The Two Left Feet

[Autonomy]

A classic riddle:

Q: What's the difference between a duck?

A: One of its legs is both the same.

The Democratic Party has two wings, as daily demonstrated by some of the many conflicts on liberal blogs. We all know the arguments; "so-and-so is not liberal enough" versus "you only help the Republicans with talk like that". Soon enough, the issue of helping Republicans will not even be on the radar screen as Democrats begin to win election after election.

With Ned Lamont's primary victory tonight, coupled with the victory of a staunch conservative over a moderate incumbent in the Michigan primary, the great divide in the American political landscape has never been so wide. But all the evidence -- Bush's popularity polls circling the drain, American opinion on the Iraq War, opinions on health care issues, stem cell research, the list goes on -- suggest that the vast majority of the American people support the platform on which the Democratic Party stands, or at least those prominent planks on which the entire liberal blogosphere agrees. But then there's the other Left foot -- the Democratic Party platform we don't all agree on.

Are we, as Democrats, supportive of business? Are we capitalist, or socialist-lite? Do Americans have a right to create wealth? Do we have a right to retain our culture? Do we owe the world, as opposed to own it?

Regarding foreign policy, now that the neoconservative doctrine of preemption is fully discredited, will our foreign policy return to the Clintonian tacit doctrine of proportional response and humanitarian intervention? Or will we rebuke and reject the next president who engages in any "foreign entanglements" whatsoever?

I'm not even going to mention Israel.

Fully expect the dynamics of public opinion to be much different from the Clinton years: the neocon star is no longer on the rise, the Contract on America has been cancelled, the Reagan Revolution overthrown. Also we are much more hip to the tricks of Faux News and potential Scaifian operatives. It will be much harder next time around to trip up a Democratic leadership from the outside. But will we trip over our own two left feet?

We of the political Left in the blogiverse of liberalism, have led the way, been far ahead of the curve in calling a duck a duck. We said in 2000 that Bush looked like a duck, walked like a duck, and quacked like a duck, so he was definitely a duck. (We were only one letter off.) We have become accustom to being relevant because we knew. We had one thing we could agree on -- that George W. Bush was wrong on everything -- and we knew we were right. And always, within a few months or a few years, polls of likely voters started to swing our way, and we felt vindicated. But that pattern may end soon. We may find ourselves relegated to the scrapheap of irrelevance as the general populace fully accepts our positions on those issues we agree upon already, and the only things we have left to talk about are those things we on which we already disagree. Where do we go when the only thing left to talk about is whether we support our own president and legislature? (Any interesting discussion will be against DU policy!) What will be our unifying force?

The fact is, the only places I see the more "socialist" end of the spectrum being espoused is on college campus and websites like this one. It's not likely that most Americans will continue to follow the lead of leftwing websites beyond Democratic policies of Clinton. We may take an invasion of Venezuala off the table as bizarre fanatacism in defiance of the autonomy of a democratically elected government, but that does not mean a future American president will be photographed hugging Fidel Castro or Hugo Chavez.

Hopefully we as a nation have grown up a bit during the Bush administration, and will never again buy into a farce like preemption ever again, and moreover reject any further attempt at post-colonial imperialism. But the vast majority of American people will not take the lesson of Iraq as meaning that we cannot intervene somewhere militarily with good reason. For that reason, the divisions rife on liberal websites could well render those websites largely irrelevant.

Americans are beginning to realize that they are, by and large, liberals. And right now that means, essentially, being Democrats. But eventually conservatives will adapt to survive, like they always have, and co-opt the liberal-progressive agenda and, like a dormant virus, hide their own agenda within it.

We will soon have a chance not seen since the 1960's to forward a real progressive agenda, but perhaps not for long. With political victory comes the responsibility of governance. Let's not shoot ourselves in the foot because it's the "wrong" left foot. Now is the time for a collective growth spurt in this petit coup d'etat of left-wing bloggers. Our survival as such may well depend on it.

Let's start finding ways right now to keep a coalition together once Democrats are in power.