Building Progressive Unity

By Hank Edson

A week ago I wrote an opinion piece about John Edwards. Edwards had taken a step out onto the ledge of progressive rhetoric, and, while he was out there, I wanted to give him a push. That is, I wanted to see him truly commit to the plunge implied by his posturing.

The article was published in CommonDreams and the blog-style forum discussion that followed directed my attention toward the process of public discourse. Initially, many readers were frustrated that more truly progressive candidates, such as Dennis Kucinich, Mike Ravel and Ralph Nader, were ignored by my article. Interestingly, their criticism was not aimed at what I said, but at something I failed to say.

Although these readers did not seem to recognize value in challenging a more mainstream candidate to become more progressive, I did recognize value in their complaints. Because the mass media neglects these truly progressive candidates so severely, writers on the progressive left have an obligation to cover their campaigns. Therefore, I wrote a follow-up article promoting the truly progressive record of Dennis Kucinich while reiterating the value of Edwards’ rhetoric and the need for Edwards to match his rhetoric with real commitment. I thought to myself, “Among allies, the art of political discourse depends not on confrontation, but on inclusion.” My readers’ comments need not cancel out my own perspective; instead, they can broaden it. CommonDreams kindly published this second piece earlier this week. Hopefully, the vigor of the debate that followed will induce them to publish a further continuation of this discussion.  If not, at least some will find the continuation here at my blog.

As a result of the comments following my second piece, I continued to learn new things about the process of public discourse. Some of the reader comments were specifically directed at the nature of this process. One reader wrote, “It’s nice to know that the authors of these [CommonDreams] articles do sometimes take note of comments, and in this case, address the issues raised.” Another reader objected to a fellow participant’s urging that we get behind a slate of two candidates early, saying, “We’ll agree to candidates at some point in the future. Until then, it’s an open playing field, a free-for-all: Bitch, whine, root, hassle all you want. When clear choices emerge, THEN we’ll get behind two people.”

These and other reader comments made me think about how important it is for progressive Americans to build a healthy culture of political discourse. It is no simple thing, it seems to me, to build a culture in which:

• differing viewpoints are freely expressed,
• criticisms are ably phrased in a way most likely to make them well received,
• arguments and positions are identified, weighed, and responded to in an organized and productive manner, and
• the community builds a vocabulary of mutual understanding and a tolerance for unresolved differences.

The very name of this website, CommonDreams, testifies to an aspiration to create a shared culture of political discourse that is healthy, vibrant, and democratic. Although the clearinghouse compilation of progressive perspectives and the reader forum go a long way toward creating that culture, as a sophisticated community, we can easily recognize that these basic structural elements are not enough to realize our goal.

Lest we dismiss too quickly the importance of creating a healthy culture for our political discourse, we should remember that it wasn’t long ago that the young progressives of the 1960s suffered the disintegration of their movement as a result of internal discord. I humbly submit that, as a community dreaming of a more progressive America, the largest task we face is the task of building a culture of progressive unity.

In his book, The Left Hand of God, Rabbi Michael Lerner writes poignantly of his first hand experience of the decline of the progressive movement that changed the world during the 1960s. Lerner writes, “By the beginning of the 1970s, as activists became increasingly despondent about their failure to have ended the war in Vietnam, many in the movement began to turn on each other with great emotional ferocity, accusing each other (and often themselves) of ‘not having dealt with’ their alleged racism, sexism, homophobia, white-skin privilege, egos, and other serious defects.” Without minimizing the truth in such charges, Lerner goes on to defend the contributions and humanity of all who participated in the movement and laments that disillusionment, frustration, and anger blinded so many to the goodness and promise they helped create. “How incredibly sad,” Lerner says, “that the people who participated in this moment couldn’t appreciate it more, couldn’t feel their own accomplishments as proof of how dramatically the world could be changed, but instead were focused on their own and one another’s deficiencies.”

With this experience of an earlier generation in mind, the discussion that arose in response to my second article, entitled “Edwards/Kucinich 2008?” caused me to identify four ways in which we might avoid the fate suffered by the idealists of the 1960s. I offer them here for the sake of engaging the CommonDreams community in a conversation about the task of building progressive unity.

1. Reaching Out by Affirming

The first place to start in building this culture, I think, is in taking a moment, as committed progressives, to qualify our criticisms of the mainstream democrats who have failed to live up to our expectations. I personally think that voting for a third party candidate is better than voting for Hillary Clinton at this point in time, but that shouldn’t stop me from challenging her to become more progressive. We all make compromises. We all exercise our judgment in relation to the conditions surrounding us. As voters, we need to be extremely sophisticated in creating conditions that will cause ALL our candidates to improve the integrity of their leadership. We all go through changes. John Edwards has found it necessary to try to change. Who knows? With our help, maybe Hillary Clinton will too.

