These two short pieces sum it up pretty nicely for me…

I was reading through Salon… and after wading through the Camille Paglia, I found these two gems regarding our most recent election…

These two pieces are pretty long so if you would prefer I put this stuff behind a cut, please just post a comment indicating that and I will do so…

Ellen Willis is a journalism professor at New York University and the author of “Don’t Think, Smile!: Notes on a Decade of Denial” and other books.
Basically, the first thing is to face up to the bankruptcy of the Democratic Party. They spent four years scapegoating Ralph Nader for Florida in 2000, and at least we’ve heard the last of that. Nader was no factor this year, and that’s not an excuse.

What you see already this year is that Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times and Thomas Frank [author of “What’s the Matter With Kansas?”] are already scapegoating cultural liberals. The argument is that we’ve let ourselves get separated from the heartland. Why don’t all these people in Ohio who are losing their jobs vote Democratic? Well, according to this argument it’s because liberals are all these effete East Coast elitists who are out of touch with “regular people.”

That’s ignoring the fact that the Democrats didn’t run a class campaign, and they’re essentially not a left party on economic issues. They didn’t face up to the fact that in the current circumstances the private sector cannot really create jobs. Not what we used to think of as jobs, anyway, where there’s a living wage and a future and benefits and a pension and people can raise a family. There’s plenty of work, but there aren’t enough jobs.

Part of that is because we’re competing in a global economy, and wages are much less in other parts of the world. Part of it is because of technology — we require fewer and fewer workers to perform the jobs that do exist, and the workers don’t benefit from that at all. They’re just being laid off. Any economic program has to address that issue. Unless you have a public jobs program you can’t solve the unemployment or underemployment problem. Do you think Kerry would have lost if he had proposed a National Security Homeland Protection jobs program?

There are other issues they don’t really directly address, like healthcare and Social Security. There are many businessmen now admitting that the most practical thing to do to solve the healthcare crisis, and control the uncontrollable costs, is national health insurance. Majorities are consistently for it when you poll them, and a lot of “experts” are coming around to this view.

Did the Democrats dare to broach this topic? No, because they’re a neoliberal party. Fundamentally, they have the same economic program as the Republicans, just without the enormous tax cuts that destabilize the economy. They proceed much more cautiously, they understand that there has to be some social safety net, but they basically pursue the same programs. There’s not a clear contrast between the parties on economic issues.

On cultural issues, it’s been a long time since the political opposition in this country really defended freedom, especially sexual freedom and religious freedom. When you read Tom Frank, he seems to see abortion as some kind of peculiar elite concern, but that flies in the face of history. Americans are deeply ambivalent on these kinds of questions, but a great deal of feminism has been absorbed into the culture. All Americans ever hear is the right-wing position: “I think abortion is a terrible thing, but it should be legal.”

For 30 or 35 years, the left — using that term very broadly — has pushed the idea that we have to soft-pedal these social issues. We have to preserve them in court, quietly, but without emphasizing them in the public arena. Religion is the classic example: In 2000, we had a conversation about whether it was appropriate for politicians to display their faith in public, when Al Gore and Joe Lieberman were trying to out-religion the Republicans. In 2004, that issue has gone much further to the right, and we talked about whether it was obligatory for them to display their faith. So we had the spectacle of John Kerry, and Howard Dean before him, struggling to talk about religion and seeming completely inauthentic. If one of them had simply said, “Part of religious freedom is being able to keep your beliefs private,” maybe they could actually have gotten away with it.

The left needs to have a genuinely alternative vision that emphasizes freedom, that emphasizes democracy

In terms of foreign policy, as long as people are really anxious about the economy and about culture, that also reinforces their fear of terrorism. They become genuinely desperate, looking for someone to make us safe, instead of realizing we have to take control of destiny. The debacle of war wasn’t enough to offset that, and neither the neoliberals or the left have a coherent foreign policy

Kerry offered a realist, internationalist, neoliberal foreign policy, but against that Bush scores a lot of points by hooking into what is fundamentally a good impulse: the idea that our relationship to the world must be moral and ideological, not just realist. He channeled people’s impulses that we should defend democracy, and that we should be for the freedom of others, into the idea that thoroughgoing militarism and triumphalism is the way to do it.

This has led to disaster, but the left, on the other hand, has copped out with a knee-jerk pacifist position. Islamic fundamentalism is a real threat, and it must be connected to the war against fundamentalism at home. Again, a solution in the realm of foreign policy involves connecting to cultural issues and not running away from them. As long as the left just says, “get out now” — well, that might work in Iraq, I don’t know, we may just end up abandoning them to a horrible civil war. But it’s not much of a long-term policy.

So we need to realize that the Democratic Party is hopeless. And now that socialism has failed, we need a whole new framework of ideas, in which we recognize that economic and cultural issues are fundamentally intertwined. Moral and cultural issues are important to people; they’re not just a distraction from real stuff. And right now only people’s most conservative impulses are being fueled.

We can’t be in a defensive posture all the time: “Let’s protect Roe vs. Wade” is not enough. We need to defend freedom, which in recent years the left has not been willing or able to do. We’ve let the right define freedom. The left needs to have a genuinely alternative vision that emphasizes freedom, that emphasizes democracy

In terms of foreign policy, as long as people are really anxious about the economy and about culture, that also reinforces their fear of terrorism. They become genuinely desperate, looking for someone to make us safe, instead of realizing we have to take control of destiny. The debacle of war wasn’t enough to offset that, and neither the neoliberals or the left have a coherent foreign policy.

Dan Payne is a Democratic media consultant and columnist for the Boston Globe.
1. Forget the unity stuff. When Republicans lose, they set out the next morning to challenge, undermine and overthrow the Democrats. Democrats are no less united against George Bush than they were the day before Election Day. Stay unified; stay on Bush’s case.

2. Hire a strategist, not a fundraiser, to run the Democratic National Committee. The ability to raise money is valuable, but the ability to design and execute a strategy is crucial.

3. Develop values issues, such as Internet censorship, the export of white-collar jobs, stem cell research, etc. The DNC should send every Democratic official “What’s Wrong With Kansas?” by Thomas Frank. Learn how the Republicans ate our lunch, using values issues to smother economic self-interest.

4. Target baby boomers. This cohort is anti-authoritarian because they grew up during Vietnam, Nixon and Watergate. Now, this demanding audience is facing retirement pretty much clueless. They need (and expect) economic protections, like long-term care and a solid Medicare.

5. Get thee out of Washington. Move the party apparatus out of D.C. Democrats are cut off from the real world and talk to each other too much.

6. Admit Karl Rove beat us. He outsmarted and out-organized unions, 527s and party organizations. Getting anti-gay marriage measures on 11 state ballots didn’t hurt either.