Left, Right, & Wrong

I began reading this and it read like some right wing writer squeezed himself into the Progressive section and began ranting about what it wrong with how the left is dealing with the Moral Issue. See, I agree with Keiser's assessment of what it is missing from the rhetoric landscape painted by the left... Then I began thinking: "what left?" There is nothing to hope from the Democratic Party (although perhaps with Dean in Charge... who knows).

"If there is anything the left fails to appreciate, and that politicians on the right exploit with unerring tact, it is the nature of that woman’s struggle. I mean the class nature no less than the moral nature. You may call it universal if you wish, because it is common to parents everywhere and, in fact, to anyone who loves anything at all, but the struggle to preserve what you cherish becomes especially acute when you live in poverty, or close to poverty, when your well-kept prefab sits on its half-acre lot a quarter mile up the road from the shack with all the dogs. Or, tougher still, when you live in the shack with all the dogs and try to teach your kids not to treat animals like the little sadists up in the prefab house. Sophisticated people of independent means can afford to be disdainful of lower-class attempts at “respectability,” chalking it up to religious prejudice or provincial narrowness, but when their own kids come anywhere within the smell of social dysfunction, they have the private-school applications in the mail. To be sure, the private school they choose will be very “diverse,” which is to say, diverse according to every criterion but class. There will be that very nice boy from the Philippines, but there won’t be any rough boys from Podunk."

Left, Right, & Wrong

We come back to an observation (a true and accurate one at that) about the Democrats and their projected persona... and how true it is that the Democrats did not show the vitality and the single mindedness of the Right.

“You know where I stand,” George W. Bush said any number of times before his 2004 electoral victory, and I certainly did: on the wrong side of every issue. But did voters know where the Democratic Party stood or, more to the point, on what it stood? Did it stand on anything? If the question offends you, permit me to ask another. Had Howard Dean been an evangelical Christian with an evangelical Christian base, would his followers have deserted him because his Iowa holler made him “unelectable”? Or would they have closed ranks behind him because his stand on the Iraq war made him right?

The underlying assumption of course is that it is possible for the Liberal Mind to be single minded, focused and dismissing of any opposing view--and going after extinguishing any opposition with a vengeance. This sort of attitude may be too much to ask. Can the Liberal Mind accept Religion and Religiosity as a tool to achieve ab end? That may also be too much to ask. That would mean to forgo certain "values" such as a woman's right to choose, gun ownership, warmongering, right to marry and benefit from a committed relationship no matter the gender of the participants in that Social Contract, etc...etc....etc...

Perhaps it is that the Liberal camp is condemned to play the part of a perpetual player who only participates from the side lines screaming foul hoping to force the debate's direction and content to include something other than pure talk of profits and bottom lines to include something humane.