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Being Right Is Not Enough: What Progressives Can Learn from Conservative Success
Being Right Is Not Enough: What Progressives Can Learn from Conservative Success
Being Right Is Not Enough: What Progressives Can Learn from Conservative Success
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Being Right Is Not Enough: What Progressives Can Learn from Conservative Success

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"Waldman's book is terrific-good sense mustered with evidence, well argued, and sharply written to boot. I agree fervently with almost everything he writes. This is the indispensable book for the 2006 elections."
--Todd Gitlin, author of The Sixties and The Twilight of Common Dreams

"A well-sourced, partisan blueprint for undoing Republican control of the nation."
--Publishers Weekly

"Here's the ticket for Democrats to get back in power: read this book, understand what it means to be a true American progressive, expose conservatives as the mean elitists they are, get tough, and fight back. Nobody paints the strengths of progressives and the weaknesses of conservatives like Paul Waldman."
--Bill Press, author How the Republicans Stole Christmas

"With clarity and passion, Paul Waldman demonstrates persuasively that the forces of the right have not 'taken over the country,' as the media often lazily put it. They've only taken over politics. That can be reversed, and Waldman shows exactly how."
--Michael Tomasky, Editor, the American Prospect
LanguageEnglish
Release dateMay 2, 2008
ISBN9780470362839
Being Right Is Not Enough: What Progressives Can Learn from Conservative Success

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    Being Right Is Not Enough - Paul Waldman

    ___________ 1 ___________

    RETURNING FIRE

    Many liberals are congenitally gloomy folk, and a look at the contemporary American political scene gives them plenty of cause to despair. In 2004, rank-and-file Democrats became more energized and motivated than they had been in decades, as liberal books shot up the best-seller list, millions of new voters were registered in an unprecedented mobilization effort, membership in left-wing organizations surged, and by some estimates more than 10 million people contributed money to a Democratic candidate or a liberal group.¹ Yet a president who had lied to the public to justify an unpopular war, who had the worst jobs record since the Depression, who had done nothing to address the most pressing domestic issues of the day, and who had dangerously low approval ratings still managed to beat their candidate by a not insubstantial margin. Republicans control all three branches of the federal government, not to mention a majority of governorships and state legislatures. The federal courts are stacked with conservative ideologues, an imbalance that will only grow worse through George W. Bush’s second term. The Senate and the Electoral College give inordinate power to small numbers of voters in conservative states, allowing them to finagle victories even when in the minority. The national debate seems easily shifted from the real problems Americans face to distractions like gay marriage, partial-birth abortion, or flag burning, sure to arouse enough anger and suspicion to return Republicans to office. The party that labors on behalf of the wealthy and the powerful adopts a populist pose, while liberals are scorned as the elite.

    Talk to a liberal about this state of affairs, and in short order the discussion will become a head-shaking litany of frustrated questions. How do they get away with it? Why are so many people fooled? For God’s sake, the liberal will cry, we’re so right and they’re so wrong—how has it come to this?

    This book is not about why progressives are right and conservatives are wrong. I may feel that way—and I have no doubt that most who will read this book agree—but that argument is a sermon the choir has heard before. Instead, this book is meant as a guide for progressives, a plan for the convinced to spread their convictions. The success conservatives have enjoyed is a product of neither an inherently conservative populace nor an inherently ignorant one. It is the result of patient planning, clever strategizing, and tireless work by conservatives, and consistent bumbling and wasted energy by liberals. The time has come to level the playing field.

    It was only four decades ago that liberal assumptions and goals set the bounds of reasonable debate, while conservatism lay disgraced and discredited. On Wednesday, November 4, 1964, conservatives woke up to a nightmare. Their candidate for president, Barry Goldwater, had been obliterated, losing by over twenty-two points and winning only six states. Relentless attacks from the incumbent and Goldwater’s own shocking statements had convinced the American public that the Republican candidate, and by extension the people he represented, were dangerous radicals who if given power would drag the country toward nuclear Armageddon.

