Why I'm Not Troubled by My Decision Not to Vote to Re-Elect Obama

[Cross-posted to Political Context]

About three weeks ago Conor Friedersdorf, a libertarianish blogger for The Atlantic, put up a post about how even those who support most of President Obama's policies, even those who see him as a much better choice for president than Mitt Romney, should refuse to vote for him. His reasons were pretty simple and straightforward: that Obama, through his toleration of (and participation in!) the expansion of extra-constitutional executive powers, through the murderous drone war which he has promoted over the skies of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and through his willingness to fight terrorism through such explicit means as targeted assassination of targets (not excluding American citizens), ought to be beyond the pale for liberal and left-leaning voters. His actions, in short, are "dealbreakers."

Friedersdorf's post generated a storm of controversy. There were plenty of accusations that his version of the Obama administration's actions were tendentious and misleading, and that his construction of "dealbreakers" when deciding who or what is worthy of a vote was highly simplistic; he acknowledged the point of some of these criticisms, and hedged his position (slightly) in a couple of subsequent posts. But if his aim was to get presumed Obama supporters to argue about whether his (in some ways disappointing, in a few ways arguably appalling) record legitimated their voting for someone else or else not voting at all, he succeeded. One of my favorite political blogs, Lawyers, Guns, and Money (though guys, a quick note: if you were getting a new masthead, couldn't you have at least made use of a proper serial comma?), went ballistic, putting up post after post after post after post after post after post denouncing Friedersdorf's position, sometimes taking on other, perhaps less partisanly united leftish blogs like Crooked Timber along the way. It was a busy week, to say the least.

I'm not going to vote to re-elect President Obama. I hope he wins the election, because if he doesn't that will mean Mitt Romney will be president, and I like and agree with more of what Obama is likely to try to do in his second term than I do with what a President Romney would likely do with his first. But right now I just don't feel any personal inclination to support him with my vote, and I'm not troubled by that in the least. I laid out some of my reasons for this decision five months ago, and my thoughts haven't changed much since then. But because I promised David Watkins, one of the LGM bloggers, that I'd reply to at least some of their furious assault on the leftists-not-supporting-Obama camp, let me see if I can restate some of my thoughts differently. I'll start with David's central contention, in my (and many others') favorite post in the whole LGM blizzard, and see where that leads.

David wrote:

The moral purpose of democracy is not to keep my hands clean and feel good about myself, no matter how much politicians and other demagogues claim otherwise. The moral purpose of democracy is the reduction of abusive power in the world....If he is “beyond the pale” for the purposes of whatever endorsement you believe a vote implies, so to is pretty much all of American politics at the federal level. Identifying yourself as “better” than the American federal state in some important moral way is just fine; you probably are. So am I! I don’t kill people, either. But to move from that banal observation to abdicating the duty to use the primary tool we’ve got to constrain its abusive power is to badly miss democracy’s point.

His conclusion being, of course, that to present any singular (or cluster of) moral issue(s) as a dealbreaker which must necessitate voting outside of the politically relevant dynamics present in this presidential election--which for left-leaning voters presumably must mean either not voting for anyone for president, or voting for a third-party candidate, rather than Obama--misunderstands what democracy is about.

Two points in response. First, I disagree that the "moral purpose of democracy" can be contained within the narrow definition which David proposes. I see a number of diverse purposes to democracy, any number of which could be simultaneously described as "moral" depending on which conceptual plane (individual? civic? materialist? idealist?) one was operating upon. Personal expressive purposes have their moral content, as do collective identification purposes. To say that controlling the abusive power of the state is democracy's "primary" point is to cast politics into a utilitarian calculus (David betrays this move of his when he describes democracy as a "technology"). To employ that kind of calculus--probably slightly more people with health insurance! probably a slightly greater chance of preserving the social safety net! probably a slightly smaller likelihood of undeclared, murderous, and financially ruinous wars!--is obviously a completely defensible decision to make (I may ultimately be on Friedersdorf's "side" here, but I would never agree with him that it is somehow "immoral" to vote for Obama--but then, I don't think it's necessarily a sign of immorality to vote for Romney either), but it is nonetheless a prior decision about one's preferred moral calculus, and in no sense an obvious ethical imperative contained within the history of democracy.

Second, I would note that David makes it clear that he's talking about the presidential election; his point of reference is the "federal level," or in other words the national government. So, then, does he think that the "moral purpose" of democracy is different when you're voting for Congressional candidates, or for governors, or state legislative candidates--or, as I just suggested, local fluoridation? Perhaps he does; again, employing a legitimate utilitarian calculus, he might argue that there is a sliding scale present in how we balance concerns with abusive power versus other, less state-centered and more aesthetic, personal, or communitarian concerns. I'd in fact probably agree with his defense of such a scale; I'm much more comfortable with identitarian political decisions when I'm thinking about who I'd like on city council or what values I'd like my state to exhibit than I am with similar moves on the national level (as evidence, consider my confession that I'm a Mormon who has no interest in voting for the first member of my tribe to make it to such a prominent political level!). Nonetheless, should David admit to such a scale, then he's admitted that "democracy against domination" logic that he wants to invest the presidential election with is, at best, a contextual logic, one which operates not as a general rule, but in light of other variables, possibly objective (the office being voted upon, the level of government which that office inhabits), and possibly subjective (judgment calls about the relative benefits and harms which are presumed to be within the scope of the powers of the office or level of government in question).

All of this is relevant to a theme which (upon my reading anyway) recurs regularly throughout the above LGM posts and the long threads which followed them: the deep conviction that, in the struggle on behalf of liberal, progressive, and/or leftish causes, there are no battleground states, there are no caveats or qualifications particular to certain contexts or jurisdictions--there is only the general ideological battle, and you are either committed to it (meaning that you are, for better or worse, locked in by your own beliefs to the dominant political dynamics--the party structures, the available candidates, the campaign finance rules, etc.--which are available to this particular group of voters, which for the LGM bloggers obviously means President Obama and the Democratic party), or you're on the wrong side. There seems to me to be some deep Ralph Nader regret motivating this theme; at least a couple of the LGM bloggers, David included, cast votes for Nader in 2000, and have taken that lesson horribly to heart. Suffice to say, I've never felt that kind of guilt for my Nader votes. I knew what I knew then, believed what I believed then, and voted where I did then; if everything had been different, my votes in 1996 and 2000 probably would have been different, but it isn't, and so they aren't. To take the fact that the system allowed someone who I and many other leftists allowed--both intellectually and with our votes--to pursue policies that were stupid, immoral, and unwise for so long, and use it as an argument that somehow every vote and every democratic action, at all times and all places, needs to be weighted primarily against a particular kind of morally and ideologically constructed scheme of defense against state domination, is to completely ignore that obvious problem of aggregation, which Jacob Levy succinctly spelled out against David in a comment to his post. Very simply, you can't simultaneously affirm that every vote equals total responsibility for the ultimate results (that is, hold you nose and vote for the lesser evil, since one should imagine that every vote is the decisive, wherever you are and whatever the issue!) while also insisting that the only results which matter are those which are pertinent are those which involve what the two dominant candidates and parties end up doing or not doing (that is, forget about party or movement-building, or registering dissent, or anything else that won't in the short term have direct relevance to who wields power in which cause).

