Early And Often
Well, that was satisfying but, oddly, I didn’t feel a surge of euphoria, didn’t feel compelled to gloat and go all Terrell Owens. Maybe it’s because I’m working this week in Milwaukee and, although the state tends to have a blue tinge, the folks I’m around here pretty much don’t, so it would have been a lonely little party.
I remember, though, working with another client group the Wednesday morning after the 2004 election, the sadness weighing on my chest like pleurisy, and having to sit through their smug smiling and repeating, “It’s a great day in America!” And I had a target-rich environment here, where a fragment of a phone conversation wafted out of someone’s office Tuesday, “..where are we going to move if Nancy Pelosi becomes Speaker of the House?” Although he was joking, it was oddly reminiscent of the pouting from the left in 2004 about moving to Canada.
However, we’ve done no more with this election than stop a careening 18-wheeler by bumping it fortuitously into one of those runaway truck lanes we get every two years, having badly missed the last three. We’re stopped, but we’ve all got whiplash and the cargo has lost much of its merchantability. This respite may be exceedingly brief if we don’t act, before the insurance adjustors, creditors and auctioneers show up, to articulate an alternate reality, one that can inspire those who changed their voting patterns in disgust or protest to participate in a new business plan.
In order to accomplish this, we need a plan, first of all. As I was considering this, I remembered what I thought was a great manifesto for how to rebuild trust and confidence in a progressive agenda penned by Rob at Emphasis Added in the ashes of the 2004 election. In that post, he doesn’t simply splutter rage at the Bush administration - he outlines the shortcomings, some of them systemic and perhaps intractable, in previous periods of liberal ascendancy, and begins to suggest how they may be ameliorated. The following excerpt makes a terrific overall mission statement to build on:
So what is the liberal agenda? Briefly stated, it’s the belief in the affirmative power of government to provide for the common good, in the rights of all Americans to participate fully in society, in cultural expression, and in international cooperation as a way of solving conflicts, with force as a last resort. I firmly believe that the march toward fulfillment of this agenda and America’s embrace of these ideals from 1933-1980, and again during the Clinton years, contributed directly to America’s rise to global prominence.
While I think it’s hard to connect the dots between Carter and Clinton without at least mentioning the Reagan years, I’ll leave it for a different discussion. We need to patiently deconstruct the straw men that people have been trained to fear in a progressive vision, and find ways to articulate it and execute it. There’s a lot of work to do, and not a lot of time to lose in happy-dancing.
