Ah, well, one can hope, with a title like that. You folks know me well enough to know that I am a very committed Obama supporter. Being such, it means I get baseballs of offensive rhetoric thrown at me from Right and Left-Field. The ones from Left-Field surprise me the most.
The first link on my blogroll, Watchblog, is my original blog, the one where I started out. I've written with and in response to Republicans, Independents, and Democrats. The commenting is open to all sides, so I tend to get it from all sides... well, the right mostly.
So, when I start getting hit by the same style of rhetoric I see coming from the Right, I get concerned, because I really see the rhetoric from the right as a symptom of a greater problem in today's politics.
That problem, as I see it, is a calcification of perspectives. Today's media is very good at targeting people, today's parties very good at dividing people, parsing the different interest groups down into rigid factions, which then attack each other with ferocious disregard for each other's dignity, legitimacy, and good character.
But how the hell do you back down from that? How do you ask for the help of those you just called the scum of the world? The trend of such politics is always going to be, eventually, isolation and disempowerment. Additionally, if you so devote yourself to that cause that you will listen to nobody else, and listen without critical thought to those within that group, then you become very vulnerable to being manipulated by those within your group.
Look at the Republicans, at the mindless conformity, at the pointless, fierce, and often senseless conflicts. Understand, that could be us. Hell, that could be the whole nation, sooner or later.
I can understand if some of you are skeptical of what I am talking about, what I am asking. By my nature, I am a fierce partisan for whatever I believe in. But I'm also an equally fierce second guesser of my own ideas, my own assumptions. And one thing I do find myself considering, often enough, are the shortcomings and disappointments of the Obama Administration.
As a defender of Obama, as a guy who still finds him an impressive and effective leader, as far as history goes, I will not be the first to voice such doubts. I will weigh what I think he's going wrong on, with what's going right. I will make allowances for what I think the external, environmental problems in Washington are, rather than flatly grade his performance as an island separate from the shores of the Village's Melieu.
And if somebody just crudely comes out and bashes Obama, or says something about him I know is false, I will jump to defend him. I will not pretend that I am not one of his loyalists.
But also, and take heed here, I will not readily accept somebody smacking me down with an ad hominem argument because I do so. Why? Because I think of my position as a reasonable one to take, one I can explain and justify. Thinking such, a person who tries to marginalize me or vilify me on that count won't get far with me, will in fact provoke hostility from me.
Ah, but you might be thinking, my response is so fierce because the TRUTH hurts, right? Well, think back to what happens when somebody says something you feel is blatantly false, unfair, or defamatory. Was it the the truth that hurt you then, or the thought that somebody was attacking you on what you considered unfair, spurious, or even false ground?
And really, if somebody's practically making me out to be a Satanic cultist, I really am not going to take that sitting down. I have my pride. I have my reputation to protect. If somebody maligns me, that hurts, and I will hurt back.
Or, at least, that will be the first impulse.
So where was I? That's right, I'm talking about the increasing narrowing of American political perspective, right?
Well, here's the thing: political propaganda and theatre is easy, and relatively low risk in the short term compared to actually sticking your neck out on policies and changing things. So, in this media age, where the bleed-it-leads covers mainly the controversies, and rarely the resolutions, it's the loudmouths, the radicals, and the truly obnoxious who grab the spotlight. When they market those judge shows, they don't find reasonable, level-headed judges. They go for the personalities, the tough guys and gals who dispense tough love or upbraid defendants and plantiffs lacking in sense. Failing that, they get sensationalist cases.
Politicians take advantage of this all too often to divide and carve out both supporters for themselves, and supporters from others. Sometimes it doesn't even matter if they alienate most of the voters in a scorched earth approach, just so long as theirs is the candidacy that wins.
Ah, but then what?
Whatever the media theorists, the pundits, or the political consultants think, at the end of the day, the strongest politics depends on persuading the greatest numbers of people. Now, if you're the default choice, well maybe you can afford to just appeal to the choir. But what if you're not? Then your task is to appeal to as many people who are not squarely and firmly in your camp as possible.
In my opinion, we're in that position. The defaults of today's environment favor the Republicans and their policies. It doesn't matter that they are failures, it matters that people consider them the ground state from which deviation brings uncertainty. Even after our momentous wins, the fact the Republicans could come back by playing on the old red-baiting, race-baiting, bible-thumping deficit hawkery shows that at the very least, our wins in the political forum are not fore-ordained.
In short, we will have a fight on our hands with virtually anything we want to get done. If we fool ourselves into believing that 2006 and 2008's results meant that the revolution had come, and that we were in like Flynn with the American people, 2010 should be our wake-up call. We can convince people to put us in charge, and we shouldn't knock that, but getting people to agree will not be a job for those who simply want to kick back and make fun of Tea Partiers.
