Looking Back, Looking Forward (Page 6)

The defeat of John Kerry, combined with the Republican advances in the House and Senate, has unleashed waves of dismay and perplexity within liberal and progressive circles. What happened? Why did so many voters embrace a President whose Iraq policy was paved with lies and deceptions, who has shown contempt for science, the rule of law and many of the principles of the Enlightenment, and whose economic policies favor the rich at the expense of the vast majority of Americans? What lessons do we draw from Kerry's failure to win over the electorate in spite of the Bush Administration's conspicuous failures? Are the Democrats crippled, or merely wounded, and is the party really out of touch with "mainstream" values? Finally, what should the priorities of the progressive movement be in this era of Republican dominance, and what is the best formula for future electoral success? The Nation asked some of the country's leading political activists and intellectuals for their thoughts on one or more of these questions. Their brief essays follow.   --The Editors

MICHAEL LIND

IN AN ERA IN WHICH MOST US POPULATION GROWTH is occurring in the South, West and heartland, American liberalism is defined by people in the Northeast. At a time when rising tuitions are pricing many working-class Americans out of a college education, the upscale campus is becoming the base of American progressivism. In a country in which most working-class Americans drive cars and own homes in the suburbs, the left fetishizes urban apartments and mass transit and sneers at "sprawl." In an economy in which most workers are in the service sector, much of the left is obsessed with manufacturing jobs. In a society in which Latinos have surpassed blacks as the largest minority and in which racial intermixture is increasing, the left continues to treat race as a matter of zero-sum multiculturalism and white-bashing. In a culture in which the media industry makes money by pushing sex and violence, the left treats the normalization of profanity and obscenity as though it were somehow progressive, making culture heroes of Lenny Bruce and Larry Flynt. At a time when the religious right wants to shut down whole areas of scientific research, many on the left share a Luddite opposition to biotech. In an age in which billions would starve if not for the use of artificial fertilizers in capital-intensive agriculture, the left blathers on about small-scale organic farming. In a century in which the dire need for energy for poor people in the global South can only be realistically met by coal, oil and perhaps nuclear energy, liberals fantasize about wind farms and solar panels. And in a world in which the greatest threat to civilization is the religious right of the Muslim countries, much of the left persists in treating the United States as an evil empire and American patriotism as a variant of fascism.

American progressivism, in its present form, is as obsolete in the twenty-first century as the agrarian populists were in the twentieth. If you can't adapt to the times, good intentions will get you nowhere. Ask the shade of William Jennings Bryan.

Michael Lind, the Whitehead Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, is the author of Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics (Basic).

RICHARD RORTY

MOST AMERICANS FIND IT INTOLERABLE to think that our soldiers were sent abroad to die for no sufficient reason. They are still unwilling to admit that those who fell in Vietnam lost their lives in vain. So half the electorate managed to keep on believing both that Saddam Hussein was preparing to use weapons of mass destruction and that he was somehow linked to 9/11. They did so because, in their minds, to abandon those beliefs would be to withdraw support from our troops. So Senator Kerry did himself little good with the voters by demonstrating that President Bush had deceived the nation in order to invade Iraq. But he was boxed in. He could not ignore the issue without alienating his own base, and could not speak frankly about it without further alienating his opponent's.

The sort of people who make up Bush's base cannot be won over by insisting that Christianity mandates concern for the poor, and that Bush has shown none. For most fundamentalist evangelicals think that poverty is a punishment either for insufficient gumption or for failure to establish the sort of personal relationship to Jesus that insures worldly success. So it would be a mistake for Democrats to start sounding more pious. They cannot give up on abortion rights and gay rights without alienating many blue voters, but if they do not do so they cannot hope to win over any red ones. Once again, Democratic candidates are boxed in.

As far as I can see, the only recourse Democrats have is to reverse the drift toward the center that began after McGovern's defeat in 1972, and once again put themselves forward as the Party of the Poor. This may not work, but it is the only card they have left to play. They should beat the drum about the widening gap between haves and have-nots, about the humiliation and misery of families without health insurance, about the scandal of disappearing pensions and about outrageous corporate tax dodges, about fabulously overpaid corporate executives, about Halliburton and Enron. If they adopt this strategy, at least they will be positioned to take advantage of any future economic downturn, and can hope for something like a reprise of the 1932 election. If they instead edge still further to the right, the Republicans will simply shift the goal posts by doing the same.

Richard Rorty is the author of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton) and Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (Harvard).

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