Both David and Scott Lemieux have responses to Jacob's point above, and while they both make some good points about the practical realities of nation-wide contests in today's America, with the general ineffectiveness of popular political signaling to larger parties and interest groups, they both seem to me to come down to a kind of in-group response: that their logic ultimately really only applies to "a group of like-minded about politics people," and that for voters with other sets of beliefs "the calculus is different." Scott is of the mind the democratic socialists are obviously included in his own left-liberal/progressive Democrati partisan group, but I'm not sure that's the case--again, depending on where you live, and what you're voting on. I can say, at the least, that it's not the case for a Kansas-dwelling populist/localist/Christian democrat/anarcho-socialist like myself.

So I will approach the election three weeks from today with every intention of supporting whatever Democrats I can locally and state-wide, since given the way Governor Brownback and his Koch-backed supporters have almost entirely cleansed the local Republican party of moderates, I have to support whatever practical resistance I can find. But nationally? Knowing that Romney has essentially a 100% chance of winning all six of Kansas's electoral college votes? In that case I look at Obama and the national Democratic party, and I see Bradley Manning still in jail, I see a president still dissembling when it comes to the horror of drone warfare, I see a refusal (in the face of mounting pressure) to rethink an invasive HHS mandate, I see no indication that there will be any grand social democratic economic push (just more neoliberal fine-tuning) in response to the continuing economic struggles of the poor and the lower middle class, and I don't see any interest in saying anything new about the war on drugs. Is that enough reason to not support the president? In a state where my vote won't help him do the many good things he might still be able to help make happen? When there is a candidate that represents, if not the correct response to all that I mention above, than at least a more correct response to most of them: namely Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate for president? I have to say, David, that I'm sorry, but you and your LGM colleagues just haven't changed my mind. (But please, keep fighting the good fight in Ohio--Obama needs your Democratic vote there far more than he needs my socialist vote here.)

A Christian Socialist and Red Tory, Hanging Around the Front Porch Republic

It's odd--or perhaps, given the dynamics of the blogosphere, it actually isn't, but it nonetheless seems a little odd to me. Anyway, from what I can tell most of the occasional readers of this blog are somewhat liberal in their politics, if not outright on the "left," however defined. I probably had far more viewers and commenters who agreed with me and supported Obama for president, than those who agreed with me that his support for abortion rights was a good reason to not support him. My long meandering posts on various cultural and moral conservative issues lay mostly unread, I suspect, while my equally long posts (do I write any other kind?) on progressive reforms and crises, both economic and political, seem to get passed around a lot. So I'm part of the liberal blogsophere, right? I suppose...except that I actually read and link to far more blogs and internet sources that on on the "right"--again, however defined--than those on the liberal side of things. I don't consider myself to be foremost a conservative, but I'm clearly a kind of conservative, or else I wouldn't find their arguments and ideas so fascinating, provocative, and important. I guess what it comes down to is that my many communitarian, populist, and religious sentiments almost invariably make me sound conservative, even few people would consider my voting choices (Obama? John Kerry? Ralph Nader?!?) to fit under that label. And pretentious academic intellectual that I am, I'm constantly trying to make sense of that difference between appearance and intention: trying, in short, that one can be, as the quote from Norman Mailer on the sidebar says, a Burkean by way of Marx, or that conservative sentiments need a little--or more than a little!--leftism to make them a reality, or at least give them a shot of holding onto reality in our modern liberal capitalist world.

All this is by way of saying that I took a ridiculous amount of glee from finding myself on the fairly selective blogroll of an excellent new conservative web publication, Front Porch Republic. The main minds behind this new effort to articulate and explore a "dissident" conservatism are some of the most challenging prolific voices around: Daniel Larison, Rod Dreher, and Allan Carlson (whose book on "Third Ways" was a hit when I last used it in my Christianity and Social Justice class). As contributing editors there is simply a ton a good folks involved: Patrick Deneen, Caleb Stegall, Mark Mitchell. And the blogroll puts me alongside anarchists and localists and anarchists of very degrees. From the first set of postings, it looks to be a fine and important clearing house--and discussion space--for ideas and agendas. I'm looking forward to reading what shows up there with great anticipation, and arguing with it as it does.

Will I convince anyone there of my point of view? Perhaps, but perhaps not: the last time John Schwenkler (who is also on the blogroll!) and I went back and forth over this whole idea of whether or not Red Tories and Christian socialists and left conservatives generally (all eight of us!) could ever be part of an coalition of thinkers on the right side of the blogosphere, we found ourselves hung up on a fundamental disagreement over liberty. Basically, the localist dissidents picking fights with Rush Limbaugh and the rest of the Republican establishment are still, truly, liberal: they see something essentially valuable in the basically libertarian conception of liberty (subject to the classical, Aristotelian and/or Christian notion of the individual as conditioned by their place within a larger body of meaning and membership). Whereas I think Hegel and Marx got more right than Locke; I think liberty in an individualistic sense is vitally important in an instrumental and prudential sense, but I'm not sure that it offers us much as an essential guide to morality and philosophy in the modern world. That's right, I'm a modern, and I think modernity has added something to our ability to think about justice and equality and community which most of the ancients simply lacked. So rather than turning away from it all, I want to find and defend social policies and arrangements which acknowledge the need for collective (hopefully democratic, and occasionally compulsory) action and institutions to preserve the cultural and economic infrastructure which local communities and traditions and families depend upon. What does that mean, today, in practice? I have my guesses, but of course don't necessarily know. That's why I read these conservatives: so that I can be reminded of what I don't know, and hopefully learn a few things along the way. (This is the same reason why I value my libertarian friends: so they can remind me of when I'm not taking that "instrumental and prudential" advice seriously enough.) But for now, I suspect that while our differences will be deeper than our agreements, even if our mutual sympathies will be broad.

Oh well. Front Porch Republic puts right there at the top of the page "Place. Limits. Liberty." Two out of three definitely ain't a bad start.

Ode to My--and Others'--Youth (also, Ralph Nader)

I told myself I wouldn't take such long breaks from blogging this year, and I meant it too. But here I am, three weeks away from the blog, and the usual number of half-finished posts piling up, perhaps never to see the sight of day. My main excuse, this time around at least, is the same as Tim Burke's--this April I've really been swamped, and a lot of it has been with stuff I've never seriously had to deal with before: advising, committee responsibilities, program evaluations, faculty searches, curriculum reforms, and all the rest of the business of being a full-time, tenure-track academic that eluded me while I had that "temporary" label attached to my title. I'm not complaining (well, not about most of it--though figuring out how to translate course outcomes for my education majors into all these matrixes and rubrics which the state certification boards have decided must be used is a real pain). Building up a major, shaping requirements, evaluating students: I like it all. But it does take up a lot of time. I know, I know, wah wah wah.

