Liberalism

Ezra Klein:

A few months back, Mitt Romney, who's now on John McCain's short list for the vice presidency, said, "I don't want to buy into the Democratic pitch, that this is all about one person, Osama bin Laden. Because after we get him, there's going to be another and another. This is about Shi'a and Sunni. This is about Hezbollah and Hamas and al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood. This is the worldwide jihadist effort to try and cause the collapse of all moderate Islamic governments and replace them with a caliphate."

The Egyptian Brotherhood isn't a terrorist group. Al Qaeda, a Sunni terrorist group, hates Iran and is rivals with Hezbollah, a Shi'ite extremist sect. This statement, in other words, made no sense. [...]

As Obama says, one of the clear distinctions between the Left's approach to terrorism and the Right's approach to terrorism is that the Left wants to limit the scope of the conflict, while the Right wants to expand it. [...] Rather than this being an effort to hunt down al Qaeda, it becomes a war to hunt down al Qaeda, destroy Hezbollah, eradicate Hamas, overthrow Saddam Hussein, change the regime in Tehran, crush the Muslim Brotherhood, confront Syria, and whatever else Bill Kristol thought of while eating his Cheerios that week. It is an incredibly dangerous and incoherent approach. And it marks a genuine difference between Obama and McCain.

Scott Lemieux on the recent Boumediene v. Bush decision that restored habeas corpus (The American Prospect):

The first section of Justice Scalia's dissent contains a screed that seems more likely to have come from an O'Reilly Factor transcript than from a Supreme Court opinion in a landmark case. "The game of bait-and-switch that today's opinion plays upon the Nation's Commander in Chief," Scalia asserts, "will make the war harder on us. It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed." [...]

[I]t is important for progressives not to approach arguments like Scalia's from a defensive crouch. In particular, there is no reason for progressives to accept the argument that there is a zero-sum tradeoff between reasonable protections of civil liberties and national security. Especially when one considers opportunity costs, there is, in fact, little security value in arbitrarily detaining people against whom the government lacks evidence. As Stephen Holmes has argued in his book The Matador's Cape: America's Reckless Response to Terror, the Bush administration's aggrandizements of executive power (and Congress' unwillingness to properly exercise its restraining and oversight functions) have undermined national security rather than preserved it. Long-term arbitrary detentions are bad for both civil liberties and the security of the American public, and it's crucial for liberals not to concede the latter half of the equation.

From Rand Beers, U.S. counterterrorism adviser and current president of the National Security Network. Beers quit the NSC in protest in March 2003 five days before the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Progressives have a tremendous opportunity — and a real challenge — on national security this cycle. The public has decisively rejected the Bush administration's national security framework. But nothing in the public discourse gives non-expert Americans a clear understanding of what the alternatives might look like. [...]

One way to fill that gap is for progressives to begin setting out the core ideas that underlie our theory of national security — and then share specific policy positions and critiques that show what those core ideas would mean, and how they would produce results different from what we have seen in recent years. The thinking behind this two-part approach is simple: there's a crying need for sophisticated, pragmatic, deep policy thinking that returns serious, non-hyped discussions of security issues to the public eye.

The challenges we face — Afghanistan, Pakistan, energy, to name just three — have no magic solutions and will be with us for years to come. Yet there's also a need for clear-sighted, unadorned talk about why we make the choices we do and what kind of nation we want to be. That is a debate that is much less technical, but no less important, than the details of our policy in Pakistan's borderlands or how many gallons of alternative fuels we can produce by 2015. Everybody, however much or little time their lives give them to think about national security, can join a debate about what kind of country we want to be.

Read more at www.nsnetwork.org.

I can't stop giggling about this comment from Sen. Mitch McConnell (DailyKos):

"It's pretty clear to me that the Democratic agenda is to turn us into France," the Kentucky Republican told The Washington Times in an unusually blunt interview at his office in the Capitol. "Americans may want change, but the question is, what kind of change?"

Well, let's see. France's healthcare system has been rated the best in the world (the U.S. ranked 37th). They have the 11th-highest life expectancy (the U.S. is 45th) and the 6th-lowest infant mortality rate (the U.S. is 43rd). French employees get 5 guaranteed weeks of vacation every year. (In the U.S., that number is zero.) And yet, despite having all that vacation and the burden of "socialized medicine" and only one-fifth the population of the U.S., France is the world's 6th-largest economy.

So, yeah, Democrats want to make the U.S. more like France. It wouldn't exactly be a bad thing.

