I hate this sort of crap, I really do. Slinkerwink, a longtime Kossack and somebody I've long had my disagreements with denounced a Glenn Greenwald tweet that equated the assassination of our president by folks from Libya or Pakistan with our killing of Osama bin Laden. Because she did this, a number of people who long agreed with here, long supported her suddenly turned on her, including one guy who got a rec list diary out of his defense of Greenwald.
I've made my opinion on the matter plain, so I won't belabor that here. What I wish to address is this kind of pernicious attack, this kind of politics that thinks in such absolutes that even the least bit of inhibition in terms of carrying out the political view is seen as treason to the cause, disloyalty by that person.
I saw this enough from the Republicans. I think it's a mistake we should avoid.
We envy the political unity of the Republicans, no question about it. Me and Slinkerwink had our share of arguments about this matter when it came time to deal with the passage of Healthcare Reform. She believed that passing the very compromised Healthcare Reform Package was a bad idea, and I reasoned differently, believing that getting that foothold was important to long term policy progress.
I still think we disagree on that.
What lead to our disagreement, of course, was the sixty vote requirement we Democrats were forced to deal with in the Senate. For folks like Slinkerwink, the idea was that we should at least try to force through something, and then (If I'm not mistaken) bargain from that. For me, the question was about getting stuff through now, not letting the Republicans have their victory, even if the policy was somewhat disappointing.
I think we still differ on our approach.
What we didn't disagree with, this time around, was that Glenn Greenwald did something foolish and outrageous by saying that killing Bin Laden could morally or legally equate to somebody coming from Pakistan or Libya to kill our President.
For disagreeing with that equivalency, for finding the comment excessive and unconscionable, Slinkerwink was written off by far too many of those who called her friend and ally before, and that shocked me.
The reply to this, I guess, is that it's necessary that we keep up a common front in the face of the Republicans and all the evil they have done, all the wrong they can do in the economy and in foreign policy. Those folks want us to keep a united front on this count. I can understand the need for unity, but what I would critique her is the way people went about it.
I suppose the thinking goes if we treat folks who break from what we perceive as the core with such disdain, if we write them off, it will relate to other people the fact that they should remain in unison, not indulge the doubts that would lead them astray.
Some would point to what the Republicans did, and say that they have succeeded. To be honest, they've had some successes. But I would argue here that they are paying a terrible cost for this forced unity of theirs, this lockstep operation.
By necessity, any political party that seeks to win by a majority in any political division of this country, whether it be local, state, or federal government must assemble a coalition of voters, because even in the strongest of ideological bastions, there are differences and factions among the leaders. Purposefully setting aside your differences to win elections is nothing new. But it creates a certain level of tension that has to be satisfied. Only in a dreamworld can we fantasize about folks not wanting their concerns to be ultimately addressed.
My theory about the Republican Party is that they've ignored the costs of this enforced unity for far too long, so a lot of the differences within the party, a lot of the artificial unity has come back to haunt them.
And so have the methods they've used to enforce it.
The Tea Party is nothing less than the divisive tendencies of the Republican Party run amok, the insistence that only Republicans can govern righteous, and only true-blue conservatives at that, taken to such an absurd degree that even most true-blue conservatives cannot survive.
The Party has purged many of its moderates, yet still has need of those moderates to win centrist voters, so you see the bizarre spectacle of Blue State Moderates like Tim Pawlenty and Mitt Romney being the front-runners because of their palatability to the centrist masses, yet having to kowtow to Tea Partiers with uncharacteristically hardline views in order to remain contenders.
Sooner or later, with a situation like that, something has to give.
And to a certain extent, it already has.
Put under these pressures earlier, the Republican Congress self-destructed. They tried to push their vision for the economy, for the energy industry, for the war in Iraq too far, and it broke the average American's patience with them. Then in 2008, it was their insistence on the fundamentals of the economy, and their extremely divisive rhetoric that did them in. With few people in the party left to dissent to things like making Sarah Palin their Vice Presidential candidate, they simply plowed cluelessly on, mystified by the outrage and the laughs their new hotness was drumming up
You may argue it succeeded in 2010, but I'd tell you that there again, they succeeded at the cost of becoming a more narrow and self-involved party. That, I think, is going to pay dividends for us Democrats later on.
Truth of the matter is, it is not always bad to be moderated. Not all compromises we make for time, place and manner of our speech fundamentally compromise what we're trying to say. In fact, if we're considering the audience as we communicate, chosing our words well and wisely can increase the likelihood that we will convince people of things.
The Republicans are all id nowadays, all impulse, and little impulse control. They're constantly reacting, even walking back and flip-flopping on their own stated beliefs to do it. Their inconsistency is telling, and probably to many people offensive. Democrats may have an excess of caution sometimes, an excess of restraint on pushing our agenda, but caution and restraint, in moderation, can protect us not just from making certain errors, but from continuing to make them because we've silenced all voices from within and without who question our own behavior.
We may not always like it, agree with it, or abstain from arguing with it when it confronts us, but the very process, and our observation of that process lets us consider the world through eyes other than our own, and by that consideration we are able to at least answer objections and differences of opinion, if not always conceded to them.
We can change and adapt our thinking, as Democrats, in a way that Republicans cannot, having crippled their own engines of dissent and civil disagreement.
We can also recognize something else, something very important: that sometimes the differences between us are more nuances, more subtle alterations of beliefs than genuine divisions. If we can recognize that we have common ground, and that our differences do not amount to a destruction of that ground, then we can join together when we have to to support and oppose things together that we do agree on.
When we adopt an us vs. them mentality, the results will tend towards a shedding of allies, as differences, big and small, prevent further cooperation. As we demonize and separate each other on these grounds, we tear apart the voting blocs that allow us to act together to promote our policies, and defend against the policies of the other side.
The rules of the game in a Democracy say that those who divide their majority in the face of an opposition lose it, even if the opposition is just a plurality afterwards. A recent election in Hawaii, where two Democratic candidates fought for a seat with a Republican, and both lost to him despite having a total of sixty percent of the vote together, is a vivid illustration of this.
But as I have said, unity can be difficult. So let's be blunt here: forcing unity has its costs, and losing it has it's costs, too, and ironically trying the first is one of the easier ways to guarantee the second.
So what's left? Unity and collaboration as conscious, negotiated, deliberate acts. Rather than simply joining together out of reaction, or because pundits and politicians strongarm us into it, we deal with each other respectfully, as adults, and try to work out these differences. I know it's not always easy, I know I've failed at it, but sometimes we have to fail to understand what's right and wrong.
We have to be forgiving to a certain degree, because we'll always have histories of disagreements. But if we love liberal and progressive politics, if we believe in our causes, then I think we'll make these efforts, because the alternative is provably worse. The Republicans, for all their troubles, have not yet conceded the fight, and they no longer have the moderation that once protected Americans from the hardest of their hardline policies. So we need to take back power from them.
At the same time, we need to keep that power, and I don't think that happens until we have a more adult way of figuring out what we're going to do with that power as a party.