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A NOTE: This is a long, long post and I apologize in advance. I’m also not so sure it really says anything new. But I felt like I needed to say it somewhere, if only to crystallize my own reformation. Anyway, thanks for reading whatever portion of it that you do.
Common wisdom has it that the modern conservative movement began at the moment when the Republican party experienced one of its most stinging defeats: the election of Lyndon Johnson over conservative lion Barry Goldwater in 1964. After that loss, conservatives "retreated to the hedgerows" and began the drive that has elevated them to near universal control of the Federal government and a majority of governorships and statehouses. They went back to the grass roots, slowly taking over local and seemingly unimportant elected offices: school board, town council and so on. This established a beachhead from which they pushed out and up, until their resurgence in the Congress in 1994 and their recent electoral victories. Such small positions not only consolidated their power, but also their influence. As the saying goes: all politics is local.
It’s been said, after 2000, after 2004, after Roberts, after Alito, that Liberals have had their "Goldwater moment", that we're on the rise, and that this is as low as our fortunes sink. We’ll go to the grass roots as the conservatives did, contest every race, gradually heal our injured party and take back the government.
But have we really had that Goldwater moment? Have we really learned the same lesson the conservatives learned in 1964? I don’t think we have. Because I don’t think we’ve really accepted the lesson that lay at the core of the post-Goldwater conservative rise.
The Goldwater defeat in 1964 did not lead directly to the founding of think tanks, fielding of candidates and education of young conservatives. Those were all symptomatic of something that happened first: a change in thinking. On some level, the conservatives of 1964 changed themselves before they changed anything else. In order to reorganize and focus, they first had to acknowledge, accept or admit that they did not function as a majority in the United States.
You may have heard the phrase “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic”: meaningless or cosmetic change in the face of a serious problem. Right now, liberals are rearranging deck chairs. Bluster about the filibuster, parliamentary maneuvers and calm dissent merely make us look and feel better before the whole ship goes down. The blogosphere, AAR, and the push to field candidates in every race, all the attendant signs of liberal surge, place the cart before the horse. Until such time as liberals accept, acknowledge or admit that they’re not the majority, they will continue to lose.
Before going any further, please let me say the following: you can be right and still be in the minority. I believe in the principles of universal freedom, equality for all and the responsibility of society towards its citizens. I believe in environmental conservation. I believe in unions. I believe in corporate responsibility. I believe those are the right ideals. But I also believe that that American political landscape places those ideals, the right ideals, in the minority. I am not, therefore, advocating a change in principles but a change in perception and behavior. It’s also immaterial as to whether or not we really are in the minority.
When you believe you’re the real majority, there is no impetus to change and the barriers that prevent your ascendance are all external: the media, the voting machines, the bad candidates and so on. If we can just fix those things, then it will all fall into place and we, the true majority, will take back our government and country. Majorities tend to rest on their laurels, confident in their continued hegemony. Majorities tend to be complacent, tend to be “civil”, tend to be passive – their status as the majority makes them prone to inaction. They tend to under-react. Believing that you are in the majority leads to stagnation, shutting out any desire or need for adaptation. This fits exactly the demeanor we see in most elected Democrats, especially those who have held their positions the longest: the refusal to stand up, the torpor in reacting to the opposition, the lack of emotion in the face of brutal, savage attacks by the opposition.
That was the lesson of Goldwater: act like the minority. Minorities are, by definition, endangered. Minorities tend to fight, tend to be vocal, tend to be caustic and confrontational. Minority groups tend to be audacious and daring, acts borne out of desperation and fear. They also tend to work for small changes because they cannot enact big ones. Minorities envision the long term while working in the short term. This is the summation of the modern Republican party: aggressive, loud, acidic, unwavering, acting “locally” (in both physical and temporal senses) while thinking globally.
Minority groups tend to be tight knit. We, as liberals, are continually amazed at the lockstep devotion of the Republicans and are similarly dismayed at the lack of unity from our own elected officials. This is yet another dynamic of the minority and majority self-identity. Minorities feel pressured from the outside and therefore seek shelter amongst each other – they seek out their shared identifiers as opposed to their differences. Minority self-identification leads to comity.
The comfort created by holding the majority position works in the opposite way. Feeling that one’s position is secure and dominant leads to distancing from the whole and a tendency to seek out the specific cliques and sub-classes that are most in tune with oneself. This is why we, as liberals, have such a hard time focusing our message and platform. Some see themselves as “labor liberals” at arm’s length with the “environmental liberals” and so forth. Because we adhere to the belief that we’re the majority, we tend to want to find sub-groups that allow greater, more defined self-identity. Meanwhile, there are simply “conservatives”; it is only now, when the majority dynamic begins to assert itself in the Republican party, that we see any disunity between “social conservatives”, “fiscal conservatives” and “neoconservatives”.