Aside from all this, I have managed to keep up an ongoing conversation over this past month with some other writers over matters discussed in this post of mine on William Jennings Bryan and populism, much of which has been informed by the reading I've done for my History of Kansas class, which in turn was shaped by a lot of fine recommendations I received last semester from you all. I have a couple of posts to finish regarding that conversation and issues which came up in that class, which wraps up next Tuesday; I'll try to get them up over the next couple of days. But for today, another end of the semester note, one that takes me back to my undergraduate years at Brigham Young University.

Some of you are no doubt aware that Vice President Dick Cheney will be speaking at my alma mater's graduation commencement ceremony tomorrow--not because I assume a great number of you care what happens at BYU, but because the fact that the invitation has actually given rise to protests at one of America's most politically conservative campuses, located in the heart of arguably America's most conservative county, has attracted all sorts of media coverage. To which I can only say: man, I'm jealous. See, I was a twentysomething BYU protester once: not a terribly responsible or ethical one, I can't deny (working for the university's official daily newspaper and simultaneously writing for and rabble-rousing along with its underground student-run weekly was hardly my finest moment, and my unceremonious firing from the former was pretty justified), nor an entirely unconflicted one (politics and religion are not easily separated at the ground level, especially at a church school like BYU, and so sometimes I got caught up by events and commitments that I couldn't in good conscience support), but one that got out and carried signs and collected signatures and was even arrested for civil disobedience in those fun years of 1991-1994 or thereabouts nonetheless. I've left that kind of political activism behind, for the most part, as most people do as they take on the responsibilities and complexities of adulthood and the professional world; nowadays, giving a speech at a local community organizing group is more my speed (in fact, I just gave one yesterday). I don't regret giving it up, but neither--except, admittedly, for a few really boneheaded moves on my part, such as the one mentioned above--do I regret my involvement in those causes, as much in vain as many of them were, and as much as some of my views have changed since then. (Some more reflections on my protest days here.) Direct, expressive, face-to-face political action--when it is done responsibly and respectfully, and not given over to self-righteousness and contempt--is a healthy thing, good for democratic society and good for the soul. Reading about the success that the BYU Democrats have had, and especially reading about the alternative commencement they and other malcontents have managed to organize, makes me feel happier--and older!--in regards to my undergraduate years than I have in quite a while.

Ah, yes...about that commencement. Ralph Nader, huh? Well, no, he wouldn't have been my first choice either. (Jimmy Carter, perhaps--but I doubt he's on the lecture circuit these days.) I have to admit that I think it's rather amazing (but in a good way!) that a plea for donations to Daily Kos would have been so successful, considering all the hate for Nader out there. No, I'm not going to attempt to refight the Nader wars; I said my bit and made my peace about supporting him for president in 1996 and 2000 long ago, and I've nothing to add now. Well, except for one thing.

I don't know, and doubt I'll ever know, Nader personally. Most of what is written and said about him and his interests and activities has always acknowledged streaks of arrogance and authoritarianism in his personality; for all I know, those streaks now complete dominate him, and perhaps those who say he's now just little more than an ambulance-chaser to boot are correct as well. I think he has been, more than once in his life, an important rallying point for those who seek to articulate a populist political response to the corporate and technocratic elites who dominate the democratic process and the marketplace; the fact that his response is not enough to make me wish to directly hand him executive power--especially given is lack of attention to building anything constructive in his wake--doesn't rob him of his ability to effectively harness the expressive desires of folks like myself who otherwise can't, as he put it, crash the party of what sometimes seems like an aristocracy that rules our country. Is harnessing such desires unwise when confronted by the real-world consequences--Cheney being one!--of pursuing such idealism (an idealism mixed with messianic complex, as the case may be)? In all likelihood, it often is. But I wouldn't want to live in a society without it, all the same.

And as for his speech and the alternative commencement tomorrow, well, I doubt anyone--probably including Nader himself--will think substantively about what it means for a bunch of protesters in the heart of Mormon Country to turn to the former Green Party candidate. If anyone thinks about it at all, they'll probably have their speculations short cut by observing that, in all likelihood, there weren't many others with that kind of name recognition available on that short of notice. But speculation should happen all the same--because the truth is, Nader's moral and social authoritarianism, if you want to call it that, is not a drag on his progressive commitments; on the contrary, they inform one another, and that sort of mutual informing, in which social solidarity combines with moral edicts and cultural presumptions, is the sort of thing which I think all Christian progressives, and Mormon ones in particular, really ought to be familiar with. To quote--with a few amendations and qualifications--an old post of mine defending the idea that leftism and an attendance to forms of cultural or even moral authority can go together:

What many progressives call "wingnuttery" is, I think at least in part, a concern for authority--including, most crucially, the authority of certain principles as embedded in cultural presumptions. You can't, in the minds of these and other leftists [like Nader], achieve progress solely through the legal establishment of a plurality of neutral spaces wherein one may (hopefully) achieve egalitarian improvement through the freedom of choice (though the prudential argument for the preservation of at least a little neutral space is strong). Such a focus is insufficient, as it never addresses who actually holds power over and in the midst of those spaces....What you need is an engagement with the whole culture, a popular demand for its conformity with justice as dictated by (you guessed it) absolutes, not merely the availability of free choice....This is part of the reason why Nader has never seen much importance in mobilizing people against traditional views on behalf of abortion rights or "gonadal politics." Is that "authoritarian"? Well, yes--insofar as one may speak of "working-class authoritarianism" as Christopher Lasch and others have. Or one could just call it "communitarian," in the sense of insisting that self-government rests primarily upon our attendance to communal values--which for many millions of working-class people [as Harry Brighouse and Bill Martin observed in the passages I quoted in this post] means a "culture of life"--and not simply the private space we afford citizens in the choosing of such.

The great majority of those who will attend the alternative commencement tomorrow will not be looking for working-class solidarity; they'll be going out of curiosity, out of a desire to be recognized as one of those who were less than satisfied with or indeed perhaps deeply opposed the university's decision to invite a man with Cheney's public record to speak at their graduation, maybe even out of desire to hear something important about what they did in response to Cheney's visit, and why more such direct action is the part of the way to create a healthier political culture, a culture in which the abuses of a vice president are not so easily kept from democratic exposure and accountability. I'm sure that at least they'll get the latter; whatever Nader's many faults, he clearly still knows how to sell youthful activists on a life of protest. Good of him, I say, and for them. And if maybe, just maybe, Nader or someone else says or does something to help all these twentysomething protesters like I once was see that their (and my) religious beliefs can be progressive, without unnecessarily compromising their acceptance of the culture and faith which made them....well, then they will have a truly great commencement. Certainly a much better one than Dick alone could have provided.

Joining the Party

Well, the midterm elections are upon us here in the U.S. Let's hope that, come tomorrow night, President Bush will find himself confronted with a Democratic House of Representatives, and maybe a Democratic Senate too. I'm not a Democrat, but this time around, the Democrats are a vehicle for not only providing a desperately necessary rebuke to and limitation upon the current administration, but also--and more importantly, to my mind--an opportunity for populist, socially-traditional-yet-economically-progressive, "left conservative" communitarians like myself (all eight or nine of us) to actually see some real expression of our ideas. Not as much as we'd get if the Christian Democratic Union suddenly swept into power, but hey...baby steps.

