Vol. 5 No. 7 (November 2006)
The Newsletter of the Commonweal Institute
http://www.commonwealinstitute
“Think of anything, of cowboys, of movies, of detective stories, of anybody who
goes anywhere or stays at home and is an American and you will realize that it
is something strictly American to conceive a space that is filled with moving.”
CONTENTS
Talking Points I: Consolidate, consolidate,
consolidate
Talking Points II: “Framing a Progressive
Agenda: What’s Missing”
Wit and Wisdom: Comics on the 2008 election
Check It Out: The Iraq War on YouTube
Featured Article: “How People See Themselves”
Endorsements: Nancy Pelosi
Get Involved: Spread the word; become a
contributor
The day
after the 2006 midterm elections, the basic conservative interpretive frame
emerged. A veritable chorus of commentators on the right rose up to
declare that the results represented not a defeat for conservatism but rather
for a Republican party that had abandoned its conservative principles.
The election was less an ideological victory for Democrats, progressives, or
liberals, we were told, than it was a sharp correction administered to the
incompetents and big spenders who had disappointed their conservative constituents.
On
November 8, Rush Limbaugh told his radio listeners that “Republicans lost last
night, but conservatism did not.” The next day, George Will wrote in the Washington
Post that incumbents were “punished not for pursuing but for forgetting
conservatism” and, citing the success of several anti-gay-marriage ballot
initiatives, argued that “on various important fronts, conservatism continued
its advance.” Jonah Goldberg, also on November 9, wrote in the Los
Angeles Times that “the GOP’s drubbing had more to do with competence and
scandal than program and ideology.” Right in step, Charles Krauthammer,
in the November 10 edition of the Washington Post, called the election
“only a minor earthquake” ideologically.
There’s
clearly a lot of spinning taking place in such assessments, and we might be
tempted to dismiss them as just wishful thinking. Yet the American
electorate remains remarkably centrist and, after 30 years of steady
conservative messaging, even tilts rightward on a wide range of issues and
values. So while the election results do represent a big move forward for
progressives, there’s a risk in over-interpreting them as some kind of embrace
of progressive ideas. Rather than an ideological realignment, we would do
better to see the new political landscape as an operational realignment
that provides progressives with certain immediate and certain long-term
opportunities for influencing mainstream American thought. Failing to
take advantage of these opportunities would be unfortunate indeed.
Having
helped clean out the Augean stables of Congress (and quite a few state
governments), progressives have secured a beach-head – but just a
beach-head. The crucial task now will be to consolidate and reinforce this
position rather than to advance immediately. Recent history suggests the
perils of overreach. Remember the early months of President Clinton’s
tenure, which were needlessly distorted by a sideshow fight over gays in the
military and by misguided nominations for Attorney General. The centrist
This will
involve careful strategic planning about how best to extend their geographical
and philosophical influence in the American political mainstream. That
planning should follow the idea of building slowly and surely, not abandoning
principle but taking the cautious steps needed to advance principles from a
position of strength and stability. It will also require continued investment
in progressive infrastructure, without which all our short-term gains could
remain just that: short-term.
This
strategy of consolidation should start with delivering practical achievements
to the American people in the areas the citizenry has identified as important:
ethical responsibility in government, a restoration of checks and balances, an
increase in the minimum wage, increased attention to domestic security.
Such a strategy should also, however, recognize that there are in fact
ideological dimensions to these achievements. For these accomplishments
are not simply technical bureaucratic measures but reflect a very conscious
philosophy of governance, one rooted in the essential American traditions of
pragmatism and fairness. In particular, the dramatic success of economic
populists and of land conservation ballot initiatives points the way toward how
progressives can occupy the center and – more importantly – begin moving the
center leftward again. But this is a long, slow process, and it will
involve years of careful framing, of progressive narrative development (see
next story), and of institutional coordination. In the meantime, the
visible adjustments to national policy should be incremental and popular, not
radical and divisive.
We should
make no mistake: The conservative communications and attack machine – horribly
animate in such media ghouls as Laura Ingraham, Rush
Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and Sean Hannity – is very
much alive, very much determined to demonize its opponents and plow salt into
the fields of progressive ideas. And the conservative infrastructure of funders and think tanks is still out there, still operating
through the night, still seeking to frame the debates and lay the groundwork
for future success. But for now they are weakened, and the time is upon
us to marginalize those forces by seizing the center and staying positive,
proactive, and responsible. Consolidate, consolidate, consolidate.