    In Congress, things were just as bad for the right. Before the election, Democrats held a comfortable 83-seat advantage in the House; afterward, it had grown to a yawning 155 seats. Senate Republicans found themselves in an equally deep hole, numbering only 32 to the 68 Democrats, which left more than 2 Democrats for every Republican in both houses, just as only one-third of the nation’s governors belonged to the GOP. The very idea of conservatism as a viable ideology with an appeal to the American electorate was considered almost ridiculous.

    Thirty-six years later, it was the Democrats who were surveying the wreckage of their once-dominant party. Bill Clinton beat back his tormenters and had a number of notable policy achievements, but his presidency left his party in drastically worse shape than it had been before. When he entered the White House in 1993, Democrats controlled both houses of Congress, a majority of governorships, and a majority of state legislatures. When he left, all those prizes belonged to the GOP, as they do today.

    Just before George W. Bush’s inauguration in 2001, the descendant of the uncompromising conservative activists who drove Barry Goldwater’s campaign stood up to address the crowd at a Republican celebration. Grover Norquist, the head of Americans for Tax Reform, should have been happy—after all, his party had just won the White House, banishing Al Gore, the heir to the Clinton presidency that Norquist had opposed with such vigor. Yet the man many people call the most important Republican activist in Washington didn’t sound happy at all. Norquist told the crowd that the fight wasn’t over because the enemy was still kicking. The Democrats are the Lefties, the takers, the coercive Utopians, Norquist thundered. They are not stupid, they are evil. Evil!²

    More than anything else, the reversal of the years between 1964 and today happened because the faith of the men and women who rallied to Goldwater’s cause remained firm.³ Those conservative activists did not wonder whether they should move to the center or seek to win the hearts of those most opposed to their goals. They did not slink off the political battlefield or tell themselves that if they could not turn everything around in two or four years, then all was lost. They got to work and built a movement. And out of the ashes of defeat, that movement grew slowly and steadily until it became the dominant force in American politics, vanquishing so many liberals in its wake that some began to wonder whether the Democratic Party had a future at all.

    THE MESSAGE IS THE MESSAGE

    Ask an ordinary person what conservatives stand for, and he’ll be able to come up with a few powerful, easily understood ideas: low taxes, small government, strong defense, and traditional values. These are the Four Pillars of Conservatism. Ask him what liberals stand for, and chances are he’ll give you the conservative caricature of liberals: high taxes, big government, military weakness, and moral relativism.

    This is no accident. Some on the left are convinced that conservative ideas are inherently more simplistic than liberal ideas, and thus conservatives have a natural advantage in a public debate dominated by media forums that favor brevity, certainty, and appeals to emotion. Because conservative ideas fit so neatly on a bumper sticker, many liberals believe, conservatives trounce liberals, though liberals are in fact correct on the merits.

    Nonsense. In their full form, conservative ideas are just as complex as liberal ones. Conservative academics and think-tank denizens spend untold hours crafting analyses and arguments to support their goals. This doesn’t mean they’re right, but there are plenty of very smart conservatives who have thought long and hard about what they want to achieve and why. The difference is this: there are lots of other smart conservatives who have thought long and hard about how to reduce those complex ideas to simple expressions of values and beliefs. It is in this area that liberals have failed.

    The American electorate includes some people who study position papers, use multiple news sources, and have a comprehensive understanding of what the parties and the candidates believe. This group, however, is a small one; far more numerous are those whose attention is only occasionally grabbed by politics. Because they have neither the time nor the inclination to assess each issue in endless detail, reaching them requires ideas that can be expressed in simple terms. This is not to say ideas must be dumbed down; there is an enormous difference between the simple and the simplistic, and some of the most powerful political statements in history were expressed simply. Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country is a simple idea, simply expressed.

    The problem isn’t liberal ideas; the problem is liberals. The old saying that a liberal is someone who won’t take his own side in an argument contains some truth; liberals are prone to carefully consider all sides, provide evidence for their claims, and hold out the possibility that someone who disagrees might have a point. Yet that doesn’t mean they don’t believe what they say or are incapable of advocating it aggressively. Liberals engage conservatives in vigorous debate every day; most of them just haven’t gotten the hang of how to do it right.