The truth is, like most Americans these days, I'm not registered with any particular political party. There was a time when this didn't bother me; I liked to style myself an "independent" who voted on the basis of issues and candidates, not the party, and I took that as a sign of political maturity. I suppose, to the extent that I connected my habits to any larger theory of politics, my motivation was vaguely republican in the classical sense: "party politics" meant professionalized politics, meaning impersonal and corrupt politics, and as one who believed that proper self-government required civic virtues like prudence and personal involvement, I figured that by refusing to support party organizations in any formal I was doing my bit to support more responsible elections. There was probably a fair amount of general religious and/or moral distaste for the power-hungry, coalition-building aspects of parties in there as well; I thought politics and political ideas were important, of course (I mean, I've studied them them whole life!), but I didn't see them as so serious as to mandate the kind of desperate, ethically compromising shenanigans that parties give rise to. So better to downplay that aspect of the political game as much as possible, I thought.

In a lot of ways, I still think that way. I'm a goo-goo at heart, concerned about voter turnout and campaign finance rules and media bias and state boundaries and a dozen other issues that have more to do with the process and effects of politics than the outcome of any given election. (See here and here and here for examples.) But I suppose there came a point where I stopped fitting the pure good-government stereotype. I never could sign on with term-limits in principle, for example; while I suppose I recognize them as a useful tool for increasing turnover and thus preventing professionalization (and hence corruption) in political office, and something that ought be able to be legitimately imposed if democratically chosen, in general I've always thought they were much too blunt an instrument: why not actually address the failures and limitations in our voting habits and options, instead of arbitrarily restricting who the people can vote for at any certain point? And there were other deviations on my part as well--as much as I've agreed with campaign reform efforts, for example, it's become clear to me that addressing the distorting power of wealth in a democracy has to begin with thinking about ways to empower all citizens, rather than merely restricting those citizens who happen to be in a position of influence. Basically, I've become a lot more democratic, a lot more populist and expressive in my political outlook over the years, and that means I've become a lot more sympathetic to parties.

Of course, to some people an "expressive" defense of parties makes no sense; a party is an organizing tool of elite interests, nothing more. Admittedly, if your understanding of democracy is a pluralist or protective one, then you probably think elections are entirely about who governs, and believe that the ideal democracy is one which channels the people's will into various groupings which are constructed so as to ensure the protection of individual rights and the larger economic and administrative structure of society. In that case, there really is no such thing as an expressive political party--but then, in that case, you're probably against all populism and expressivism in politics anyway. My understanding of democracy is a lot more beholden to participatory and developmental models; I think elections are about governing, yes, but are also--and more importantly--about creating and maintaining those assumptions and perspectives within which we recognize good government. Voting alone can't do that, of course--there are a hundred important ways in which citizens can participate in the generation of potential political worldviews. But contributing to, supporting, and voting for parties is perhaps the most time-tested and important of all those ways. (And no, I don't think that means contenting oneself with merely "strategic" options at voting time; my votes for Ralph Nader in 1996 and 2000 were not deluded attempts to disrupt the party system, but small but sincere effort to give expression to views that need to be included in it.) Hence, I've found myself becoming a party person--sometimes even complete with the buttons and funny hats. Democratic politics is about building a party through your vote and other efforts which carry and thereby refine your ideas, not waiting for the perfect vehicle which can express those which you've refined all on your own. (In short: what Todd Gitlin says.)

So fine, I'm willing to commit myself to parties. But why the Democrats? Have they moved any closer to where I wanted them to be two years ago? To some degree, actually yes, they have. The Democrats of 2006 have are in the position they are today primarily because the faults of President Bush and his administration in the handling of Iraq have become manifest to many more people, but that is not the only reason. In fact, when it comes to particular races, running against the Republican management of Iraq alone is, as Senator Lieberman's all-but-inevitable trouncing of Ned Lamont in Connecticut is making clear, far from sufficient. Down in the trenches, what you have are Democrats who have also benefited from their party leadership having spent two years thinking about all the moral and religious and cultural values arguments over the past couple of years, whether expressed in connection with abortion or immigration or outsourcing or same-sex marriage or school choice or a dozen other issues that have resonance with rural, small town, and exurban voters far beyond what elite economic and political opinion usually acknowledges. The result is that the Democratic party has gotten behind some great people, like Senate candidates Harold Ford, Jr., in Tennessee, James Webb in Virginia, and Bob Casey, Jr., in Pennsylvania, as well as dozens of similar House candidates. Conservative Democrats, of course, have always trumpeted these folks, but even mainstream secular Democrats seem increasingly aware of their value to a stronger, more populist, more religious party coalition. An genuinely Democratic argument against unlimited abortion rights exists in embryo out there, one that can be properly combined with a smarter, progressive argument about human rights and personal dignity. A lot of success by some of these candidates, and it could grow in strength.

Of course, all the success in the world by these and similarly minded folks won't mean a complete change in the whole platform of the Democratic party. As such, that means that this time around I'm supporting a party that is going to probably do a mildly better job than the Republicans at expressing my interests and aspirations in regards to matters of social justice, especially in regards to trade, education, job creation, social insurance and welfare, international affairs, and so forth, but a much worse job at defending religious and moral priorities, promoting moral and family-friendly media and cultural reforms, etc. Does that mean I'm prioritizing my economic and egalitarian concerns over social and traditional ones? I don't think so; I think I'm saying that, while also doing something good for the county's political health, I can potentially do something long-term for my preferred vision by supporting a party that doesn't admittedly doesn't adhere to those parts of it I perhaps care most about. If those parts really were on the line this election, my feelings might be different. But what I'll see on my ballot tomorrow is indicative of the larger reality in which party thinking becomes necessary. I've got a choice before me for Kansas House District 95. On the one hand, an experienced Democrat, Tom Sawyer (yes, that is his name)--an accountant, responsible legislator, predictable Democratic supporter. On the other hand, a nice old fellow put up by the Republicans by the name of Benny Boman. In some ways, I much prefer his direct and hard-line approaches to abortion and casinos in Kansas (basically, "stop abortion" and "no casinos") over Sawyer's Democratic boilerplate...yet Boman, if elected, would surely go to Topeka and be lined up with the same evolution-obsessed, tax-bashing Republican machine which has run the state government for decades. Sawyer, besides all the obvious good things he'll do (like promote decent educational standards), will be part of a minority, and thus will have to be creative, and maybe that'll even mean he'll have to be open-minded. And with open-mindedness comes change: change in a party's approach, and even--and more importantly in my book--in their ideas.

It may be happening nationally; certainly it's happened here in Kansas, where the Democrats, though far from wielding real power, have nonetheless changed the landscape somewhat by picking up voters that single-issue Republicans have left behind. It's not enough to get me to register as a Democrat; I'm still holding out for the Christian Democratic Union to start running some local candidates. But in the meantime, for this election at least, I figure there's a party worth joining, and voting for. I hope enough others do the same.

