John Quiggin makes my inner philosopher very happy. He takes a worthy swipe at John McCain’s foreign relations credentials and makes a good point about diplomacy in the process (via L,G&M).
Typically, I would have a lot to say about this, but I have to go out and see if anyone else in this town likes to Drink Liberally. The comments are especially good. A couple of the commenters draw pointed attention to the limitations of rational choice thinking, which is something we need to do more often in our political discourse.
Filed under: Community, Mississippi, Politics, Progressive, Strategy | Tags: activism, Alabama, New Media
Thanks to everyone who’s read what I’ve been saying here and at Left in Alabama over the past week.
You Left in Alabama folks ought to read the comments here if you want a little encouragement. We got a reader who makes phone calls!
I don’t think we have the support we need to go forward with the plan I had in mind in my last post. But, I’ll be sharing more with those of you who agreed to support it, and making a detailed plan for it. Once we have to people we need to do it, we’ll go forward. So be patient and keep the conversation going. I have to slow my pace a bit and start encouraging the relationships to form that we need to go forward. I’m proposing that everyone who’s in favor of forming a close relationship between Left in Alabama, Cotton Mouth, WriteChic Press, and Pine Belt Progressive to be sure and visit these sites and link to one another as often as you can. As we do this, we also need to bring other Mississippi and Alabama blogs into our coalition.
I also propose that everyone from these four blogs support three blogs which are not part of our community. I’m choosing these blogs for specific reasons. They do good work, and they don’t get massive comments. So if they pick up even four or five regular commenters who are coming from our community, they will notice. So comment there when you have time. Give them feedback on their work, and link to them when you can. If you don’t have time to support all three, become a regular commenter at the one you like best. It’s important to add value to their blogs and give them feedback. Once they get to know us and we get to know them, perhaps they’ll have things to share with us that might help us encourage the growth of our community. Here’s a list:
I’m also proposing that we do simple things to help one another out. Here’s a very simple thing: If you see a post with no comments on any of our four sites, leave one. It doesn’t have to be long. Posting a question is a good way to encourage a discussion to develop. Remember, it’s easier to join a discussion than to start one, and we want causal readers to get engaged. Use this thread to continue the discussion we’re having.
Update – See my diary on this at Left in Alabama, and my comment extending the invitation to the bloggers and readers of Cotton Mouth.
I’ll be around to catch up on comments on Sunday afternoon.
Filed under: Blogs, Civil Liberties, Community, Economy, Elections, Environment, Human Rights, Iran, Katrina, Media, Mississippi, Politics, Pro-Choice, Progressive, Strategy, war | Tags: activism, Alabama, New Media
If you want to be the New Media voice of the New Southern Left in Mississippi and Alabama you can be.
If you want a revolution in media affairs, right here where we live, you can have one.
Are you ready to show the nationwide progressive movement that we are just as committed to taking our country back as people in Philly and New York and L.A.?
I’ve got you’re compelling new media narrative, neatly framed and ready to roll. I’ve got your target audience. I know where to bring the traffic. I cannot release the story until I’m sure a few people are willing to trust me enough to say what I ask them to say and say it to the people I ask them to say it to. If enough people are willing to help, it shouldn’t cost anyone much of time or energy.
This moment is ours. If you want to join with me and seize it, leave a me a comment here and let me know you’re in. If you’re a registered Left in Alabama member, read this proposal, take the poll, and leave a comment.
I’m giving until it hurts here. I’m begging for support.
Left in Alabama? Cotton Mouth? WriteChic Press?
Alert Readers click links. They also leave comments and thank outstanding bloggers like MEC when they spotlight the issues we care about.
Filed under: Civil Liberties, Community, Mississippi, Politics, Progressive, Strategy, Surveillance State | Tags: Alabama
(there’s a nice song there)
Happy Friday!
Filed under: Blogs, Civil Liberties, Community, Human Rights, Mississippi, Politics, Progressive, Strategy | Tags: activism, Alabama
Welcome, Left in Alabama readers and other progressives! By now you’ve probably read what I have to say about getting organized to fight tooth and nail against movement conservatism in the south. I want you to think about this: Every dollar the GOP spends in Mississippi or Alabama is a dollar they can’t use in Florida or Ohio. So If we make them spend one more dollar in our states than they would if we weren’t here, we’re making a positive contribution.