    Conservatives have also understood that it isn’t enough to describe in simple terms each of the dozens of issue positions that comprise an ideology. A series of simple arguments unconnected to one another doesn’t add up to anything. What conservatives have created is a thematically unified master narrative, a notion we will return to at length later on. When conservatives advocate in favor of or in opposition to a piece of legislation, a candidate, or a social condition, the arguments they make are directly related in both their substance and their expression to a small number of core conservative principles.

    As a consequence, every specific debate reinforces those principles, creating a coherent image of conservatism. When conservatives tell you we need tax cuts so pointy-headed bureaucrats in Washington won’t waste your money, it reinforces the idea that government is a hindrance and a burden to ordinary people. When they argue against gun control by saying people should be able to protect their families with assault rifles, it reinforces the image of conservatives as self-reliant and responsible. When they oppose environmental regulations by extolling the entrepreneurial spirit of small businesspeople, it reinforces the notion that conservatives are friends of Main Street. In each case, one can draw a direct line from the core principle to the specific issue argument; each debate thus enhances and burnishes the image of conservatives and conservatism.

    If progressives are to succeed in recasting their public image, they need to create their own master narrative, to see every debate as an opportunity to shape the images of both progressives and conservatives. They must also realize that in politics, ideas are unable to stand on their own merits and that compelling communication of those ideas is the sine qua non of success. Communicating effectively and persuasively with the public isn’t a messy adjunct to politics, something leaders have to engage in against their wishes so they can go about the real business of governing. It is the very essence of politics, the process that builds and maintains the connections between citizens and their government. A movement that doesn’t know how to communicate its ideas and its identity to the public is doomed to failure.

    Again and again, liberals and Democrats have come before the American public wielding a sensible, pragmatic ten-point plan in the naive belief that the public will examine it and be persuaded. Conservatives and Republicans, on the other hand, have understood that persuasion and the political success that follows it do not flow from the quality of your ten-point plan. Progressives have been consumed with what Aristotle in his Rhetoric referred to as logos, argument based on logic, facts, and reason. Conservatives have focused on the two other kinds of persuasive rhetoric he delineated: pathos, the appeal to emotion, and ethos, the appeal based on the character of the speaker.* It is the latter on which conservatives have built decades of success. As Aristotle wrote, It is not true, as some writers assume in their treatises on rhetoric, that the personal goodness revealed by the speaker contributes nothing to his power of persuasion; on the contrary, his character may almost be called the most effective means of persuasion he possesses.

    If you don’t establish trust through ethos, none of your arguments will be persuasive. Progressives need to understand that it isn’t about your ten-point plan, it’s about you—who you are, what your values are, and why people should trust you. Two thousand three hundred years after Aristotle made the point, it’s time progressives learned this lesson.

    LIBERAL OR PROGRESSIVE?

    Throughout this book, I use the term progressive to describe the ideology of the left in the present and the future, and liberal usually to describe the ideology of the past. In the details of policy, there is little difference between the progressivism and the liberalism of which I speak. I make the distinction to denote a new chapter in the identity and the political fortunes of the American left. The question of what to call ourselves has been the subject of some private debate recently among writers, activists, and political professionals, and I come down on the progressive side for two reasons. The first is that liberal has taken a beating over the last couple of decades, to the point where the connotations it brings up in many Americans’ minds are negative ones: weakness, indulgence of criminal behavior, sexual permissiveness, and a general mushy-headed naïveté, to name a few. The truth of these stereotypes is of no particular importance; the relevant fact is that they exist.