John Paul II, Authority, and the Left

Well, Pope John Paul II was buried this morning, so I suppose if I'm going to say anything about this pontiff I need to say it now. Not that much (perhaps too much) hasn't already been said, especially by people like myself who engage in political and moral theorizing. As Lee at Verbum Ipsum commented, everyone "want[s] to claim as renowned a personage as John Paul II as one of their own--as favoring their own particular political program." He provides some good links, and a causal search of the internet will turn up dozens, if not hundreds more. The liberal pope, the conservative pope, the pacifist pope, the anti-communist pope. E.J. Dionne put it well in The New Republic: JPII's personal sense of philosophical "consistency [did] not necessarily match that of the world that is judging him."

I think the one thing I've read about JPII this week that has helped me the most in putting his spiritual vision of the human person--a vision that mandated a defense of the weak and defenseless within a context of religious authority, family unity, sexual fidelity, political freedom, social justice and anti-materialism--into perspective has been my friend Damon Linker's short piece in TNR; for Damon, the Pope's central legacy was one of "absolutism." It is a valuable and good, perhaps even necessary thing, to hear an absolute call to particular moral standard; as Damon wrote, "after a century of mass murder, John Paul's unconditional defense of human dignity cannot fail to impress." But absolutisms "also distort our vision, obscuring the exceedingly complicated, even paradoxical, character of morality itself," leading to the possibility that those inspired by absolutes will (like some of those who called attention to themselves during the Schiavo case) reject the necessary steps of self-government in favor of more direct action. For some such as these, the "lawful course of action--the slow, difficult, and possibly futile task of persuading Florida voters and their representatives to change the laws of their state so that a similar situation would not arise in the future"--will be considered "simply unacceptable." And so, this Pope, to the extent that he saw no need to temper his absolutist religious convictions when involving himself or the body of doctrine he promulgated in political matters, represented another instance of the threat of moral fervor to democracy which liberals have rightly concerned themselves with for centuries. (And this is no idle concern; there were those who called for "extra-legal action...up to and including forcible resistance" in the case of Terri Schiavo.)

I liked Damon's piece, not because I fully agreed with it (I'm far more a populist, including a religious populist, than Damon), but because I think it clarified the issues so very well. Similarly to how another (much more harsh) questioning of a Catholic religious figure helped me appreciate that figure more fully: Christopher Hitchens's infamous diatribe against Mother Teresa. As I wrote a long time back, it's quite possible that all of Hitchens's allegations--that Mother Teresa took money from blackmailers and dictators and criminals, that she ignored the consequences of her own teachings in a monomaniacal quest to serve and save the poor in their own state (rather than working to improve their state), that she tolerated and even encouraged a cult of personality that saved her from criticism (and audits), etc., etc.--are completely true...and yet they still wouldn't add up to what he claimed they did. Why? Because Hitchens has mortal concerns, and "all mortal concerns are, by definition, incomplete. Holiness, by contrast, is wholeness. If one wholly adored God [as Mother Teresa plainly did], then the moral complications of discerning between what some deserve and others do not, of working out compromises when faced with hard moral choices, of deciding between just and unjust wars, indeed of all the necessary vicissitudes of ordinary life, would not trouble you one bit--and...that describes Mother Teresa's lack of care for the 'real world,' or 'the big picture,' or 'the long term' very, very well." Similarly, one may see (as I wrote in a more explicitly religious context) John Paul's absolutism as an expression of his prophetic stature, his determination to address the world and all its elements entirely and only through a prism of righteous doctrine and higher, holy laws.

Of course, the Pope, whether a prophet or not, nonetheless has a position of political influence in our world very different from Mother Teresa's, and thus perhaps can be faulted for not taking responsibility for his absolutisms, in a way that a Mother Teresa, explicitly concerned as she was with living out a consecrated life, ought not be. That's not a debate that can be easily settled, and I certainly don't think I can do so here and now; wiser minds than mine have struggled to work out the best accounts of how, and if, moral absolutism and religious populism ought to be accounted for in connection with the liberal prudence necessary for democratic self-government. But I do think something needs to be said about how the disavowal of absolutes, particularly the kind advocated by JPII, has done great damage to the left in the U.S., and beyond.

Think back to the Schiavo affair again for a moment. As I wrote a couple of weeks back, I was disturbed at the warped and lopsided "culture of life" rhetoric employed by many, perhaps, most of those who surrounded the Schindler family. But this wasn't the whole story. Towards the end, you saw an interesting collection of leftists and progressives showing up on the Schindlers' side of the barricades: Ralph Nader. Nate Hentoff. Even Rev. Jesse Jackson stopped by to pray. These guys are hardly reputable among liberals today, of course; Mark A.R. Kleiman lumped them together with a host of extreme conservatives and denounced them all as "dimwitted self-promoting busybodies." Now, I have my own tortuous history with Nader, and heaven knows that Jesse Jackson is little more than an ambulance-chaser these days. Still, the vehemence poured upon Nader's head for having taken this action is revealing--revealing not just of how much mainstream liberals today still loathe Nader for his actions in 2000, but also revealing of just how little connect there is between the presumptions he thinks to be necessary for social justice, and what most other liberals today assume. What most self-described progressives call "wingnuttery" is, in truth, a concern for authority--including, most crucially, the authority of certain principles as embedded in cultural presumptions. You don't, in the minds of these and other leftists, achieve progress solely through the legal establishment of a plurality of neutral spaces wherein one may (hopefully) achieve egalitarian improvement, though the prudential argument for the preservation of at least a little neutral space is strong. Nonetheless, it is insufficient; such a focus never addresses who actually holds power over and in the midst of those spaces. (In the case of Terri Schiavo: was it judges, or doctors, or a husband with unclear motives, or who?) What you need is an engagement with the whole culture, a popular demand for its conformity with justice as dictated by (you guessed it) absolutes, not merely the availability of free choice (as the law judged Terri Schiavo, via her husband Michael, to have chosen). This is part of the reason why Nader has never seen much importance in mobilizing people against traditional views on behalf of abortion rights or "gonadal politics." Is that "authoritarian"? Well, yes--insofar as one may speak of "working-class authoritarianism" as Christopher Lasch and others have. Or one could just call it "communitarian," in the sense of insisting that self-government rests primarily upon our attendance to communal values--which for many millions, means a "culture of life"--and not simply the private space we afford citizens in the choosing of such. Some suggest that certain Democrats are coming around to this position, meaning perhaps that the larger context (if not the specific content) of the arguments and actions that have alienated folks like Nader from the Democratic party as a whole is finally being recognized. If so, I'm delighted--and saddened that it has taken so long, because that exactly point was at the heart of Pope John Paul's critique all along.

