It’s really all about me…er…ah..us.
I trying to do some blog work for Tony Barr, I came across and interesting dialog and I thought you should read it, but the whole thing is like 5ooo words and that’s a big blog even for me so I did some editing
The gist of it is that there are lots of people, good people, smart people, disgusted by the GOP and Bush, they want change but they can’t bring themselves to side with us fuzzy headed liberals, even when they line up with us on issue after issue.
The obvious question was “Why” After 5000 words here’s what I got out of it.
Since JFK declared, ‘Ask not what your Country can do for you ask what you can do for your country” GOP rhetoric has relentlessly pounded out the same theme over and over: liberal Democrats are naïve, unrealistic hypocrites whose ideas are fantasies and whose politically correct accusations can be dismissed and ignored.
The reason Rush Limbaugh and his ilk, can get away with his rude, hammering diatribes is that he is perceived as a Crusader fighting the good fight against those hypocritical, naïve liberals who want you to feel guilty about your Hummer, your Confederate flag, your xenophobia, and your good, old fashioned greed, the fuel that drives the beneficent and invisible hand of privatized, capitalist markets.
Your average Blair County Pennsylvania working Joe has enough problems without being expected to sacrifice those few things he does have to “Other People” in the name of charity, altruism or guilt.
What we as Democrats need to understand is that: that’s what they think we’re asking of them. We need to change this and Today!
If you hang out with progressives and Democrats, you simply will not hear them talking about “other” groups of people who need to be helped. You will not hear them talking about self-sacrifice ala JFK. The agenda bears no relationship whatever to a JFK/LBJ call to reaching out to less fortunate people. Hell, progressives are simply not running around talking about helping the people in Darfur or even, for the most part, in New Orleans.
No, today’s progressives are talking about something else. They are talking about US! They are talking about what WE, the mainstream Americans, need from government. To get excited about a progressive agenda today, you don’t need empathy, altruism or self-sacrifice. You simply need to care about your own family.
What changed in those since JFK? Well, what changed is that the impact, the pain, the DEATH that is the fruit of American corporatism has come to bear on US!
Today, the discussion of inhumane working conditions and inhumane wages is not a discussion of some smallish, marginalized group of other people. It is a discussion of US, of the millions who have fallen out of the middle class and into poverty. It is a discussion of people who trained for manufacturing and technical jobs and can no longer get them. It is a discussion of downsized middle managers who can only get jobs paying 1/4 of what they used to make. For God’s sake, it is about 75 year old people who work for minimum wage because they can’t afford to retire.
Health care? 40 million of us can’t get health insurance and the rest of us pay staggering prices for it and endure the nightmare of a bureaucracy that won’t allow our doctors to give us the care we need.
Education? You don’t have to bus middle class students to ghetto schools to give them and their families a taste of the problems of underfunded schools. Public schools are dying because their revenue streams are vanishing and mandated requirements are absolutely killing them. Funds for college are vanishing and great swaths of the upcoming generation entertain no hope of attending college. OUR kids are now experiencing the frustration that we used to associate with “their” schools.
How about racial and ethnic issues? Well, we certainly continue to have our white xenophobes and racism lingers stubbornly on. But here’s the thing: demographic trends and ethnic intermarriage are blurring the line between us and them. Look at the current GOP push for racial purity disguised as concern about illegal immigration. It’s backfiring because “they” aren’t them anymore–they’re us.
Contrary to the myth that progressives don’t care about national security, the fact is that Americans feel profoundly exposed. It is precisely OUR army that is being destroyed in Iraq and Afghanistan. The trillions being wasted over there and building up our debt are OUR taxes–and the debt we are building up for ourselves and our children.
On issue after issue, progressive concerns are emphatically NOT matters of empathy, altruism, and self-sacrifice. They are the precise opposite. Americans who want an alternative to the corporate GOP are not concerned for others–they are concerned for themselves. Take the issue of unconstitutional executive action: wiretapping, arrests without warrants, torture. Those who are not concerned use the old frame: to care about this, you have to care about towel heads who hate us anyway. But the progressives who DO care about these issues see them as threats TO US! It’s their own security they care about.
The Environment: It isn’t just hippies and tree huggers that are concerned about the environment anymore, it’s hardcore hunters and fishermen worried about what’s happening to the deer population and the state of our rivers and streams that are starting to take a hard look at the environmental movement.
We need to do some serious re-tooling of our rhetoric. If we are to pull our region and our country back from the abyss, we need to reframe our issues and we need to start talking about us. Wow, less than 1000 words.