So once you've finished the reading list of anti-conservative books, you can get started on these:

• Why We're Liberals: A Political Handbook for Post-Bush America, Eric Alterman
• The Conscience of a Liberal, Paul Krugman
• Reason: Why Liberals Will Win the Battle for America, Robert Reich
• Being Right Is Not Enough: What Progressives Must Learn from Conservative Success, Paul Waldman
• Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision, George Lakoff
• Framing the Debate: Famous Presidential Speeches and How Progressives Can Use Them to Change the Conversation, Jeffrey Feldman

Paul Waldman:

When Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama had their recent squabble over Ronald Reagan – Obama noting that Reagan successfully altered the country's political trajectory, Clinton focusing attention on the disastrous effects of Reagan's policies – neither one mentioned one of the most important pieces of Reagan's legacy: the impact he had on conservatism and liberalism as ideologies and movements. But the question of where each of these candidates might leave the country ideologically could ultimately be the most lasting determinant of the success of the next Democratic presidency. Unfortunately, neither Clinton nor Obama has addressed the question directly. But there are hints in both campaigns about where they might take their own followers, and where political activists on both sides will be eight years from now.

This is in some ways a more important question than the "theory of change" argument that Clinton, Obama, and John Edwards had for many months. It isn't just about how you move legislation or what kinds of coalitions you build, but about the ideological flavor your presidency carries, and what kind of shape your party and your movement is in once you're done.

From one of my favorite authors, Steven Pinker, writing in the New York Times Magazine:

When anthropologists like Richard Shweder and Alan Fiske survey moral concerns across the globe, they find that a few themes keep popping up from amid the diversity. People everywhere, at least in some circumstances and with certain other folks in mind, think it's bad to harm others and good to help them. They have a sense of fairness: that one should reciprocate favors, reward benefactors and punish cheaters. They value loyalty to a group, sharing and solidarity among its members and conformity to its norms. They believe that it is right to defer to legitimate authorities and to respect people with high status. And they exalt purity, cleanliness and sanctity while loathing defilement, contamination and carnality.

The exact number of themes depends on whether you're a lumper or a splitter, but Haidt counts five — harm, fairness, community (or group loyalty), authority and purity — and suggests that they are the primary colors of our moral sense. Not only do they keep reappearing in cross-cultural surveys, but each one tugs on the moral intuitions of people in our own culture. [...]

All this brings us to a theory of how the moral sense can be universal and variable at the same time.

Read the rest of this entry...

Paul Krugman in Slate:

[A] word about terms — specifically, liberal vs. progressive. Everyone seems to have their own definitions; mine involves the distinction between values and action. If you think every American should be guaranteed health insurance, you're a liberal; if you're trying to make universal health care happen, you're a progressive.

And here's the thing: Progressives have an opportunity, because American public opinion has become a lot more liberal. [...]

But any attempt to change America's direction, to implement a real progressive agenda, will necessarily be highly polarizing. Proposals for universal health care, in particular, are sure to face a firestorm of partisan opposition. And fundamental change can't be accomplished by a politician who shuns partisanship.

I like to remind people who long for bipartisanship that FDR's drive to create Social Security was as divisive as Bush's attempt to dismantle it. And we got Social Security because FDR wasn't afraid of division. In his great Madison Square Garden speech, he declared of the forces of "organized money": "Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me — and I welcome their hatred."

The Center for American Progress has created four new ads that explain the progressive movement and what progressives stand for (see all four ads at thinkprogress.org).

In particular, the first two ads are very good and essentially follow Paul Waldman's advice to create a "progressive master narrative":

The conservative master narrative tells a story that begins in the 1960s, but this progressive master narrative crosses the scope of American history, seeing it as a continuous progression to realize the noble ideas on which the country was founded. It posits government as a force that, when it works properly, creates justice, security, and opportunity. The abolishment of slavery, the enfranchisement of women, the G.I. Bill, the creation of Social Security and Medicare, and the civil rights and environmental movements are all events driven by progressives that fit within this narrative.

Given these ads and Kos's recent comment in Newsweek that "Democrats believe government can be a resource for promoting the common good," I think Democrats and progressives are finally getting their act together and figuring out a coherent way to explain what we believe.

Kos of Daily Kos is now a regular contributor to Newsweek. His most recent column argues that Democrats will do fine in 2008 as long as we draw a clear contrast between what we believe and what Republicans believe:

Democrats [...] believe government can be a resource for promoting the common good and thus are invested from the beginning in governing competently, efficiently and fairly. Their ideology demands it. And what better way for Democratic candidates to illustrate this contrast than by running against the Republican trifecta — the White House, Congress and the Supreme Court — that governed throughout most of Bush's eight years in office?

Democrats should and will use Bush and his destructive policies on the campaign trail as the primary example of what happens when people who hate government are elected to run it. The message will be that Bush isn't a historical anomaly: he's the embodiment of modern conservatism.

If Americans want willfully ineffective government, they'll have a Republican Party desperate for their votes. But with 70 percent of the American people thinking the nation is on the wrong track, it's clear they expect the opposite. As long as Democrats make that contrast clear — and Bush's record will be integral to that argument — they should be headed for victory in 2008.