Planting Liberally

At DailyKos, Frank Cocozzelli has started a five-part series called Our Military, which attempts to present a new liberal paradigm for the military, so that members of the military will once again become a liberal constituency.

Part 2 is now available.

The folks at MyDD are putting together a poll which asks a series of questions that most media firms will not ask.

Kudos to them! Polling - especially polling on questions which are not frequently asked - is a great way to drive a story and "create" news.

However, polls are not enough. As Peter Daou pointed out in his "triangle" post last September, blogs will not be able to push a story into the traditional news media unless they have the support of Democratic officials and candidates.

Luckily, the MyDD poll dovetails with a lot of great yeoman's work being done by other parts of the blogosphere, on highlighting and supporting Iraq vets who are coming home to run for Congress. See, for example, Air America Radio, the ActBlue Fighting Dems fundraising page, and kos's weekly Fighting Dems series.

Before the poll gets underway, it's important to get the support of these Democratic candidates, as well as key elected Democrats, like John Murtha, Nancy Pelosi, and Russ Feingold. A commitment from even a handful of these to talk about the poll in the days following its release is as necessary to the poll's ultimate success as any fundraising or poll-drafting efforts.

Moreover, it wouldn't hurt to bring the progressive magazine circuit, including the Nation, Mother Jones, and The American Prospect, online in this effort.

While the liberal movement is busy trying to figure out what to do about the war in Iraq, the conservative movement is busy exploiting the war to reach out to soldiers. Via Jesus' General, New Life Ministries is selling a set of "sexual purity" kits on its website, Every Soldier's Battle. (The General does a great send-up of the kits and New Life Ministries, as always.) From the website:

Every Soldier's Battle is a campaign of New Life Ministries (NLM) to provide military personnel (soldiers), both home and abroad, with resources that will help those soldiers who choose to maintain sexual integrity and sexual purity.

This campaign is fueled by a certain degree of crassness and plain ideological blindness. What's the number one problem that soldiers in a hot war zone have to face? The temptations of sexual impurity, clearly. New Life Ministries is taking that breathtakingly one-sided view of and giving it a special twist, asking soldiers and their families to buy the kits to prevent unfaithfulness while on duty. Of course, real soldiers in Iraq have real problems, not necessarily those which rigid conservative religious dogma says they have. War is an extreme situation which provides soldiers with a host of theological problems - chief among them, is it right to kill and when? Separation from one's family is indeed a major issue for many soldiers; not because of problems of "sexual purity", but because war puts a tremendous strain on personal relationships. Some soldiers are lucky and have a strong network which will support them through hell or high water; others are less lucky, and find that upon return from Iraq, their friends have fallen out of touch, their partners have left them, family members have died, or worse. There is ample room for the religious left to step in and help soldieers and their families grapple with these issues in a way that's not crass and ideologically blind. How can that be achieved, and who will step up to the plate?

(Note: I originally wrote this as a diary on MyDD. I think it's a good illustration of how we can use ideological conversion machines to de-militarize our culture.)

I believe that the Leave My Child Alone campaign has great potential to be an ideological conversion machine for liberals.
If you've been a member of DFA for the past month or so, you've probably heard about Leave My Child Alone (LMCA).  LMCA is an effort to encourage parents to ask school boards not to give their high schooler's contact information to military recruiters.
If you've been reading MyDD for the past year or so, you've probably read a few front-page posts about ideological conversion machines, or social institutions which tend to alter a person's ideology.
I believe that LMCA can do for liberals what the anti-evolution movement did for Christian conservatives: sway people who are otherwise not concerned with politics to become passionate ideologues for our side.

For starters, I'll spell out what I think makes for an ideal ideological conversion machine (ICM).  An ICM is an institution which:

• helps people solve a problem they have
• is local in flavor - that is, it engages people in a problem which they can attack by acting within their neighborhood
• tends to encourage its participants to think about larger issues and more abstract power dynamics
• makes the people it encounters amenable to a particular ideology
• is capable of drawing its participants into a long-term effort

Here is how LMCA meets these criteria:

• The problem in this case - kids are being recruited (and in some cases bullied) by military recruiters; those who join the military are often sent to Iraq.  LMCA allows parents to solve this problem by preventing recruiters from contacting their kids.
• The problem is the degree of friendliness between the school board and the military recruitiers.  If the school board is friendly to opt-outers, parents will have an easier time at defending their kids.  So the problem is local because a local pressure point is the school board.
• I think it's quite evident that there are larger issues at play than recruitment here.  For one, the war in Iraq; as well as the lack of good jobs and opportunities for advancement.
• This is inherently a movement which is anti-militarization, pro-nurturant parenting.  Both of these attitudes are fare more suited to the liberal ideology than the conservative one.
• The long-term aspect of this campaign is perhaps least obvious, but I believe it has potential.  For example, a long-term goal for LMCA participants would be to try and get as many parents in their district as possible to join the LMCA movement; then recruit teachers and school board members; and finally, try to spill over into other districts.  Such a long term effort would necessarily require the creation of a strong, lasting, active citizen's group, which could morph into a more fully-developed ICM.

The long and short of this post is as follows: the more people we can get to opt-out of military recruitment via the LMCA campaign, the better poised we are to get recruits to liberalism.
I also think that we should be cultivating ideas which run along the lines of LMCA: local action which helps people solve a problem and makes them more liberal.  This is the heart of the conservative culture war, and if we are going to make a liberal culture take root and grow, we've got to start with the same tactic.
To get involved with LMCA, visit the Leave My Child Alone website or your neighborhood DFA group.