The Strange Death of Liberal America

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Image from The Field Negro

Recently I looked at a map of my own posts on Technorati and guess what showed up right in the middle of my tag map in bold letters exceeded in size only by George W. Bush? Iraq. I went back through my own list of postings and found that although the number directly related to Iraq is not overly high–in fact it is downright parsimonious in terms of some blogs–it does represent a substantial percentage, easily more than any other single issue.

What I saw in the chart unnerved me. It was as if I had looked into the mirror expecting to see a reasonably nice human face and instead saw a monster, like one of those B-grade horror films where a character sees they are not a person but a hideous thing.

What unnerved me has to do with the origins and purpose of this blog. I started this blog as a supplement to my book, The Strange Death of Liberal America. As my very first post stated, I envisioned the blog to be an extension of the book, a place where I could comment on the new issues that had arisen since its publication.

The mirror clearly told me that somewhere this idea of an online second edition had gone terribly wrong. What I myself had criticized in the book–single issue politics–had infected me. Actually, I would not have even been aware of this infection were it not for two blogging colleagues, Wayne Bennett of the Field Negro and Francis Holland. As members of what is becoming to me the most lively corner of the blogosphere, the Afrospear, they have a knack for making me reflect on why I was blogging.

As some of you know, the central theme of Strange Death is equity, the idea that the fundamental role of government is to keep the playing field level. I believe that, and that alone, is the core value of Liberal America. That view contrasts with the last several decades during which liberalism and the Democratic Party became synonymous with a rather large and fluid list of issues, each driven by an interest group convinced that ITS issue was the most important, an attitude that led many of those groups to institute rigid litmus tests for candidates. It also contrasts with a spate of recent books that have defined liberalism in what to me are vague terms like “the common good.”

As the book notes, the inability of liberals and Democrats to identify their core value has caused the Democratic Party platform to resemble a jerry-rigged contraption, leaving the Party without a central theme or defining set of principles. Quite rightly the Republicans began to call them the party of interest groups. When I was writing the book I asked a Democratic candidate what she was for and she answered, “The environment, jobs, education, health care, gun control..” Then she stopped like she was trying to remember what else went into the list.

One of the most difficult parts of writing the book–and I believe its most original contribution–was to identify the systemic underpinnings of the level playing field. It is one thing to say government needs to keep the playing field level, but HOW does it accomplish that? What issues does it focus on? What institutions, programs and laws MOST allow Americans to achieve that proverbial equal opportunity promised by the American Dream? This lead me to identify four key areas as the cornerstones of Liberal America: voting rights, economic and social justice, educational equity, and media fairness.

Of course, that foursome leaves out a lot of issues dear to the hearts of many interest groups, issues such as the spotted owl, the opening of the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, gun control. In addition other issues such as abortion and gay marriage became reframed by cornerstones such as social and economic justice. I believe very strongly that framed this way, as issues of fundamental equity whose roots lie in the Bill of Rights and other key documents in American history, these issues have more power.

When I started this blog, I envisioned the cornerstones as its central focus. I even went so far as to design logos for them that would accompany each post. Today as I look into the mirror that is my blog map, those issues appear in small type, if at all. Instead Iraq looms over them all. I have become that which I most feared.

In an interview I did with Matt Rothschild of The Progressive last December, he asked me how Iraq fit into the book’s central themes. My answer was and still is that the idea of the level playing field and its cornerstones should govern foreign policy as well as domestic. That the present conduct of the Iraq War meets none of these criteria is obvious. So in that sense it is important as both a foreign policy fiasco and as an indication of the values of this administration.

Still that does not totally explain or justify Iraq posts dominating this blog. When I look at the posts themselves some of them clearly were driven by high-profile events such as the execution of Saddam Hussein and the Iraq War funding bill debate. A few, like the most recent post on suicide among our Iraq troops, grew from issues no one had written about that gnawed at my sense of moral outrage.

But here is where we get to the tough part, the part where looking in the mirror becomes personal. Frankly many of those posts were driven by the day’s headlines and unfortunately a day does not go by without Iraq appearing above the fold. The Strange Death speaks extensively about media seduction and here I was the one being seduced.

I am also ashamed to admit my own tracking showed that Iraq posts tended to generate more readers while posts about the cornerstones did not. Writing to what you think the audience wants is another powerful seduction for writers as powerful as its exact opposite, writing only for your own ego. With this blog that delicate balance has become a little too unbalanced.

The real kicker to all this is that one third of the book focuses on the theme that people of color and women are the ones who have continually held the Democrats’ and Liberal America’s feet to the fire by raising issues about the cornerstones, many of them uncomfortable issues. People like to eulogize Fannie Lou Hamer, now that she is in her grave, but during her lifetime she was a controversial figure who raised uncomfortable questions that black and white folks did not want raised. By not listening more to the uncomfortable questions being raised by contemporary Fannie Lou Hamers, I essentially ignored a third of my own book!