Think of Left in Alabama as a progressive village struggling to survive in the heart of Red Nation. We want it to grow into a thriving town as quickly as possible. Think of Pine Belt Progressive as a tiny base camp from which to survey the landscape just beyond the horizon of the LiA village and choose the site for our next one. Right now they are connected by a tiny path. We need to widen that path into a road. Here is something easy we can do to widen the path, and what we all get out of it.
Lots of people are uncomfortable setting up accounts at internet sites, for a lot of reasons. I think Left in Alabama may have some readers who would comment if they could use a pseudonym in an open forum. Pine Belt Progressive can be a place for these readers to go and communicate with the writers in the LiA community.
Comments give a blog legitimacy. Blogs with empty comments threads look vacant, no matter how useful or well-designed they are. Casual readers are much more likely to comment on a post if they see a conversation already under way. They are much more likely to come back a second time if they get the idea that someone lives here and people are paying attention to what this blog says.
So, if you’ll come and comment on my work here to help me bring more Mississippians into the conversation, I will make a habit of featuring your best diary entries and discussions here in posts that also link to other blogs. That will get them out on the massive WordPress category indexes, and will allow people to find them with trackbacks. I will also use my diary from time to time to call LiA’s attention to useful conversations from the PBP discussion threads.
This is the first step toward developing a network of Alert Readers all across these two states who will help us find-tune our messaging and make the most of opportunities to take concrete, local action for positive change.
So here is my proposal: Drop a comment on this thread. Say nice things about Left in Alabama readers. Welcome Mississippians our larger community. Talk about how utterly cool Monkeyfister is. Or how insane John McCain is. Ask a question. Or say whatever clever thing is on your mind. Everyone has something to contribute. Your first comment will be moderated. After you have one comment approved, you’ll be free to post at will. I have to work this afternoon, so your initial comments won’t appear until this evening. Please drop a comment, and then check back tonight or tomorrow to see what sort of discussion might develop.
I cannot express how happy it would make me if one of you enterprising Left in Alabama bloggers published a response to me in your diary discussing the ideas I’m offering. It’s a good idea to train ourselves to have those sorts of exchanges. The more we write about this, the more likely people are to join the conversation.
Small steps, folks. It’s all about small steps. If we want the Constitution and the Republic to survive, we have to try and take a baby step every day.
____________________________________________________________
Suggested reading: Orwell’s Politics and the English Language is classic which speaks directly to the issues we’re struggling with today. It will teach you how to argue against conservative talking points more effectively and show you some things that will help you be more wise to the sorcery of the mainstream media. Forget what you learned about him in high school and read this essay in light of the conversation we’re having. If you’re familiar with it already, I suggest reading it again. If you’ve never heard of it, I suggest reading it, thinking about it for a few days, and reading it again. It has immediate practical application. It’s good fuel for comments. If you enjoy literature a much as you enjoy politics, you might even find a good topic for a blog post.
Filed under: Blogs, Community, Elections, Mississippi, Politics, Progressive, Strategy
Remember Monkeyfister? The blogger who put together the blogswarm to help people when all those tornados plowed through the Mid-South back in February?
The primary battle is driving poor Monkeyfister to distraction.
Monkeyfister has one of the awesomest mission statements in all the blogosphere.
Close ranks. Control Damage. Attack McCain. Build Communities.
___________________________________________________________
Filed under: Community, Mississippi, Politics, Progressive, Strategy | Tags: activism, political organization
I have a project that might make us stronger and more organized if you’re interested. You can read the basic idea at Left in Alabama. I’d like you to read and consider it. If it’s something you’d like to discuss, feel free to use the comments thread here.
Filed under: Blogs, Community, Mississippi, Politics, Progressive, Strategy | Tags: Alabama
Left in Alabama front-paged my Easter message today. I’ll be doing some diary posting over there from time to time.
Those of you who have been keeping tabs for a while (I know you’re out there, lurkers!) should bookmark or blogroll Left in Alabama if you haven’t already. You newcomers should take a look and do the same.
“Why Left in Alabama?” you ask. “Why not that excellent Cotton Mouth blog?”