— Ian Finseth, Senior Writer
At time when news of climate change, human rights
abuses, the UN's Millennium Ecological Assessment,
and the dire state of the half of the world’s population that lives on less
than $2 a day should be bringing new adherents, Progressives seem to be losing
influence around the world. The work of many of us demonstrates that appealing
alternatives exist to the destructive practices of the last century. Yet
despite our efforts these lessons remain isolated and largely ignored. We must
and we can do better.
The following discussion integrates the work of
Professor George Lakoff, Senator Bill Bradley, David Korton and others. Each has put forth, in my view, a part
of what is missing that would enable us to solve the puzzle stated above, but
each alone is insufficient. Together they may provide the basis for laying out
a Progressive strategy.
Lakoff points out that
those who would maintain the status quo have spent the last 25 years investing
heavily in leadership training, in professionally crafted attacks on
Progressive policies, and in skillfully communicating their agenda. Senator
Bill Bradley has observed that Conservatives have built a solid pyramid to
support their world-view. When the Goldwater Republicans lost in 1964, they
didn't try to become Democrats. They figured out how to make their own ideas
more appealing to the public, undertaking a sweeping, coordinated and long-term
effort to spread Conservative ideas on college campuses, in academic journals
and in the news media. Korton argues, however, that
until Progressives plausibly address the concerns of ordinary Americans, in
ways that have an intuitive ring of truth, no amount of institutional revision
will enable Progressives to recapture the popular imagination.
There is little doubt that investments by radical
Conservatives have put them in a position to control the agenda. In his New
York Times article, “A Party Inverted” (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03
In contrast, says Bradley, Progressives run for
office, lacking a coherent, larger structure on which they can rely. They must
design each campaign anew, assembling a campaign apparatus as they seek to
formulate ideas and a vision. Many donors sign up to support a Progressive
campaign only after assessing whether the candidate has assembled his or her
political, media and idea people. But at the intensity of a campaign is the
worst environment in which to try to do this. There is no time for patient,
thoughtful development of new ideas, no time to comb the Progressive
organizations for solutions that may be successful in one location, but unknown
more broadly. Winning in the press takes precedence over building a consistent
message. The closest that Progressives get to a creating an authentic brand,
Bradley notes, are catchy slogans.
If Progressives are serious about change, they
should learn from the Conservative success, and create an equivalent structure.
The work of the laureates of the Right Livelihood Foundation is a good start,
but to take this work to scale will require replicating the other aspects of
the Conservatives edifice. This it won't come cheap. But it is the only
alternative to remaining small and divided. Getting Progressive ideas accepted
by the general public will require that we learn to communicate, to work
together and to produce a consistent, and well-framed
vision of a world that works for all life, not just for the wealthy
constituents of the status quo.
Just replicating the architecture of the Right is
insufficient. David Korton, author of When
Corporations Rule the World and other books, observes that the
Conservatives have captured the public's imagination with plausible stories
about how to achieve the three things that people want: prosperity, security
and meaning.
Conservatives have carefully crafted and framed
their agenda as an assertion that the wealthy and the corporations are the
engines of prosperity. If they are given access to the money (tax-cuts, etc)
they will invest it wisely, build new businesses, create jobs, etc, to increase
the prosperity of everyone. The poor, conversely, are poor, the claim goes, in
part because it is God's sign that they are not worthy (the fact that the rich
are successful, is similarly seen as a sign that they have been blessed). In
addition, the story goes, the poor don’t manage money well – they are poor.
Better to give the resources of society to the wealthy who have demonstrated their
capacity to invest it wisely to enhance the economy for us all.
Government programs that give more money of any sort to the poor (support
programs, safety-nets, welfare, etc) are seen as an inefficient way to create
greater prosperity because "everyone knows" that the poor do not use
money wisely, and that spending resources on them will not increase jobs or
economic activity.
