What Profit It Liberalism to Save the World If Conservatism Gets All the Credit?

For a long time, Steve M. has been beating the drum of "making more liberals." He's always added that no, he doesn't know how to go about doing so.

But now, he's found something that I at first thought might just end up "making more liberals."

It made me twitchy, though, and I think I've figured out why. Steve's headline is "AT LEAST SHE'S TRYING TO SELL LIBERAL POLICIES TO NON-LIBERALS (unlike some administrations I could name)"

That's the problem: disguising liberal policies as conservative in order to sell them to non-liberals allows non-liberals to "buy" those policies without buying the liberal philosophy behind them. This is the self-destructive tactic that has allowed conservatives to co-opt every liberal accomplishment of the last century: Social Security, Medicare, even civil rights for fuck's sake.

But isn't it a good thing that opponents of a liberal policy come to embrace it?

No, not if that embrace and cooptation allows them to continue to demonize liberalism as destructive/impotent.

We have the perfect example right in front of us: President Obama's tax cut for 95 percent of Americans. Sending every taxpayer a check prominently labeled "President's Tax Cut for YOU!" as Smirky did would have garnered huge political credit but done little for the economy if people socked it away in savings. Obama chose to spread it out by adding a few bucks to each paycheck that people would likely spend rather than save.

Huge liberal policy victory! Catastrophic liberal political failure!

Every single government policy that majorities of Americans approve are liberal policies. Approved by Americans who call themselves conservatives and condemn liberals as evil.

That's what "Keep Your Filthy Government Claws Off My Medicare!" really means. Liberals won the policy battle and lost the political war.

You can't make more liberals by pretending liberal policies aren't liberal.

Steve M:

I have very mixed feelings about this story, but at least what Nancy Jackson and her colleagues are doing beats sitting around waiting for everyone in America to suddenly see reason:

SALINA, Kan. -- Residents of this deeply conservative city do not put much stock in scientific predictions of climate change.

"Don't mention global warming," warned Nancy Jackson, chairwoman of the Climate and Energy Project, a small nonprofit group that aims to get people to rein in the fossil fuel emissions that contribute to climate change. "And don't mention Al Gore. People out here just hate him."

Saving energy, though, is another matter.

Last Halloween, schoolchildren here searched for "vampire" electric loads, or appliances that sap energy even when they seem to be off. Energy-efficient LED lights twinkled on the town's Christmas tree. On Valentine's Day, local restaurants left their dining room lights off and served meals by candlelight.

... Town managers attribute the new resolve mostly to a yearlong competition sponsored by the Climate and Energy Project, which set out to extricate energy issues from the charged arena of climate politics.

... If the heartland is to seriously reduce its dependence on coal and oil, Ms. Jackson and others decided, the issues must be separated. So the project ran an experiment to see if by focusing on thrift, patriotism, spiritual conviction and economic prosperity, it could rally residents of six Kansas towns to take meaningful steps to conserve energy and consider renewable fuels.

... The project's strategy seems to have worked. In the course of the program, which ended last spring, energy use in the towns declined as much as 5 percent relative to other areas....

Obviously, on the one hand, I would like to live in a country where vast number of people didn't reject solid science in favor of corporate and Republican noise machine propaganda. But we don't live in such a country. I'd love for someone to tell me how we can get heartlanders to change their views -- but until that person comes along, I can't reject this:

SNIP

My feeling about just about every idea in progressive politics is that you've got to do something like this. You've got to work to get buy-in from the broad public -- in other words, you've got to get the consent of the governed. That means you have to stop assuming that everyone in America had college board scores in the 99th percentile and got a top-tier college education and maybe a graduate degree or two. It means learning to communicate with ordinary citizens, in part by learning what their beliefs and assumptions are, and starting more from where they are than from where you are.

Many of the advances we're most proud of came as the result of coalitions built with people who clung to some very bad ideas. The Constitution was possible only because of compromises wikth slaveowning states. The New Deal coalition included Southern Democrats who fought to preserve Jim Crow.

In order to make the transition away from fossil fuels, yes, I'll be happy to form a coalition with people who believe global climate change is a myth. Maybe, if we could make the transition effort seem like simple Americanism, the transition could actually take place -- and, ultimately, the skeptics might gradually lose their skepticism.

In any case, searching for ways to sell progressive ideas to non-progressives is what the Obama administration never does. It's what the Democratic Party never does. Left organizers don't do enough of it, either. And until we bring some of these heartlanders around, we're going to keep losing, on everything.

But achieving liberal policy goals by denying liberal politics is the path to destruction for liberalism. With each liberal policy victory that is stolen by conservatives, liberalism dies a little more, and the next liberal policy victory becomes that much more difficult.

Liberal policies can't survive without the support of liberal politics. We are rapidly approching the point that liberal policies will become impossible to sell because there will be no actual liberals to promote them.

Energy conservation and renewable energy are liberal, you Kansas mouthbreathers, and don't you forget it.