It isn’t because I don’t love Cotton Mouth and wouldn’t be honored to write there. It’s because we need two quality Mississippi blogs working together. And because Cotton Mouth has a good stable of quality writers already. (Keep your eye on that awesome trio of J’s — John, Jeff, and Jake.) Also, it’s because Mooncat is awesome.
There’s a method to this madness. A strategic method. That will become more clear in time.
______________________________________________________
grasshopper: We’ve got to get you in this game, girl!
Filed under: Civil Liberties, Politics, Progressive, Religion, Strategy | Tags: theocracy
It is in the best interest of Christians in the U.S. to argue for more separation of church and state, not less. This ground has been thoroughly covered in the wider discourse. If we do not enforce strict separation in our republic, we Christians will soon find that we are no longer able to exercise our religion freely. I made this argument last month as part of a larger discussion of Christianity and theocracy. If you poke around at BAT for a while, you’ll likely find someone making solid observations about the relationship between free exercise and separation.
In my last post I argued that religious bigotry enables and reinforces racism and sexism, and I identified proponents of theocracy as key agents in the Conservative Movement’s success in shifting the Overton Window toward the extreme right. I am pleased to find that Dan at Fitness for the Occasion is also thinking about the Overton Window.
I am not prepared to endorse everything Dan says, but he is essentially correct about the Overton Window and the way the battle for religious freedom is fought. I want to accept his argument for the purposes of this post and think about why Christians might want to question the wisdom of taking an oath of office on the Bible. We can divide Christians in politics into a couple of groups based upon how they operate. This post is not addressed to the sort of Christians who take a “do what’s expedient and repent later” approach. I will leave questions about whether or not this method is truly compatible with the Christian way for another day (and I will have something to say to this group eventually).
I am speaking now to Christians who take the New Testament seriously and make an honest effort to follow Jesus’ example in everything they do, and who seek office in order to do the sort of good that is suggested by “love thy neighbor as thyself.” These people really need to consider whether or not it is advisable to take the oath of office on the Bible. I believe there is evidence in the scripture to suggest that this is not, in fact, a Christian thing to do. Jesus admonishes his disciples teaches us not to swear oaths at all:
But I tell you Do not swear at all, either by heaven, for it is God’s throne (Matt 5:34, NIV)
. . . Simply let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes’ and your ‘No’ be ‘No;’ anything beyond this comes from the evil one. (Matt 5:37; recommended: verses 33-37)
I believe this admonition applies to all who would call themselves members of the universal body of Christ, and it is re-iterated in the Epistle of James:
Above all, my brothers*, do not swear — not by heaven or by earth or by anything else. Let your ‘Yes’ be yes and your ‘No,’ no , or you will be condemned. (James 5:12, NIV).
These passages ought to raise serious questions for committed Christians who have dedicated their lives to public service. They first ought to raise a question about oaths in general. If I were elected to public office, I would have to ask myself how I could possibly do the sort of good I am supposed to do with the authority of my office if my first official act is to break a clear commandment of Jesus. I might resolve that question by choosing to “affirm” rather than to “swear.” Some will say this merely a matter of semantics; I disagree.
However I resolve the question of oaths in general, the question of whether or not to place my hand on a Bible to offer my oath or affirmation would be significant for me. Here are some reasons why. First, I do not regard the physical book — the cover and pages — as sacred. It is the words and meaning that are sacred. The power of God does not “rub off” on a person who touches the Bible. One must read it and internalize its message to receive the power. So, placing my hand on the Bible adds nothing to my affirmation. It does not bind me any more firmly than a simple promise, and God sees me make that promise whether I have my hand on the Bible or not.
The insertion of the Bible into this political ritual is, in my opinion, for show, and I find it unseemly to use a Bible in this way. When we use the Bible in this way, we are confusing the spiritual with the temporal in a way that is not pleasing to God. When we use this Bible in this way we are also making some implicit assumptions that we ought not make. We are assuming that everyone we represent is a Christian, which will never be true; and we are assuming that God has sanctioned our political system in a way that he most definitely has not. Our political system is a work of free-willed human beings. It is only a work of God in the sense that everything can be said to be His work. I think that when we use the Bible to legitimize our worldly power games, we are tempting him to teach us a lesson.