Those Iraq posts that I can justify raised the question of whether Iraq was diverting attention from other important concerns. I wrote “A Tale of Two Cities” about Baghdad and New Orleans and suggested House Speaker Nancy Pelosi should visit New Orleans as well as Iraq. I also criticized the antiwar campaign of Ned Lamont as a single issue effort doomed to failure because it pointedly ignored equity, the cornerstones, blue collar people, people of color.

But as the voices raised against the war have become louder, with polls showing Iraq is the major issue with voters, it has become more difficult to ignore the War’s siren song. It also has become more difficult to say anything original or propose any meaningful resolution of it. At the same time blogs that formerly covered a variety of issues have become dominated by anti-Iraq rants.

This will probably raise a few hackles out there in the blogosphere, but my reading of various blogs suggests most of the posts on Iraq contribute little to the dialogue. After you have read the umpteenth tirade against “this immoral” war complete with four letter words and descriptions of what should be done with George W. Bush, it becomes both stale and unproductive. At best these are op ed essays; at worst egotistical ravings.

But it is the dominance of Iraq on my own blog that makes me most uncomfortable precisely because the people being most impacted by the playing field that has been tilted by the Republicans are frustrated because of the predominance of Iraq posts. In other words, it is me (along with the rest of the whitosphere) who is ignoring the very values I fought for in Strange Death.

A post at The Field Negro came right to the point:

If you want to talk about Iraq,or oil, or campaign finance reform,or deficit/debt..there’s none of that on Field Negro” That would be correct “Charlie”, you won’t get discussions here about the deficit,the national debt, campaign finance reform etc. You know why my progressive friend? Because most black folks out here don’t give a f**k about those issues. We are too busy trying to hold down a nine to five and not get shot on our way home from work to be worrying about your f*****g campaign finance reform.

Curiously, though, it is not only people of color who are perplexed by the Whitosphere’s obsession with Iraq. Having just returned from my son’s college graduation, I can say that white college students are not as angry about Iraq as they were about Vietnam. In fact there were more demonstrations about Darfur (a much worse crisis, by the way) on his campus than Iraq. There have been no teach-ins or symposiums as there were during Vietnam, but they had one on Darfur last year.

As one who lived through the Vietnam years, I have a theory that blogging actually has served to prevent the kind of protests that helped to end the Vietnam War. Instead of taking to the streets, this generation seems to take to its keyboards. Instead of organizing, they seem more comfortable by themselves in front of a computer screen.

I have believed for some time that the Vietnam War helped to derail the Civil Rights and Equal Rights movements by changing the focus of white progressives. The tragedy of the assassination of Bobby Kennedy is that he did get it. Vietnam also shifted the Democratic Party from economic issues and cost it a large hunk of its blue collar base. Somewhere in the rice paddies of Southeast Asia, Liberal America and the Democrats lost their moral compass.

When Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party showed up at the 1968 Chicago convention just as they had in 1964, the cameras that had put them on center stage four years earlier virtually ignored them. They became a footnote to the street theater that remains our most lasting memory of that convention. After 1968, Hamer and the MFDP faded into obscurity. Hamer died in poverty. Yet her vision of a Southern Democratic Party built on grassroots organizing among people of color remains a viable, if unfulfilled vision.

The decline of the MFDP paralleled the decline of the national Democratic Party. I campaigned hard for George McGovern in 1972 and still admire his courage, but in hindsight McGovern was Ned Lamont. Vietnam not only trumped other issues but also put equity and the four cornerstones so far on the back burner that they all but disappeared. The vision of Democrats from William Jennings Bryan to Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt to Harry Truman–and the powerful coalition built around them–began to unravel.

Iraq has begun to worry me much like Vietnam, only this time the playing field has become much more tilted and much more is at stake. The Whitosphere has picked a bad time to turn away from equity to focus on the war just as those cameras did in Chicago. To confirm this I dialed into Technorati, the service that tracks posts. Typing “Iraq War” into the search box I sat for several minutes to find that there are an astounding 1,729 blogs devoted to the Iraq War!

Typing “equity” yielded 1,112 blogs, which at first left me feeling OK until I realized equity is a business/investment term. The irony of this double meaning did not escape me nor did the fact most “equity” blogs dealt more with making money than charity. Voting rights has 54 blogs, media fairness 12, educational equity 6, and social and economic justice 43. Now admittedly this test is a bit unfair in that the words I used in the search could be modified and yield different results.

Yet, as I told Matt Rothschild, Iraq is about equity. My last piece on the high suicide rates among America’s Iraq troops needs to be balanced by some even more appalling statistics. The suicide rates among people of color are a national disgrace. According to the national Child Trends Data Bank, in 2003 suicide rates among Native American teenagers were 24.7 per 100,000, almost double to total for whites (13.3). According to the Centers for Disease Control Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report for June 9, 2006, 24.2% of Hispanic female high school students seriously considered attempting suicide and 18.5% actually made a suicide plan.