Nader and JPII in the same sentence? I'm not sure how you can think otherwise, when one reads in Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (On Social Concern) about how the arms trade, global trade practices, and international debt are linked as "structures of sin," representing "modern forms of 'imperialism'" that are, in fact, "forms of idolatry: of money, ideology, class, technology." In that encyclical, he calls for not only for a more just distribution of resources, but a reconsideration of our whole approach to development, given that private property itself must be understood to function under a "social mortgage," one tied to its just and righteous use. Centesimus Annus is too frequently taken to be a post-Cold War vindication of certain right-wing readings of liberalism, and even those conservatives who take issue with this obvious misinterpretation tend to see the Pope's vision primarily in terms of "freedom." But if that is so, how to account for his explicit insistence upon the necessity of "educational and cultural work," including "the education of consumers in the responsible use of their power of choice," so that the principle of honest work may be connected with those "collective goods" necessary for righteous development? No, for this man, democracy and freedom were basically a means, important primarily because of what they make possible: the realization of a spiritual, meaning-full, non-materialistic culture, and that means a culture that never treats human beings as merely "material"--no matter if they are young or old, rich or poor, or for that matter, a condemned murderer, an enemy soldier, in a persistent vegetative state or even a fetus. For a great many conservatives in America today, a (unfortunately usually quite partial) attachment to these spiritual absolutes is common, but the ability to make it part of a socio-economic and cultural argument is lacking. Whereas for many committed to the old popular, social visions of justice on the left, such spirituality may be occasionally absent--but more importantly, the absolute cultural context is not.

A bunch of old friends and I have been talking about JPII this week; one of them, Matt Stannard--who, like me, thinks the way the "bourgeois parties" in the U.S. today talk about issues of life and death is an example of "moral myopia"--took me to task in an e-mail, challenging the way I apparently give a pass to authoritarian structures like that embodied by the Pope in order to respond to injustice. "The Pope's anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist messages emerged in a context of institutional power that made them next to useless," he wrote; "the Nazis hated capitalism and modernity too, remember. That didn't make them progressive. You cannot be truly egalitarian while simultaneously believing in (and in this case being the living embodiment of) spiritual hierarchy and patriarchy." And he is right that the argument I'm making here, for a left that is more "authoritarian" in a popular sense, engages in some easy equivocations. Just because egalitarianism includes both A and B, and X is both A and B, does not mean that X is egalitarian. Very probably, I'm reaching too far, and ignoring too much, in trying to sustain my argument about JPII (perhaps the paucity of spokespeople for the "left traditionalist" position has resulted in a kind of desperation on my part). Nonetheless, I do think that acknowledging the way in which a spiritually hierarchical and patriarchal power--even one whose own teachings cannot avoid the accusation of culpability, as is the case for this pontiff and the AIDS crisis in Africa, which his preaching against birth control, and hence condom use, did not cause but certainly exacerbated--can nonetheless incorporate or make possible a certain kind of progressivism in the midst of modern life is something which many on the left (which so often seems to be caught up in celebrating a kind of acultural, unembedded autonomy) need to do. If we agree that we need a comprehensive cultural vision, doesn't that mean we need to invest authority elsewhere besides in the liberty of the self-motivated individual, or at least partially so? And if so, can we really imagine an authentic, historically realized, cultural entity or movement capable of exercising such authority which simultaneously is without any kind of exclusions or hierarchy? I'm doubtful. This is not to excuse all the cultural forms that religions and traditions take--after all, the whole point is to be able to mount a larger, more comprehensive critique of the practices which reflect such principles. But it is to acknowledge that the best basis of progress is one which embeds certain absolutes--principles to progress towards--in a protected, even privileged cultural or institutional space. Martin Luther King would not have been nearly so successful in shaming America for its treatment of black people if the American polity was not so communally devoted to the promotion of certain moral virtues. And that is what JPII, and the culture of life he advocated, was at least in part about--the authoritative, even "absolutist," revealing or constructing of a principled culture that the peoples of the world could devote themselves to, and by so doing progress. As I see it, that's a big part of what being on the left has always, and must always, mean; if liberals have forgotten that, and JPII's example can serve as a reminder, then this is an argument worth making.

A related point: does this mean that Pope John Paul II, and the left I'd like to see, to whatever extent I'm right that aspects of their cultural message of dignity and equality overlap, are illiberal? Partly, yes, though both Ross Douthat and Richard Neuhaus are probably more correct to describe JPII's philosophy as demanding an ongoing critique of, and hence engagement with, Western modernity and liberalism. Still, I think Matt Yglesias's assessment of what being an "absolutist" means in a liberal environment is basically correct--I wouldn't go so far as to say that freedom is a complete non-starter for such thinkers, but it certainly isn't constitutive of much of an argument all on its own. (And he's similarly correct that "culture of life" absolutists need to see that primarily valuing the freedom to privately choose between a plurality of goods is not, in itself, a declaration of relativism--a conclusion which this pontiff quite explicitly did not affirm, in contrast to some of his more aggressively antimodern forebearers.) John Holbo adds a wrinkle to this analysis of absolutism: clearly, many an advocate of absolute principles don't necessarily deny the reality of others' divergent, even plural, principles, and hence the importance of the freedom which makes such possible. But, in the end, I suspect all that observation tells us is that there are, on the one hand, many a philosophical or habitual liberal for whom the witness of people like the Pope has induced an inchoate longing for absolute principle, and on the other hand, many an "absolutist" (of one stripe or another) for whom the liberal recognition of plurality is embraced as prudent; "adjectival" liberals, you might say. Such prudential yet absolutist engagement is, I think, an example of a leftism which has, to our loss, all but disappeared from American politics, occasionally resurrected today by folks on the margins of liberal politics but just as quickly dropping beneath the surface again. It needn't be that way, or at least so I wish. A Mother Teresa, or a leftist who aspires to non-political purity, can afford complete illiberality. But that wasn't, I think, the quality of this Pope's absolutist call, and that is a lesson for the left to learn. I wish I was confident it could.

Some (Long) Thoughts on Religion, Progressive Politics, and Not Fighting Another Civil War

First things first: damn. When I saw how the Senate was going last night, my longing for a Kerry presidency redoubled, if only so that there could be some sort of balance, some sort of give-and-take in government for the next two and probably four (or more) years. It didn’t happen. I’m grumpy about it, to say the least. The great egalitarian accomplishments of the last fifty years--Social Security, Medicare, public education as we knew it--are all on the chopping block. And there’s no one new at the wheel to guide us toward a broader, less tunnel-visioned foreign policy. We’re in bad shape, no doubt about it.

More challenging things second: everyone is talking about the exit polls which demonstrate that, frankly, Iraq didn’t matter all that much to a great many voters, and neither did the economy. What mattered most for most voters was "moral values"–namely, the struggle over same-sex marriage, abortion, and all the rest. This has led the blogosphere today to talk about religion, particularly the sort of religious values and language that could play well in the red states (particularly the American South), and why the Democratic party has a distinct lack of such, and whether that can or should be rectified, or, conversely, ought to be celebrated as a badge of angry, disdainful pride. The idea of finding a good Southern Democrat, and getting them to talk about the interests and "work ethic" of America's (often rural, often socially conservative and religious) lower-middle and working classes, is central to the imaginations of many (John Edwards's boosters not the least), and I'm hardly immune to it. Hey, all things considered, I wanted Gephardt. But it is the latter, deeper possibility--that there is now an insurmountable divide between the religious, working-class, tradition-bound residents of provincial America, and the progressive political agenda as manifest in the Democratic party--or at least the reflections I'm seeing on just such a possibility, which most interest me.