I am, of course, sensitive to the fact that, if we resist this questionable use of our holy text, our political enemies will use that decision against us. To that objection, I can only say that our faith isn’t worth much if we can’t do what Jesus advises us to do and trust God to support us. I think if we refuse to allow the Bible to be inserted into our politics, and we back up our objection from the Bible itself, most reasonable Christians will understand what we are getting at.
*Some translations read “brothers and sisters” here, and to the best of my knowledge that is a legitimate reading of this passage.
Update: I have this in a comment below but it’s an important enough point to attach here.
Notice that when Dan identifies the problem the use of the Bible for oaths poses, and talks about it as a separation activist, your reaction was “yeah,” but we’re just stuck with that one.
And notice how your perception of the problem changes when you read my post. When a Christian explains the problem, and uses the Bible to back it up, refusing to use the Bible for the oath seems much more possible, if only for a second. It’s still a radical idea, sure. But no longer completely beyond the realm of possibility.
That’s shifting the Overton Window. If you want a better world, the first thing you have to do is persuade people to imagine that it’s possible.
Filed under: Politics, Religion, Strategy | Tags: bigotry, political theory, sexism
I am sensing a subtle change in the discourse, even here in Mississippi. The political landscape is shifting. Young people are paying attention to politics. Older people are questioning long-held assumptions. Progressives are getting organized and learning to be assertive. I believe people of good will have more and better opportunities to make real changes in this country than we’ve had since the early 90s. We need to make the most of these opportunities.
We are faced with some uncomfortable truths. Racism and sexism are still alive in this country. A lot of people have been complacent (perhaps even fatalistic) about them for quite a few years now. We need to start thinking about them again.
David Neiwert has a very thought-provoking post on racism that I think provides a good starting point for beginning to evaluate race relations in the here-and-now and figuring out how to start making progress on racism again. I also recommend the comments thread.
Echidne has a post on sexism that I think does a good job of pointing out some things that are very helpful to anyone interested in understanding sexism in these 21st Century United States. IMO, the comments thread on this post is very intersting reading.
A word about these two bloggers. Dave has assembled an impressive body of work, and his credentials are impressive, too. Orcinus is one of the first blogs I discovered in the dark days of the run-up to the war. Rush, Newspeak, and Fascism, which you can find on his sidebar, really opened my eyes. He knows the far right and he knows the media. Intimately. Echidne is also a long-time fave of mine. I trust her powers of observation, and her understanding of gender relations, as much or more than any of the great writers who post on the big feminist blogs.
Here’s a third piece of the puzzle. The histories of race and gender bigotry in this country are long. A deep, ugly, and persistent strain of religious bigotry is entertwined with them and enables them both. I suggest that we need to start thinking about these three separate historical narratives as related. What do they have in common? How do they reinforce and enable one another? Are there things we can do to that will help reduce them all at once? I am not sure. But I have a theory about where they all converge.
I ask a simple question: What are the people who I have met that fall into the category of religious, racial, and sexist bigots all at the same time like? My answer: Far right Christians who go by various names. Dominionist theocrats. Evangelical Fundamentalists. Christian White Supremacists. This is not a monolithic group, and I have named only the most extreme elements. It’s a lot of different organizations. Some of them excel at seeming “mainstream.”
These are the people exerting the social pressure that make it so easy for Conservative Movement elites to push the Overton window to the right. Expose their connections to the so-called “moderate” wing of the Republican Party, and most decent Christians will be outraged by those connections. Show how their ideas: Their political theory, their theology, their economics, and their various ideologies of hatred are used by the warmongers and the profiteers to construct the grand narrative of “social conservatism.” Connect them to Reagan. Connect them to Iraq. That’s how you win the game in the short term, and it is how you win the South in the long-term.
I know this isn’t a perfect argument, but I think there is something in here worthwhile. Will someone help me see these pieces of the puzzle more clearly, and assemble them into a coherent whole? Theocracy, and the sort of political ideas that I call theocracy-lite (see: the Mike Huckabee campaign) seems to be the place where our most pressing social and political problems converge.
This is the first of a series of posts for the latest installment of Blog Against Theocracy. At some point this weekend, I’ll write the post that actually gets linked to the BAT blog.