Rather than confronting these assertions with
intuitive, internally consistent, but alternative stories about how society can
achieve greater prosperity, Progressives reiterate tired litanies about the
need to give more tax money to the poor. This is, simply put, non-responsive to
the story that the Conservatives have successfully delivered to the general
public. Merely attacking the Conservatives and saying why their schemes won’t
work, while perhaps statistically true, is insufficient. The Conservatives have
given the public a plausible way to achieve what they want. Until we do the
same, we are simply not in the game. The majority of the public will stay with
the side that set the agenda. Progressives will continue to be seen as whiners
who attack, but can’t put forth a competing agenda
On security, the Conservatives have persuaded the
public that military might and a Rambo-like stance will increase your personal
security. Aggressive policies to neutralize terrorists, the use of color-coded
alerts, erosion of civil liberties and preemptive wars are the way to get tough
with the world's threats.
Many Progressives have programs that will do a far
better job of achieving real security, but the Progressive movement rarely says
more than “peace is better than war.” To counter the belief that massive
militaries are the answer, it is incumbent on us to put forth a coherent theory
of how individuals, communities and whole societies can achieve greater
security, for themselves, their families and for the world.
On meaning, the neo-cons promote Christian
fundamentalist theology. An American President who personally speaks to God is
preferable to one who wrestles with moral ambiguities.
The Progressive response is to repeat its
doctrinaire insistence on the separation of Church and State. Many Progressives
speak meaningfully to what it means to be human, to what spirituality is. We
understand that this critical inner work must be integrated with the more
technical answers. But we have not communicated this understanding outside of
our limited community. Perhaps most important, Progressives generally lack the
sort of emotional intelligence that will enable our work to appeal to people's
desire to connect at the human level. Many liberal candidates are inaccessible
technocrats. People want to vote for someone with whom they can connect, someone that they admire, like and to whom they can
feel connected.
Korton argues that until
the Progressives can tell competing stories that describe how to achieve what
people want most, we will be rendered irrelevant by the more artfully crafted,
and massively funded, Conservative message. Much of the Conservatives’ story
can be de-legitimized, but until we have a better story, we're in trouble. Our
job now is to get much better at crafting these stories, framing them and
telling them.
— L. Hunter Lovins, J.D., Natural Capitalism Solutions, Inc.
www.natcapsolutions.org
“In 2008, Rudy Giuliani, former mayor of
“Yesterday, Democrat Russ Feingold announced he has
decided not to run for president in 2008, which finally answers the question no
one asked.” — Conan O’Brien
“There’s a rumor Dick Cheney may run for president
in 2008. If he wins, that would make him the first three-term president since
Franklin Roosevelt.” — Jay Leno
“According to a new poll, Democrats are favoring
Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nominee for 2008. Democrats say
they are looking for a fresh and exciting new way to get their asses handed to
them.” — Tina Fey
If you
want to get a better sense of why the global image of Americans has descended
to such abysmal levels, you might want to check out some of the footage from
Particularly troubling are some of the comments and exchanges in the forum
section that accompanies each video. At the bottom of the barrel are
mindless rants like the following, from “Linz9021,” posted in response to a
video submitted by “armorguy”: “just gois to show ppl u mess with
While the
debate rages between the cretins and the troglodytes on each side, there is
much reason to believe that a sane center still exists. It is this center
– regarding the
The
images from
The following is an excerpt from Hubert Burda’s “How People See Themselves,” which appears
in the current issue of Edge: The Third Culture.
“In today's media society, in which hundreds of
different media compete for the attention of viewers, readers and listeners, a
great deal of importance is attached to presenting oneself. Those who know how
to present themselves get noticed, and a whole raft of
consultants from different horizons make sure that their protégés are presented
as effectively as possible. The opportunities of personal representation and
self-presentation have become democratised to an
extent that would have been unimaginable many years ago. Nowadays anyone who
wants to draw attention to themselves and communicate
to the public an image of themselves can to all intents and purposes do so.
“As a publisher in a media company with a global
presence, who is confronted on a daily basis with a plethora of images of people
portraying themselves to the media, but who has remained in close touch with
his field of study — art history – I naturally am always interested in the
history of such phenomena. I should therefore like to take a look back at the
early stages of modern portrait art and follow its development from then until
now from the following perspective: what does the self-presentation of the
people being portrayed say about the image that they have of themselves and
that they want to convey to a specific community?”
Read the whole article at http://www.edge.org/3rd
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