Liberals should spend more time defending their ideology and attacking the conservative ideology; the initial avenue for such a discussion should be in popular books. We can follow the model used by
Don't Think of an Elephant! to hit the top of the bestseller list. We can expand on it, and bolster the liberal blogosphere, by using the massive intellectual resources of the liberal blogosphere.
Recently the
The American Prospect compared the way liberals talk about conservatives and conservatives talk about liberals:
Liberals may write best-selling books about why George W. Bush is a terrible president, but conservatives write best-selling books about why liberalism is a pox on our nation (talk radio hate-monger Michael Savage, for instance, titled his latest book Liberalism Is a Mental Disorder).
Indeed, large portions of the conservative movement can be understood as an effort to crush liberalism in all its manifestations. Conservatives understand that their main enemy is not a law, government program, or social condition they don't like. Their main enemy is a competing ideology, and that is what they spend their time fighting.
In contrast, liberals spend very little time talking about conservatism. They talk about their opposition to President Bush or the policies proposed by the Republican Congress, but they don't offer a critique of conservatism itself.
And indeed "talking about conservatism" is exactly what this site is for.
Kevin Drum elaborates and, I think, points us at a stunning weakness of the right:
It's not just the term "liberal," either. Conservatives have also done a masterful job of demonizing, for example, "feminist," "environmentalist," "trial lawyer," and "labor union," despite the fact that sizable majorities of Americans support equal rights for women and stronger environmental rules, and equally sizable majorities are helped far more than harmed by trial lawyers and labor unions.
And that is precisely the problem. After forty years of conservative movement-building, conservatism remains a largely negative ideology.
Many of conservatism's grand ideas are just intellectual fodder meant to antogonize liberals and illustrate the conservative ideology by example - take private school vouchers, for example. As a matter of uniform policy, they are doomed to failure, because there aren't enough private schools to educate even a fraction of the country's children. As a matter of politics, they are genius, since they illustrate a basic conservative tenet (faith in the market), the drive a wedge in the liberal urban coalition, and they are a stark contrast from current policy. I hardly need to elaborate on how the neo-conservative holy grail, the war in Iraq, failed miserably when push came to shove.
Instead, the bedrock of conservatism is attacking liberalism. Just read an Ann Coulter book or listen to an hour of Rush Limbaugh and you'll see what I mean. It's a relentless, persistent effort to demonize an entire political group and that group's ideology.
Lately we've seen an opening - in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, we've started to talk about how the problem is not a failure of a particular government bureaucracy, or a particular failure of planning or allocation of resources. Many liberals see the disaster in New Orleans as an indictment of conservatism writ large, as well they should. (See the Rude Pundit's three part series -
here,
here, and
here - for a particularly devestating example.)
Now is the time to start writing books attacking conservatism. We can start with the opening of Hurricane Katrina, elaborating in detail how conservatism, as a movement and an idelogy, failed the people of New Orleans. We can continue by talking about the Iraq War and how conservatism created that debacle as well. But throughout this discussion, we should keep one thing in focus: we must propose an alternative. The
liberal ideology is an intellectually rich set of concepts. We need to defend them and fit them to today's problems.
A reader at MyDD asks how we can make this happen.
Frederick Clarkson provides an interesting solution. He suggests that liberals can use small, independent publishers like Chelsea Green, and follow Chelsea Green's model with
Don't Think of an Elephant!:
"We did this by partnering with progressive activist and indy media groups, to launch the book via e-mail blasts and on various web sites, like MoveOn.org, Democracy for America, Apollo Alliance, Jim Hightower, GreenFestival, AlterNet and more. We also got a lot of help from the blogs, like DailyKos and BoingBoing. We published a book about new, progressive ideals, and rather than going the traditional and lengthy turn-your-hair-gray publishing route (calling on galleys, sales reps, early reviews, and ads), we went directly to progressives to get Lakoff's book out into the world. It worked. We created a new publishing model. And we're not shy about telling you that Chelsea Green and Mr. Lakoff have made a very nice chunk of change."
Essentially, the idea is to use the existing liberal network to promote the book. I would add that what really made this model take off is the prominent place DToaE! received in the January Democracy for America meetings - each meeting organizer received a DVD summarizing the book and was asked to discuss it with her group. The result was an overnight boom in framing discussions at places like
The Frame Shop and
DemSpeak (and DailyKos, of course.)
I would add that there's a new dimension we can add to this model - online book writing. Software packages like
Civic Space Labs (on which this site runs) and wikis make the collaborative publishing of a large body of knowledge by many individuals in loose coordination possible. Witness the success of
Wikipedia or the
dKosopedia, for example.
In fact, the first few anti-conservative books might be really easy to write, since so much of the content has already been written, and the authors would probably be happy to get the royalties. In essense, two or three individuals could coordinate the compilation of all the Katrina-related blog posts on major liberal blogs. The main criterion for inclusion in the compilation would be that the blog post would have to be a direct indictment of conservatism, not just a slam on Bush or Michael Brown or FEMA. Once all the content is compiled, it could be edited down to a cohesive book. Call it "How Conservatives Failed New Orleans". For the cover art, use the infamous graphic of New Orleans underwater with Grover Norquist's awful "drown the government in a bathtub" quote superimposed. Pump it through the mill of liberal blogs and national advocacy groups, and overnight you have The Liberal Response to Hurricane Katrina.
Where do we go from there? Rinse and repeat on the Iraq War. Then use the money to fund more anti-conservative books. Oh yeah, and make sure the bloggers who contributed content get richly reimbursed for their contributions. Before you know it, we'll have our own liberal media empire.