Laura Flanders makes an interesting comparison between the civil rights and conservative movements:
It was that movement which made it impossible for LBJ to try, however feebly, to accommodate Fanny Lou Hamer at the 1964 convention, that movement which literally changed the faces in politics, that movement which made the candidacy of Barack Obama possible, as the later Feminist movement would Hillary Clinton’s. It’s that movement the Reagan-Right learned from so well and today’s progressives would do well not to forget.
The long-term legal strategy adopted by the NAACP and other civil rights groups to desegregate public facilities was one of the most critical elements in the success of the civil rights movement. I’ve been thinking for a while that it would be interesting to compare this strategy to the long string of cases brought by conservatives over the last couple of decades to overturn the Bill of Rights and concentrate power in the executive branch and see if any patterns emerge from the comparison.
Legal change can be positive or negative, depending on your perspective of a given case. It seems to me that whether you’re using the law to protect rights or to take them away, the basic processes should be the same.
It says exactly what needs to be said in a way almost anyone can make sense of. I can’t find anything about it to disagree with, and I don’t know how he manages to make those posts so short.
A note on the comments: I agree with what Herding Old Cats says in the sense that you probably could say the same things about conservatism. I suspect HOC and I have pretty similar definitions of conservatism. But I think it would be an error to attack conservatism in the context of elections, especially if it were done at the expense of associating the word “Republican” with policies that have made people suffer. Other people have other definitions of conservatism. Conservatism isn’t governing the country. Republicans are.
The way to win is to take all those things Matt said in his post and find creative ways to hang them around the republicans’ necks every day from now until election time. Do that and come election day, it will be time to stand back and watch them sink.
Conservatism is a root cause of the ways of thinking that produce Republican politicans and the spectacularly punitive policies they prefer. I attack it on this blog every chance I get. I, personally, believe it to be a vicious and obsolete set of ideologies. But this isn’t really an election blog. Attacking the Republican Party is a more sure way to get some Democrats elected. If this were a blog devoted to helping candidates, I would attack conservatism once a week, and attack Republicans three or four times a day.
(Of course, I’ll do my part to help some candidates, but I think what candiates need are people on the ground, because there are already lots of well-established netroots for election organizing. I am convinced that people are one of the big things that have been missing from our campaigns for at least 10 yeas or so. The religious right’s got lotsa people, oh yes).
And think about this: without Republican power, what would conservatism have to do with politics in this country? I say: Not much.
(Eventually, I’ll post some more comments at Cotton Mouth. I ran off almost to Memphis and forgot the stupid password for my Google account. If no one has thought of it yet, someone with more skills than me should Digg! all those This is How We Do It posts.)
John Leek of Cotton Mouth posted a comment to my post here that I found very helpful. I’m not going to excerpt it – it’s easy to locate. Since my counter-comment turned out to be pretty long, and since I think it’s a good idea to move this back to the top of the page and encourage others to join in, here are some further thoughts on the center, liberals, and non-voters.
First, the self-identified center. I feel as though I interact with a pretty fair slice of the population of Mississippi. I think most voters who identify themselves as centrists are weak republican-leaners who don’t pay much attention to politics unless there’s a very big story playing on the t.v., or unless there is an election two or three months away. And I think most politicians who identify themselves as centrists are either democrats who don’t wan’t to use the party lable or republicans who don’t want to associate too closely with the rabid right wing. This is intuition from my own experience. A sufficient amount of polling data that says otherwise might prompt me to revise my statement.
Next, the rhetorical center. I would be very uncomfortable making the statement “Democrats tend not to talk to them,” (“them” being the center), for a couple of reasons. First, the categories “Democrats” and “center” are so broad I don’t see how that claim could ever be settled. Second, if democrats tend not to talk to the center, then democrats must not be a part of the center. The GOP has been very successful at conflating the idea of the (political) “center” with the idea of the (social and cultural) “mainstream.” If I rhetorically place democrats outside the mainstream, while at the same time making a statement that is really too broad to be proven, I yield ground to the republicans that I don’t have to yield. In doing so I make life too easy for them.
