, I think the kids have got it, alright!
The voting public are getting younger, especially the liberals - and they are more informed than their older predecessors. And the more informed we are, the more ideological we become. Apathy is for the ignorant or the despairing. We are neither, and we are legion. (And, I would submit, without a shred of evidence, we are overwhelmingly LIBERAL, in the truest sense of the word.)
We, the informed political activists of the Internet, overwhelmingly favour the right to privacy, the idea that our bodies and our minds are sacrosanct. Even those younger voters styling themselves "Republicans" will more often than not agree that it's really no one's business what others do with their own genitalia, and that marijuana should be decriminalized. And, if you catch such voters in a particularly honest state, they might even admit that prostitution being illegal makes as much sense as it would to criminalise one-night stands. But I digress...
Younger voters across the spectrum of the Internet, in the spirit of that same candour, will even concede that the great bugaboo of the extreme religious right, "gay marriage," is a pointless and purposeless bit of ideology - dinosaur ideology, let's call it. The wholesale denial of the federal benefits, protections and responsibilities of officially recognised cohabitation (yes, marriage) to an entire segment of the citizenry on the basis of sexual orientation (a PRIVATE issue, surely no sensible person will deny) is simply un-American. And wrong, lest a distinction between the two be stronger of late. It is WRONG to deny a man the federal benefits afforded to his fellows, purely because the person with whom HE wishes to cohabit in an officially recognized way happens to possess the same sexual organs as he. It is WRONG to deny a woman the federal benefits afforded her fellows, purely because the person with whom she wishes to cohabit in an officially recognized way happens to LACK possession of a penis.
The ABSURDITY of the previous few sentences is prima facie obvious, and it only increases the further one explores the rationale behind the legal discrimination against people on the basis of who they fuck. Equal rights for ALL has always been the principle to which Americans have, at least theoretically, aspired. And yes, the denial of legal marriage to gay people is EXACTLY the same as the denial of legal marriage to mixed race couples. THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE.
See what I did? I started off trying to analyse and I ended up pontificating on a principle. That's the way of it with these kids today, Mr. Henninger. We lack not coherence but elected representation willing to be politically honest instead of politically cautious, principled instead of craven, courageous rather than capitulatory.
What we LACK, in other words, are people of principle. So, lacking that, we apply our formidable intelligence, passion and energies to FORCING those people we DO have to FOLLOW our principles.
I'd love to stay and present my case for MY principles, as opposed to, say, those of my political polar opposites on the Internet - but, unlike most of my peers on the Left of the Internet, I DO have a tendency toward incoherence and logorrhea - to say nothing of digression... SO I'll leave it at that.
For now.