As an aside, this explains one of the most puzzling behaviors of the right in this country today. Despite their almost unchecked Federal power and dominance at the state levels, they, almost to a person, believe they are oppressed and picked on. This is a viral meme that has been implanted by conservative pundits and talking heads in order to maintain the conservative drive, the drive based on minority group self-identification. Without it, they’ll begin to crumble. This is why they beat the drum about the “gay agenda” and the “liberal media” and so on: it allows their acolytes to continue self-identification as the minority group. It gives them an enemy that seems larger than they are, thus reinforcing the minority self-identity that empowers them and lies at the center of their behaviors.
So, in 1964 or sometime shortly thereafter, the conservatives began to reorganize their thought process. It was only then, once they had fundamentally shifted their view of themselves and their place in America, that they set up those thinktanks and fielded those local candidates and educate those future generations of conservatives.
So that, my fellow liberals, was the real “Goldwater moment”. Where is the analog for today’s liberals?
DailyKos, Democratic Underground, The Huffington Post are easy to point to as parts of the larger machine. Undoubtedly, the blogosphere plays an important role in the fate of the Democratic party. Dr. Dean’s “all 50 states” mantra allows us to think we’re doing the same thing the conservatives did after 1964. We’re running in all the races, we’re spreading our message through the blogs and the radio stations.
These all, however, put the cart before the horse. Spend any time, on any given day, reading any of the blogs or listening to AAR and you’ll hear two refrains. “We are the real majority” and “it’s everybody else’s fault that we’re losing”. These indicate that the liberal mind has not undergone the minority shift that I believe was the key to the success of the conservative movement.
The blogs, while useful as information clearing houses that keep the liberal faithful informed, do little to shape new behaviors. In fact, they tend to wallow in the majority thinking that has brought us to this point. How many of the Kossacks or DUers are learning how to argue a point, to use the right wording when speaking, to think as a minority member? In fact, a common retort on the liberal blogs is that conservatives will spin their words in a million different ways, so it doesn’t matter how they say things. This is majority thinking at its most destructive: I don’t need to choose my words carefully because their real meaning will out and the rest of the majority will “get it” anyway.
This the sort of mindful training that people like Ann Coulter and her ilk focus on intensively at conservative organizations. Coulter’s recent screed “How to talk to a liberal” is a blueprint for the training she and others like her receive at the hands of conservatives. The closest liberals have come is in Lakoff, most especially “Don’t Think of an Elephant.”
But Lakoff’s observations don’t make a bit of difference if you don’t buy into the underlying thought that you do need to explain yourself in the first place. That, again, is endemic to majority self-identification. If you are the majority, there is no significant need to explain and define yourself because you believe most other people understand you already. Lakoff is only as useful as you make him.
Another troubling indicator that the liberal Goldwater moment has yet to happen is the focus on the ’06 Congressional races and the ’08 Presidential race. There seems an almost uniform view on the liberal side that retaking the congress in ’06 will signal an end of the conservative movement, or that winning the presidency in ’08 is the key to a power shift. Without a doubt, winning in ’06 or ’08 would be a welcome respite from our current slide toward conservative hegemony. We’d be foolish to think this reasserts some sort of dominance when the conservatives have had 40 years to lay groundwork at the local level and train legions of willing recruits. Put simply, an ‘06 or ’08 loss would be a speedbump in their movement. Additionally, periodic losses reinforce the right’s minority-mindset, essentially refreshing their efforts rather than stemming them.
Thinking that the establishment of a liberal infrastructure will solve everything deludes us. Belief in the cure-all of an ’06 or ’08 win deludes us. We can have all the thinktanks we want, but if we can’t admit to the fact that we need to re-introduce ourselves to the American people, we’re never going to get anywhere. Every election cycle, we’re going to have the same problem of narcoleptic campaigns and candidates who never seem to connect with the American people because, fundamentally, they believe they don’t have to connect with the American people. A problem the Republicans do not have because they constantly re-introduce themselves. They never stop acting like the minority.
You have to believe that people need to hear what you have to say. Not want to hear it, as in “they’re already on our side so they want to listen to me”, but need to hear: “they need to hear my message because they haven’t heard is before. That’s really it at a core level: when you’re the majority, everybody already knows who you are. It’s the minority that has to work to make itself known. That’s what the conservatives learned in 1964. And it’s what they’ve been doing ever since: acting like the minority. Thinking in terms of local races and long time spans. Sticking together out of a shared desire to survive. Consistently seeking to introduce themselves to the voters.
Politics isn’t about winning elections; that’s merely the visible side of something much deeper. Politics is about influencing thought. And we have not yet begun to deal with that because our arrogant adherence to the idea that we’re the real majority blinds us to the fact that we need to influence thought. When you believe everybody – or a significant portion of everybody – believes the same thing you do, there’s no need to “convert” them.
We have not yet had our “Goldwater moment”. And we won’t gain any significant ground until we do.
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