I want to talk about the experience of being a liberal in today’s intellectual climate. Though I’ve always worn my political sentiments close to the surface, I feel that deeper down there lurks a more transcendental set of beliefs which, even in the best of scenarios, struggles to consolidate its sound and fury into neatly paraphrased talking points or spiritual facsimiles of election campaign slogans. They remain despite all the efforts and engineering of our political class to the contrary.
No, these beliefs, I suspect, are what some call feelings, a discovery that — should everything pan out — entails some wildly gratifying ramifications: first and foremost is that perhaps I may actually be cut out to scribe this weekly political column after all. Perhaps. But more importantly is to understand that for one to host and politely entertain actual feelings about politics is an ancient and time-honored rite of democracies, and not many Americans can do it anymore.
Understandably, a visceral feeling of politics is in conflict with our American pragmatism, with the efficient economy of our ideas. After all, what upstanding American, sorely tired from overwork and underpay, pushing his psychic shopping cart through the political dogma aisle of the ideological supermarket, could resist the shiny labels and promises of easy digestion attached to the mind-numbingly stupid political products and aphorisms such as Governor Perry’s bold thesis, “Social Security is a Ponzi scheme?” Or banker/minister hybrid Herman Cain’s “9-9-9 Plan” to replace federal tax code with a cocktail-napkin conjecture that somehow manages to be both more regressive and less lucrative than the system it purports to replace?
These products are fast-burning and often come coated in the sticky-sweet cinnamon rhetoric of Cold War-era moral pornography: Be like us. Buy this idea. To consider the competition, or even to hesitate or consult your feelings, is on par with treason. Glenn Beck melodramas and NeoCon speeches aboard aircraft carriers come to mind.
What do the ‘realer’ alternatives taste like? More often than not, they’re pretty bitter. Perhaps you share in my trepidation at what has become of the alleged era of a New Left supermajority and the broad liberal mandate we all spoke about when President Obama took office.
Today it seems one only hears this sort of rhetoric among those diverse and aimless throngs of Occupiers coalescing about bourgeois landmarks throughout the country. Or perhaps you felt a similar revulsion during August’s debt crisis when I saw my President, the most progressive Democrat in generations, offer to pay for the ruinous Bush tax cuts by handing John Boehner a budgetary axe pointed at the health care, public savings, education and safety of the American people. I do admire the tenacity with which Obama pushes back against this present bout of absurd — and in my opinion deeply racist — Congressional gridlock, but this feeling that some profound betrayals are transpiring behind closed doors of traditionally liberal Democratic offices is undeniable.
So here we arrive at last, to a politics of pounding headaches and uneasy stomachs as those of us without a manufactured ideological indoctrination try to make some sense out of the national debt, immigration policy, tax reform, oil spills, wars for profit and medical marijuana. Already the loonies are out and foaming — see Michele Bachmann’s recent speculation that Democratic presidents cause influenza outbreaks — and the election is still more than a year away.
More than a year away. For us liberals the most compelling recourse to action would seem to be a mirror of what we feel inside, to curl up into a ball and wait out the storm. Alas, there is some hope in this notion of a storm: storms must end, and eventually, those who speak most thoughtfully tend to displace those who merely speak the loudest.