    The alternatives, then, are to fight those stereotypes or to propagate a different term whose connotations can be built from the ground up. The demonization of liberal, of course, did not happen by accident. Not too long ago, even Republicans thought a liberal was a good thing to be. In 1952, Dwight Eisenhower argued that for his campaign to be fully effective, we need in Washington liberal and experienced members of Congress.⁴ Or consider this stirring tribute to liberalism: Let me give you a definition of the word ‘liberal’ . . . Franklin D. Roosevelt once said.... It is a wonderful definition, and I agree with him. ‘A liberal is a man who wants to build bridges over the chasms that separate humanity from a better life.’ The speaker was none other than Richard Nixon.⁵ But twenty years after Nixon made that statement during his first run at the White House, Ronald Reagan began an assault on liberalism, mocking it as an ideology both dangerous to law-abiding citizens and worthy of the distinctive Reagan ridicule, simultaneously friendly and contemptuous.

    It was not until 1988, however, that liberal was finally turned into an epithet, and like most such conservative achievements, it could be accomplished only through the bumbling of Democrats. Referring invariably to Michael Dukakis as the liberal governor of Massachusetts, George Bush defined all that was frightening or unmanly about his opponent as the product of liberalism. My opponent’s views on defense are the standard litany of the liberal left, said Bush on the stump in San Diego. The way he feels, I don’t know if he could be comfortable in a great Navy town like this. I wouldn’t be surprised if he thinks a naval exercise is something you find in the Jane Fonda Workout Book.⁶ Har, har. Reagan chimed in, taunting Dukakis as Liberal, liberal, liberal. Dukakis mustered only weak responses—This election isn’t about ideology, it’s about competence⁷—that did nothing but validate Bush’s attacks. It wasn’t until just days before the election, in a desperate last attempt to change the terms of debate, that Dukakis embraced the liberal tradition of great presidents like Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman and John Kennedy.⁸ By then, though, the damage had been done.

    The final nail in the liberal coffin was pounded home by Bill Clinton. When running for president, the only time Clinton ever spoke the word liberal was when he proclaimed that his policies and ideas were neither conservative nor liberal. Yet he all but declared defeat when he began to use the term this way:

    Bush is trying one more time to sucker the conservative mainstream folks of Ohio by pretending to be anti-tax, when he signed the second biggest tax increase in history, antigovernment when the conservative Heritage Foundation says he raised regulations by more than any president in twenty years, and paint me as some wild-eyed liberal when my state ranks first in the country in job growth, has the second lowest taxes in the country, the lowest state and local government spending in the country and we created manufacturing jobs while he lost 1.4 million manufacturing jobs in the United States.

    Here Clinton has accepted that conservatives are mainstream folks, while liberals are incompetent, profligate tax-raisers—his proof that he isn’t liberal is job growth, low taxes, and low government spending. Like much of what Clinton did, this formulation had positive short-term effects on his electoral fortunes and negative long-term effects on his party and those who support it. Ever since,Democrats have fled from the idea of liberalism as though it were a noxious cologne whose scent would offend the nose of any who came near its wearer.

    Nonetheless, the most acute liberal problem isn’t so much with the public as it is with the chattering class. Pundits of all political stripes consider being a liberal or hailing from a liberal place to be a liability for a candidate in a way that being a conservative or hailing from a conservative place is not. (Given how often the question Can John Kerry win, given that he’s a Massachusetts liberal? was asked, you’d think his home state was some sort of Sodom on the Bay, where children are forced to participate in animal sacrifice and the state government is run by a cabal of anarcho-syndicalists.) As we shall see, this conclusion can’t be based in the matrix of issue positions that make up contemporary American conservatism and liberalism, since on most issues the liberal position is the more popular one. The majority of Americans favor legal abortion, gun control, a higher minimum wage, generous Social Security and Medicare benefits, universal health care, and strong environmental protections, to name a few.