I went through the trouble of parsing out how I would respond to somebody coming after me with vilification and hostility to make a point about political arguments: When you put somebody on the defensive, their first thought will not be to agree with you, even if they think you're right, even if they know they're wrong. When you call me an Obamabot, I have to work past my offense at being so named before I will consider your ideas. That is, if I ever make it to considering your ideas in the first place. Whatever you think of the righteousness of joining your cause, joining your side, it's my choice, and my attitudes that will make the difference in whether I make common cause with you.
I know some will say "I'm not talking politics to persuade anybody." Well, alright. But if that's the case, you should be happy to express that point of view, and then not debate. The moment you debate somebody, the moment you engage somebody else with the point of forcing a concession, you are talking politics to persuade somebody. Once that becomes the case, you'll have to deal with the free will others have to laugh in your face at your demand that they concede a point to you.
You, sir or madam, are powerless to force agreement.
A while back, somebody presented a video of I think Slinkerwink basically saying, outright, on the nose, that one healthcare deal or another wasn't good. And I thought, watching that, what difference does it make to the message? It was her same old message, in a youtube ballroom gown. Points for sophistication, but still unconvinced.
Shower the insults, insist until you're blue in the face that they're wrong, call them names and make snide implications about them, and are you any closer to winning? No. It just confuses fighting, and the expending of passionate willpower for progress. You might not have lost the struggle, but the purpose it's aimed towards still eludes you.
We have goals beyond the shape of our rhetoric, beyond simply staying in the fights between us and the Republicans, between each of us, and our opposite factions among the Liberals and Progressives of our party. The FDLers can fight the DLCers, the Third Way folk can strive to prove their Kung Fu is greater than that of the Obamaites, and the Obamaites can fling themselves at the lines of the PUMAs, but if none of them gains enough converts, enough supporters, all the dreams of getting their way are in vain.
Democracy, and Democratic Republics like ours work from majorities, in the voting booth, and in Congress. We can convince ourselves that the fight is elsewhere, but the final fights we must wage to get our way in today's politics must take place there, and all we do out beyond must resound and reverberate there.
The question is not how to shout down the opposition, but how to bring new supporters to causes. We can't merely fight defensive actions to protect what's left of the unions. We have to revive the interest in and the sympathy towards the unions. We can't merely fight another rearguard action against the purveyors of austerity. We have to convince people anew that government can be a positive force in the economy.
If we want healthcare reform to continue, to expand, we have to change the conversation about healthcare away from the obsessive red-baiting the conservatives always inflict. If you want a single payer system, or something close to it, you have a bunch of people to convince.
If you want the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to end, and the mistakes that lead to their interminability and their horrors not to be repeated, you have to deal with not only the conservatives that call us traitors, but the mindset that makes it so easy for Republicans to be taken seriously when they talk like that, rather than get laughed out of the room.
We have to change minds. We have to change people's feelings about things. It's about more than throwing facts at people. It's about planting within them the seeds of knowledge and the sprouts of persuasion that are necessary to get them motivated to agree with us. We can only start them in a direction. After that, their thoughts and attitudes must take over, and do so in such a way that it reinforces the new attitudes.
I tell you what: too many people on this site simply hope to browbeat their opposite number. Too many hope to shame or harangue their opposition into compliance. They don't check their facts like they should, they accuse those who disagree of loving clearly hateful policies to all concerned. Somebody even told me that I secretly held a desire to vote for Sarah Palin, once Obama was out of office.
Think he convinced me, with that kind of talk?
My thinking runs along these lines: people's views are composites of many different attitudes. They don't merely think in monolithic terms. A liberal can love guns, be big on the Second Amendment. A Conservative can be in favor of Gay Marriage. A Green or former Green Party supporter can be big on border security.
I think in any given encounter, we should be looking for such opportunities to draw people to our line of thinking, carefully encouraging a sense of common ground on an issue. If you don't think this can be an effective threat, ask yourself Why the Right fears Obama's attempts at creating compromises, why Mitch McConnell and John Boehner went to such lengths to vilify and marginalize him. It wasn't necessarily because he was as liberal as they claimed. No, they knew that if they left things to themselves, Obama would get many conservatives and independents to his side at their expense. They fearmongered to wedge people away from him, before he cemented his alliances with those people.
If that is what they fear, the quiet, subtle undercurrent of agreement between people the Republicans want to keep as their own and the Democrats, then I suggest we do our best to bring about the result they fear.
This is not about bringing back the Democrats as they were in the past, but rather organizing a new, more liberal future, changing the balance of America's political leanings. We need to redefine what is centrist, what is politically normal, what the defaults are, and we can't simply count on belligerent rhetoric to do that.
We certainly can't count on creating majorities from a party that's doing its best to tear itself apart. We have to have the maturity to bridge our differences, to come to the aid of our common cause. We will not always agree, and there will be pies thrown back and forth from time to time, but if we stick together where it counts, if we recognize where our common interests lay, we can upend what has been the settled order of Washington.