(Note: in a sense, what follows is a composite of all those posts on populism, class and culture which I promised, and now that the election is over probably won't ever write, at least not as I originally conceived them. So there's a certain amount of murky reaching and recycling in what follows. You've been warned.)

A friend of mine e-mailed me this morning, with the simple message: "the Civil War begins today." His language is on point, but I’m not sure we can leap to thinking about a renewed struggle with the Confederacy quite yet. Let’s instead think about the culture wars in a more general way. Timothy Burke has long been writing about this conflict more thoughtfully and better than anyone I know. A few months ago, he laid out his fears that there was a core group of voters in America, the Bush voters, who genuinely embrace the president's numerous flaws because they see him as their greatest vehicle towards remaking America in their image. Timothy pleaded with them to recognize that Bush’s economic and social agenda wasn’t just unpopular with a great many American voters (49% of them, as it now seems fair to say), but is actually crushing to the possibility of maintaining (through government neutrality and a relatively small amount of wealth-sharing) a diversity of spaces and consequently a certain amount of civic peace. In essence, he argued, to choose Bush is to "choose tyranny"–not because he himself is necessarily a tyrant, but that to so ruthlessly impose an agenda upon a divided nation is by definition tyrannical. Now, with the popular election of Bush by exactly the narrow majority he feared, Timothy calls down condemnation upon the Bush voters, upon "their president" (not his) for his and his followers' refusal to accept life in a "shared social reality."

This isn’t strictly about a bunch of radicals from Texas and Oklahoma imposing an oppressive Christian theocracy on the U.S., though a fair amount of that kind of fear is tied up in Burke’s argument. More broadly however, he's framing the culture war as a contest between traditionalists and moderns, the latter being those that delight in, or at least tolerate, the spaces and nooks and crannies and surprises of the liberal order, with all its material innovation, irreverence and creative destruction, and the former being those who want gemeinschaft, who dislike the new, the cranks who hate "the cities and the educated and the culture-makers and the secularists." Of course, this sort of class-sensitive analysis, one which places religious conservatives like Pat Robertson and economic communitarians like Ralph Nader on the same side, doesn’t hold any water when it comes to talking about yesterday’s specific electoral results (Bush clearly doesn’t have an anti-capitalist bone in his body). But the point is nonetheless a good one: the residents of Heartlandia, as Timothy put it in a later post, want a world with more authority, more discipline, more unity, more specificity--a "city on a hill," if you will--whereas those in Bicoastia hold to the essentially libertarian ethos of "don’t tread on me."

(One could, perhaps, try to connect this to a theory of economic relations, wherein the greater market freedom seemingly endorsed by Bush and Co. is translated in their minds into an opportunity for greater individual responsibility, possession, and mastery. In other words, more stability and control over the "social power that reserved particular cultural forms as the source of social distinction or hierarchy." If the government doesn't take my money, then I have that much more power create--through gated communities, private schools, etc.--my own safe and enduring environment! But this gives them way too much credit; I think it makes more sense just to assume that such conservative social and economic thinking is simply incoherent. What conservatives at one time did recognize was the same thing which socialists of all stripes, including Marx, have always recognized: that allowing economic empowerment to follow only the rules of the marketplace, accruing to the hard-working but also and more importantly to the lucky, the privileged, the well-born, well-connected and, most especially, the self-interested, spells doom for any kind of civic morality and, hence, any truly shared collective goods. Timothy has mentioned that he doesn't really consider himself a "leftist" any more; his focus, in the end, is simply on who has which goods and whether they have what they have a right to, rather than on who gains and who loses from the production of such goods in the first place. That is, he's consistently liberal; he doesn't agree that there are forms of power that melt away when ways of life are changed, so long as the people are free and able to pursue their preferred individual changes. One of the reasons I believe, as I'll get to later, that progressive politics can find a home in a restrained religious world is because I think the argument for social justice, properly understood, really is closer, or at least as close, to the conservative one than the liberal one. I'm by no means an orthodox Marxist, but I still hold out for a social democracy can bring together both religious conservatism and egalitarian concern. But I'm digressing from the practical egalitarianism Timothy and I both share.)

If I may elaborate on Timothy’s superb reading of recent events, Bush is Heartlandia’s strong leader, their resolute authority, their guide through difficult times, and they’ve clung to him and celebrated him despite all the evidence and details which undermine almost every one of his accomplishments, as well as so much that was once central to America’s role in the world. He is their moral voice, and that’s enough. Kerry’s efforts to speak of faith and morality and the necessary limits of hard choices, however heartfelt they were, remained essentially "bicoastal"--when he addressed a woman who asked about abortion during the debate in St. Louis, Kerry responded with as much fervor as he could muster, "I respect your views." But what kind of authority, what kind of order, can be contained in an open-ended morality which says, in the end, "there’s your morality, and then there is those people’s over there"? There’s no particularity, no resoluteness, no definitiveness there. Only a patronization, as Harry notes, of the poor provincial who doesn't see how much wider and diverse the real world really is.

To return to the main point: for Timothy, Bush’s victory means that those who oppose him and his brand of culture-war governing have no other option but to search "for the Fort Sumter of our times and our souls, for the path to the figurative dissolution of our contaminated Union." He is far from the only blogger speaking in apocalyptic terms. Yet I can’t quite tell how hopeless he really is; he doesn’t truly think a division in our society between Heartlandia and Bicoastia is conceivable (any more than Matt Yglesias thinks a federation between the blue states and Canada, and its separation from "Jesusland," is possible), because 1) there is too much interplay between our ways of life anyway, and 2) because there is and must be a "bottom floor of basic rights" that he cannot cede to the desire to create a definite cultural particularity, a guarded Christian enclave protected from the blue staters and their devious ways. In making this argument, Timothy echoes one of his greatest posts, a meditation upon intervention, on the invasion of the particular by the universal--both its necessity and its tragedy--which has been greatly helpful to my own thinking over the past year or so. I do not know if he intends his invocation of our need to continue together and thus "intervene" as necessary, but also of the way secular liberalism might have been better off if it hadn’t "pushed too hard...towards a transformative project," to contribute to an argument for "some new alliance, with a new mix of issues and convictions" that could carry progressive causes forward. Perhaps not. But I for one don’t mind having the contradictions of modernity placed front and center, because I at least do think there's another form of progressive politics possible, one that can challenge, as the old liberal coalitions no longer can, the current Republican dominance of the Heartlandia core. The problem is that it requires an ethos which many liberals hoped to have ejected from the modern egalitarian American state when they--the universal choosers, the liberal liberators--rejected the restrictive, populist particularisms of the South (and the Midwest, and most of the West too): moral authority. Or, in other words, a genuine respect for, and a willingness to employ, a judgmental religious voice.

(Which, of course, is interventionary too, only interventionary in a different way. Practically speaking, that difference is small, which is why all crusaders, whether liberal or conservative, religious or secular, need to hold their principles to the test of prudence and the present day, something which Bush’s actions in Iraq, I realized too late, did not do. But on a theoretical plane, how important is that rather small difference? Not at all, if you doubt that there is any order beyond the one we will into existence. For Timothy, every extremist is just as modern as every other one: anti-moderns have a universalizing agenda the same as liberals do. But should you take seriously the idea that we dwell in an order not of our own making--that is, if you allow that ontology can have something to do with politics, can limit it and oblige it--then perhaps religious interventions can, perhaps, take on a somewhat different hue, though they remain every bit as potentially abusive as ever.)