    Yet while the public is hardly conservative on these issues, there is a small but particularly noisy group whose visceral hatred of both liberals and liberalism convinces journalists and pundits alike that liberals are held in near-universal contempt. As political scientists Henry Brady and Paul Sniderman put it in a 1985 study of ideology, liberals do not like conservatives; however, they do not dislike them nearly as much as conservatives dislike liberals.¹⁰ For the staunchest of conservatives, anything that gets one’s blood boiling can and will be described as liberal. For instance, conservatives often articulated their venomous hatred of Bill and Hillary Clinton as an objection to their alleged liberalism. The idea that the Clintons are, in Newt Gingrich’s evocative phrase, counter-culture McGovernicks is a rather tenuous proposition when one considers their support of the death penalty, missile defense, NAFTA, and restrictive welfare reform. And in recent decades, conservatives have grown to dislike liberals more and more with each passing year.¹¹ Sean Hannity once described an illicit marijuana facility as a secret liberal lab.¹²

    Given the talk-show dominance of conservative voices, it’s no accident that the notion that liberalism is a repugnant malady on a par with leprosy is bandied about on a daily basis. While it’s not surprising to hear it coming from conservative blowhards, the idea gets repeated by ostensibly neutral observers as well. In the media echo chamber, statements by ideologues (John Kerry can’t get elected because he’s a Massachusetts liberal) get recycled as questions by journalists (Can John Kerry get elected, given that he’s a Massachusetts liberal?). The result is that conservatives have succeeded in pushing the punditocracy—left, right, and center—to view being identified as a liberal as at best problematic and at worst vaguely shameful. As a consequence, politicians on the left will be forever forced to answer questions about whether they are too liberal.

    This state of affairs may be unjust and unfair, but there it is. The left is thus faced with the Herculean task of rehabilitating the term, one that would take a great deal of time and energy. The alternative is to focus not on changing impressions of what a liberal is but on forming impressions of what a progressive is.

    This brings us to the second reason why progressive is a preferable appellation. Because the term holds no particular set of associations for the vast majority of Americans, the left has the opportunity to convince Americans that progressive is a good thing to be, particularly since the root of the term—progress—is something to which the left can legitimately stake a claim.

    The idea of progress is embraced by all but the most curmudgeonly among us. Not only is the person who desires progress admirable in the abstract, he or she is admirable in a particularly American way, always looking to build, to improve, to advance. One critical element of the progressive project is not only building the articulation of ideology from basic principles, but also tying those principles to the fundamental traits, beliefs, and ideas that lie at the heart of the American creed.

    Progressive also defines its opposite in an advantageous way, something of which liberal is no longer capable. At this stage of American life, the idea that liberals advocate liberty has become muddled to the point where it is no longer a meaningful part of the image of liberalism. Conservatives successfully combined attention to the excesses of political correctness (overblown, but not without some truth) with their own relentless focus on individual rights to make conservatism, in its public image if nothing else, as much the ideology of liberty as liberalism. And though we use the word liberal in nonpolitical contexts to mean free, expansive, and open, its colloquial usage also invokes some of the less popular elements of the liberal stereotype, including permissiveness and moral relativism.

    Just as we have the opportunity to build an image of progressivism, we have an opportunity to build an image of its opposite as the opposition to progress. This highlights the least popular portions of conservative ideology and the conservative coalition: the know-nothing school board member wanting to banish science from the classroom, the intolerant anti-immigrant activist, the puritanical scold telling other people what to do in their own bedrooms.

    One defining feature of conservatism throughout history has been an aversion to change, the desire to keep things as they are. The progressive, in contrast, is an advocate of progress—not simply change for its own sake, but advancement and improvement. This means scientific discovery, invention, improvements in the efficiency of government, and greater education, all linked to the American optimism that foreign visitors so often admire.

    By defining progressivism as a distinct new movement, we also have the opportunity to hold up a rising generation of leaders who relish both policy and politics, who can walk into a room and leave an hour later with a pile of contributions, a long list of volunteers, and a group of voters won over for good. This is no small point, particularly for the electoral fortunes of the Democratic Party. As Slate’s David Plotz pointed out during the 2000 Democratic convention, the current generation of Democratic leaders doesn’t seem particularly interested in or good at the political part of politics:

    The Democratic Party is suffering from a pleasure deficit. Since 1992, the Democrats have been dominated by a politician who adores politics, and the party has thrived because of it. On Monday night Democrats said farewell to President Clinton and handed the party off to Gore, Lieberman, Hillary Clinton, Tom Daschle, and Dick Gephardt. The Democratic leaders showcased in Los Angeles may well be the most earnest, most public-policy-oriented, most intelligent group of politicians ever to head a major party. They are intellectually impressive, and they have the best intentions. But they don’t really like their jobs. They are skeptical of politicking, or bad at it, or both. Gore, ever obedient, has learned to pretend to love campaigning, but it will never be a natural act for him. Say this for George W. Bush: He loves to shake hands.¹³

    The same is true of John Kerry: he might have turned out to be a great president, but he will never be a great politician. And think of the group he beat out for the 2004 nomination: Dean, Gephardt, Edwards, Clark, Kucinich, Graham, Sharpton, and Moseley Braun. With one or two exceptions, not exactly a collection of natural politicians.

    In its 2005 Political Typology study, the Pew Research Center found that, to oversimplify its categorizations a bit, the most conservative Republicans were those most pleased with the Republican Party, but the most liberal Democrats were the least pleased with the Democratic Party. Among the pro-business group referred to by Pew as Enterprisers, 60 percent said the GOP did a good or excellent job of standing up for its traditional positions on such things as reducing the size of government, cutting taxes and promoting conservative social values, a view shared by 63 percent of Social Conservatives. None of the Democratic groups were that enthusiastic about their party, and only 23 percent of the group Pew called Liberals felt the Democratic Party stood up for its traditional positions.¹⁴

    There could be more than one explanation for this finding—party stalwarts like winning, for instance. But the more compelling explanation is that both the conservatives and the liberals are right: the Republican Party has been standing up for its traditional positions, while the Democratic Party hasn’t. Democrats look at their party and see a collection of timid, ineffectual policy wonks who seem to have forgotten what made them Democrats in the first place and who get outfoxed and outfought by their opponents time and time again. At the 2004 Take Back America conference, a gathering of liberal activists, Jim Hightower said to great applause, There are those who say that John Kerry is not liberal enough. I don’t care if John Kerry is a sack of cement, we’re going to carry him to victory. If progressives create a real movement, future Democratic candidates may look to them less like sacks of cement and more like leaders.

    BUILDING A MOVEMENT

    In August 1971, Lewis Powell, who would be nominated to the Supreme Court by Richard Nixon just months later, wrote a memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that provided an action plan for the men who would fund the conservative movement in the coming decades. Powell argued that capitalism was under assault not only from the Communists, New Leftists and other revolutionaries who would destroy the entire system, but also from perfectly respectable elements of society: from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians. Powell told the chamber and those it represented that if they wanted to save capitalism, they had to spend every dollar they could to conduct guerrilla warfare against these seemingly mainstream voices, who were no less a threat to business interests than were bomb-wielding radicals.

    In what could stand as a motto for the conservative movement he helped spawn, Powell wrote, Strength lies in organization, in careful long-range planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and national organizations. Among Powell’s recommendations were that business interests should create their own cadre of scholars to compete with liberal academicians and demand equal time for them; put pressure on universities to hire faculty committed to free enterprise; monitor television news for hostility to the free enterprise system and pressure news organizations when they found it; support conservative scholars in their efforts to publish magazine articles and books; and maintain a network of lawyers to push for business interests in the courts.

    Making the audacious claim that few elements of American society today have as little influence in government as the American businessman, the corporation, or even the millions of corporate stockholders, Powell told the chamber, Business must learn the lesson, long ago learned by labor and other self-interest groups. This is the lesson that political power is necessary; that such power must be assiduously cultivated; and that when necessary, it must be used aggressively and with determination—without embarrassment and without the reluctance which has been so characteristic of American business. Powell told the executives that doing so would require a substantial investment, more than they had ever put toward politics before. Soon after reading the Powell memo, the beer magnate Joseph Coors put up $250,000 for what would become the Heritage Foundation, the right’s premier think tank.

    The degree to which Powell’s memo was actually read at the time is a matter of some debate,¹⁵ but whether it was actually utilized as a blueprint, much of what it recommended has come to pass. Though its analysis of the forces arrayed against American capital may have

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