Next: The ideological center. There is none. I choose a side or not. If I don’t choose a side, and I happen to lean republican, I feel like a winner (for now). If I don’t choose and I happen to lean democratic, I feel like a loser(for now). But either way, I am not really standing in the center. I’m just declining to choose a side and letting my party preference take over. Party preference and ideology are not the same. They interact in ways that are difficult to predict consistently. Both party preference and ideology can affect issue salience in the mind of an individual voter. It’s a big mess. Eventually, a new ideological center will emerge. The definition of a new ideological center is one of many things that is at stake right now in U.S. politics.
If, hypothetically, it is still fair to talk about a “center” in Mississippi in the sense that we talked about it all through the 90s, that center is shrinking rapidly, and it has no meaningful relationship with the self-identified center. In my opinion, counting on any part of that hypothetical center to matter in elections that are still more than a year away is not a wise thing to do, if the goal is to win those elections. If democrats rely on those so-called moderate-centrist-swing voters to win close elections, this is what I think is going to happen:
The republicans are going to take their fund-raising advantage and use it make the elections about the state flag, civil unions, and those exorbitant social services that we are spending oh-so-much money on. And they’re going to keep doing what they’re good at — they’re going to win with racism, homophobia, and robber baron-style class warfare. And life is just going to keep getting worse and worse for most Mississippians.
John is absolutely right to say that people not seeing a reason to vote doesn’t equal them wanting a more liberal party (especially on so-called social issues). I haven’t re-read my earlier post to see if I said that. If I did say it, I was in error. I don’t think we can know much at all about what those non-voting people want until we get them participating, and I am advocating for more liberal policies across the board here.
If those things — advocating for more a liberal state party and more liberal policies, and getting non-engaged people to participate — simply cannot go hand-in-hand in Mississippi, I’ll learn that lesson soon enough, because I’ll have no local audience. But I think someone needs to try it. It needs to be someone (such as myself) who really believes that more liberal policies are a good idea, who can explain why they think so.
I am well aware of the fact that many of the democrats who are active in the state party organization are not as liberal as me. If my goal was to climb up from the county committee level to a high rank in the party, I would not be able to be as vocally liberal as I am being here. But that is not my goal.
I’m not under any illusions that what I am saying is going to directly influence the party in this election cycle even one whit, but some of my ideas are good. So I am directing many of my pieces here toward the Democratic Party. I am doing my best to be clear about what I think needs to happen for democrats to win, and hoping that somehow the good ideas will find their way to the right ears. I want democrats to win.
I do not believe that I am a curiosity. There must be more like me (well, similar to me). How to find them? How to convince them that if they organize, educate, and participate, they can get themselves into a position to start addressing some issues that desperately need to be addressed? My goal is to find them and convince them.
John’s point about disorganization is well-taken, but I think that 3 decades of marginalization has a lot to do with that disorganization. The whole point of marginalization is to prevent organization.
Now a word about civility: It’s admirable to “fight forcefully with respect.” Civility is fine when everyone is being civil. Where you get into problems with civility is when one side decides that they are going to make a civility a campaign issue, wins, and uses continual appeals to civility to evade legitimate questions about the way they are governing, while all the time holding up every attempt at compromise on the part of their opponents as a sign of weakness and unfitness to govern. The republicans have been doing that for a long time now. I don’t think anyone is going to persuade them to stop by just continuing to play nice.
I really do hope sites like ours will help that organization problem, too. I hope we can find ways to help one another.
Do you you guys know if there is a Drinking Liberally in Mississippi? I checked the other day, and the closest one I was able to locate was in New Orleans.
UPDATE: The title wasn’t working for me, so I changed it.
And, This is How We Do It #6.
If you are involved in an election campaign, or if you ever plan to be, you should read This is How We Do It at Cotton Mouth. It will give you some positive, to-the-point, and level-headed advice on running an effective campaign. It has the added bonus of validating a few of the things I’ve been saying here about the Democratic Party.
Making a list of things that a party needs do is the easy part of developing strategy. Giving practical advice about how that list translate into communication with actual voters is much more difficult. The guys over at Cotton Mouth seem to be focused on winning elections for Mississippi Democrats in the present tense, so please give them a look and encourage them to keep up their admirable work.
This is How We Do It: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