Descending from philosophy to politics: what would this embrace of judgment entail exactly, and is it remotely possible? Ought the Democratic party try to compete with the Republicans in being a "moral voice"? For many, to invite any sort of immersion in the ethics and habits of the red states is to poison the progressive cause entirely; it is to shake hands with the Ku Klux Klan, apologize to the Confederacy, wink at anti-gay bigotry, hand power over the inbreeds from Deliverance, and generally ruin everything civilization stands for. It is demographic talk like this that leads so many secular progressives to find great comfort in Ruy Teixeira's thesis (which I've never liked, and which doesn't seem to be panning out, so far anyway) that, eventually, all those blue-collar, rural (racist, moronic) Jesus freaks will die out, leaving the future to the secular, urban, multicultural, self-employed, high-tech (enlightened) creative class. (Either that, or it leads them to engage in fantasies about how much nicer America would be if only General Sherman had been more thorough in his march through the South.)

I couldn’t disagree more, though I recognize that the odds of such disagreement being heard when we have only two major parties to choose from, with no Christian socialist or culturally conservative social democrat option in sight, will be a long and difficult haul. And admittedly, the burden is primarily upon religious progressives like myself; one cannot reasonably expect secular liberals and desperate Democrats to take seriously as a ground for argument and actions the particularist beliefs and perspectives of a region of the country, and a class of the population, which has just thoroughly rejected them. Still, short of waiting for the apocalypse, I see two tasks before us, one long-term, the other short. I have no idea which is more likely to come about than the other. (Both are, it goes without saying, unlikely in general.)

First: there are, there have always been, there will always be, Christians whose beliefs lead them to be social conservatives and economic progressives. (For evidence, look here and here.) We exist, and we have no party to represent us. (The Democratic party once did, back in its working-class heyday, but respect for that kind of traditional authority has been declining ever since the 1970s.) What we need to do is work for the transformation of America’s political and party system, so that more venues can open up, and the death-grip which a warped, half-statist, half-libertarian, decidedly non-communitarian "conservatism" holds over "moral values" in America can finally be loosened. It may not happen in my lifetime, but it's something worth working for, and praying for. Second, and of greater relevance to this discussion: in the meantime, we need to continue to work towards making the Democratic party remember the lesson of Carter and Clinton, the lessons of respect.

After the way Kerry flogged his "faith" to no end on the campaign trail, it might be easy to dismiss this as a lost cause: the Republicans have grabbed religion, so let them have it. (After all, all that fire-and brimstone crap is just for the weak and superstitious, right?) One can point to the example of Amy Sullivan as evidence that there’s nothing new to be said here. I admire the hell out of Amy’s work, and have nothing but praise for it...but, if one honestly wishes to ask what sort of thinking could lead the Democratic party to start putting forward an agenda that shows some respect for the unavoidable fact that they live in a socially and culturally conservative country, then I think it may be worth noting that her primary campaign--to open up religious voters to progressive causes by helping progressives learn to make their case in religious language--may be backwards. What if what is necessary is not translating liberal political imperatives into an evangelical or culturally conservative idiom, but rather taking such faith seriously as a legitimate basis for thinking about politics, and drawing progressive concerns from it? It won’t be a liberalism which gives you abortion rights–but maybe it’ll give you health care. Isn’t that worth something?

Think about Bill Clinton; think about the ease with which he sat down with black preachers and white pentecostals. (That is, when he was governor; his time in Washington poisoned him and those around him, made him a polarizing figure that drove an even a deeper wedge between the Democrats and white rural believers, a tragedy that I hope a just God will punish both Clinton himself and Kenneth Starr for.) Was it all a "spiel" to him, a language he adopted to get elected? Hardly, yet everyone knew he wasn’t at all pious. He was forgiven that—by enough evangelicals to win various Southern states, at least—because it was manifest that he didn’t think religion was something he needed to condescend to. He shared that context. The lack of follow-through in legislative content can be forgiven if it at least begins with recognition and respect. Clinton certainly didn't outlaw abortion, and the dedicated anti-abortion professionals in America today certainly never gave him an inch of credit. But consider what happened at the margins, in the provinces, when Clinton declared when he accepted the Democratic nomination that abortion should be "safe, legal, and rare." Rare. Meaning: it's a bad thing, aborting an unborn child; we ought to do less of it. The people who have or make it seem easy to have abortions when there's no call for abortion are in the wrong. That's called moral judgment, using the power of the office to define and order what American life ought and ought not be about. That swayed people--a few of them, anyway, enough to unite with the (not incidentally often socially conservative) African-American population of the South and thereby pick off a few states--because it showed some respect for how they had constrained and disciplined and thus made difficult their own lives, and thus allowed them to hear what this liberal politician had to say about taxes and medical care, because they knew it was out from someone who was willing to put themselves where they lived.

All I’m saying is this: is it not possible that the measure of moral authenticity to the average believer is not the content of one’s profession or performance of belief, but there context, the seriousness with which such belief is treated? It comes down to ontology again. All politics, all modernity, is interventionary; it’s unavoidable, unless you genuinely desire the life of the Amish. But is liberalism alone, the secular historical accomplishment of such, the only way to generate the arguments for the sort of interventions necessary to make the modern order egalitarian, to make it decent? If you think so, then you must believe that Bush and everyone who voted for him is nothing more than an incipient fascist, a greedy and hateful and bitter rube from Texas (or Bavaria) intent on plunder and murder and putting their boot in the ass of anyone, Iraqi or American, who gets in their way. Because, after all, their Heartland talk, however sincere and serious and definitive and clear, must by definition just be bullshit: a spiel, nothing more. That probably describes Tom Delay, and more than a few others. But in general, I don’t think that's correct. I think the Bush-voters are wrong: wrong about the untrammeled market, wrong about the "ownership society," wrong that the environment can take care of itself, wrong about the role of the state, wrong about what is needed to make America responsible and admired in a world in need of our wealth and example. Moreover, I think they are deluding themselves if they don’t recognize that the man they elected, despite the few good things he’ll do, is very bad at carrying out even some of his best plans. But I don’t think Heartlandia is poisoned, and I don’t think the religion and way of life we embrace out here (metaphorically speaking, of course; we live in cities too) is so undeserving of respect and so incapable of grounding a government that could conduct the sort of careful, egalitarian interventions we ought to support. Of course there are theocrats around; some Southerners may not stop until Nathan Bedford Forrest occupies the White House. But some others--enough, again, to win a few states at least--just like knowing that the President of the United States won’t stop them from praying at high school football games. If the person who makes that promise speaks their language, knows where they’re coming from, and makes that knowledge part of their platform, then who knows what may open up. Probably not my longed-for Christian communitarian polity, that's for sure, but maybe a way to get enough of religious America on board a simple liberal egalitarian agenda so as to save what little social justice remains in our country. It might even avoid another Civil War. It’s worth thinking about, anyway.