If the suicides among our Iraq troops signal something has gone terribly wrong with the war, suicide statistics for Native American young men and Hispanic young women signal a country gone horribly wrong. That candle that we call the American dream has blown out for these young people. They are telling us they have so little faith in our society that they can see no future for themselves.

We also lament the needless deaths in Iraq, not only of Americans but of Iraqis. Yet the violent deaths in Iraq should not overshadow violent deaths in this country. I wrote a post awhile ago about how in one week more people were murdered in New Orleans than in Baghdad. John McCain was parading around Iraq in a bullet proof vest, but actually he would have more need for it if he were a black youth in our inner cities than he would in Baghdad.

According to the Child Trends Data Bank:

In 2003, the homicide rate for black male teens was 58.9 per 100,000, 16 times higher than the rate for non-Hispanic white males (3.6 per 100,000).

Nowhere is that statistic more dramatic than in Philadelphia, which has earned the nickname Murderdelphia. MSNBC reported that as of late April of this year the murder rate in Philadelphia was one per day which at its present pace will exceed last years total of 406 murders. The story’s opening paragraph is worth the read:

A bloody, bullet-filled weekend left 11 people dead across the city, where drugs and disrespect have trumped brotherly love and the murder rate is on pace to be the highest in a decade.

According to the Global Securities web site, the total U.S.-reported deaths in Iraq in 2006 were 78. So if you are a young black man you are safer in Iraq than Murderdelphia. MSNBC observes:

Most of Philadelphia’s killings are by gunfire, most involve young black men and most are the result of arguments, often over drugs but sometimes over trivial insults or perceived slights.

If we think of Murderdelphia as a war zone like Iraq, a frontline on the war against terror, ask about the money spent in our own cities vs Iraq. I wager to say we are budgeting more for Baghdad than we are for Philadelphia or all of America’s inner cities. We have hired all sorts of independent contractors to rebuild Iraq’s schools and infrastructure such as water and electricity, but New Orleans still awaits any massive federal rebuilding efforts long after Katrina.

Perhaps one reason Iraq dominates the Whitosphere is that blogging about Murderdelphia is a lot more difficult than blogging about Iraq. Iraq is clearly a total screw-up on the part of the Bush Administration. Finding yet another scandal or another bad policy decision is like shooting ducks in a barrel. Murderdelphia is ultimately about us, meaning we are forced to gaze into the mirror.

Young black men are killing each other at an appalling rate and few in the Whiteosphere seem to care. Every day the media publishes the names of those killed in Iraq, but do they publish the names of those killed in Muderdelphia? MSNBC invokes an old stereotype when it focuses on drugs. At least in my city, many of the murders involve people including young children who have nothing to do with drugs.

If we do not resolve the craziness in Murderdelphia, we will have lost an entire generation of young black men to either death or prison. Our inability to stop the murders represents a much more serious indictment of American democracy than anything going on in Iraq. When young men with guns give up on democracy it should send shudders down all our spines for it signals a fundamental breakdown the likes of which we have never seen before. The playing field isn’t just tilted, it doesn’t exist in the minds of these young men.

This is where the blogosphere could perform a valuable task, for a constructive dialogue among thousands of creative minds might just uncover a new perspective on the problem and maybe even a solution. Quite simply the future of our country is at stake. Four hundred murders in a year in one city symbolizes an epidemic eating away at democracy’s cornerstones, each bullet creating a hole that makes them resemble Swiss cheese.

Four years ago, a distinguished panel of the American Political Science Association Task Force on Inequality and American Democracy wrote:

Our country’s ideals of equal citizenship and responsive government may be under growing threat in an era of persistent and rising inequalities. Disparities of income, wealth, and access to opportunity are growing more sharply in the United States than many other nations, and gaps between races and ethnic groups persist. Progress toward realizing American ideals of democracy may have stalled, and in some areas reversed.

According to the famous apocryphal story, Nero fiddled while Rome burned. We in the Whitosphere seem to be spewing ink about Iraq while America figuratively burns in places like Murderdelphia–and in saying that I am talking about myself. As that dark spot grows it threatens to black out the ideal of the level playing field. Those of us in the whitosphere are liable to wake up and find democracy has disappeared while we had our eyes focused elsewhere.

I cannot speak for others in the Whitosphere but I can acknowledge my own image in the mirror. This blog at least needs to undergo a makeover so that it can return to its original purpose and in turn shine a light on the issue of equity. It also pledges to make a concerted effort to link to the Afrospear, other blogs of color and blogs focused on inequality. Admittedly this blog is but one, small candle, but perhaps it can light another candle or two and in turn those candles do the same.

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