One of the tools we should not neglect in striving to create these change-inducing conditions is the tool of reaching out to mainstream candidates by affirming their humanity and all that they have done that deserves praise. It is not for nothing that we may be able to elect the first woman, African-American, or Hispanic president in 2008. These campaigns were not built on sheer corruption, but embody a great deal of accomplished humanity. We can refuse to support a candidate for embracing corrupt corporate power, but when we criticize such a candidate, we should not disrespect their legitimate accomplishments on behalf of humanity.

One way or another, after all, he or she is likely to end up on our side. No matter how much the Democrats have enabled the Republicans, there is a real difference between the two parties. We should maintain hope that the Democrats can change. The Republicans, on the other hand, have so abused their power that they must be regarded as an intractable threat to our democracy. By affirming the humanity of these enabling Democrats, we improve the integrity, power, and clarity of our condemnation of them. Such condemnation is far more likely to hit home than unrestrained hostility.

2. Embracing an Active Role

Speaking of condemnation, I believe that, as voters, we have been too inclined to sit in passive judgment of our candidates as though we all really agreed that the political process is just a beauty contest. When we sit back and bitch and moan about how ugly this one is and how stooped that one is, we render the great technology of democracy completely inane. Our computer has become merely a TV. Our job as voters should be to constantly interact with all candidates and to actively create a culture in which their campaigns are forced to be responsive to sophisticated people.

In challenging Edwards to demonstrate the sincerity of his anti-corporate rhetoric by making political process integrity a centerpiece of his campaign, I am not endorsing Edwards, but merely identifying for him an opportunity to improve his relationship with progressive voters. In so doing, however, I am also trying to make it clear that failure to seize this opportunity could cost him progressive support. I believe it is a mistake to cast such a challenge as a betrayal (even if unwitting) of the progressive interest. When we adopt an active role, our interest lies not in just choosing who we will support, but in creating a culture in which all who campaign are forced to improve their commitment to democracy.

Readers of my blog know that I have been writing in a similar fashion about other candidates, suggesting , for example, that Al Gore has Ralph Nader to thank for making him a leader with more integrity than he possessed in 2000 (See “Third Party Irony”). We should want Gore, Nader, Kucinich and Edwards all to improve. We should celebrate them when they do, rather than condemn them for the stains on their record. Then we should continue to engage them by challenging them to pursue even further the democratic principles they invoke in their rhetoric. And we should be innovative in finding ways to reward these candidates incrementally when they make progressive campaign decisions and punish them when they don’t.

One way to influence the presidential race is to make a strategic endorsement early on of a promising team that is explicitly anti-corporate, that has sincere rhetoric and an inclination to improve the integrity of its leadership, as well as an admirably progressive record. Edwards and Kucinich just might fit this bill. A united progressive movement could use its influence by letting Edwards know that our support of him will depend upon how well he promotes the career of Kucinich and the agenda of Kucinich’s constituency.

If we succeed in energizing the idea of an Edwards/Kucinich ticket early on, we might be able to persuade the democratic party that the integrity of democratic principle embraced by a progressive slate of candidates is far more effective in winning elections than having celebrity candidates mouth corporate-safe, meaningless platitudes. Such an achievement would be a meaningful victory in our struggle to restore democracy to our government.

3. The Gold Standard

The key to fulfilling an active role as voters in a democracy is being able to define and apply a clear standard which candidates must meet in order to get voter support and being able to determine whether the different standards we apply actually need to divide us as a voting block.

I maintain that our “gold standard” should be whether or not the candidate is able to clearly assert him or herself as anti-corporate power and also whether or not the candidate can demonstrate meaningfully the sincerity of such rhetoric. The reason I believe this is the gold standard in this election is that it gets to the core of our survival and our reason for existing as a nation: our democratic principles. Our political process has lost its integrity and is no longer meaningfully democratic. I believe the ultimate source of our corrupt political process is the alliance which corporate power spearheads under the name of the Republican Party.

The candidate who deserves our vote is the candidate who clearly states a commitment to fight corporate power and meaningfully demonstrates sincerity by making political process integrity a centerpiece of his or her campaign. He or she deserves our vote because his or her campaign is about saving our democracy and restoring to the American people our democratic principles. To me, a campaign focused on anything else is misguided and does not deserve my vote.

In the forum discussion following my last article, however, two other important gold standards were offered. Some argued that opposition to the Israeli lobby ought to be the gold standard and that achieving peace in the Middle East mattered more than anything else. Others argued that our political process has been corrupted, not by corporate power, but by gerrymandering of district boundaries, which all but guaranty victory to incumbents. What I think is important here is that we all probably agree on the same objectives.

We are all against gerrymandering to subvert the political process. We are all against corporate campaign finance, lobbyists, and abuse of power. And we are all against the use of violence in the Middle East by Americans, Israelis or Palestinians. Because Edwards has taken a position in support of the Israeli lobby, this might cost him the vote of some who see Israel as the ultimate source of all our problems. Although there are many, such as Rabbi Michael Lerner, who strongly criticize the Israeli lobby, I do not think there are many who see the Israeli lobby as the ultimate source of dysfunction in the American political process. Thus, for the most part, there is room to address the Israeli lobby even when the president supports the lobby so long as the president is committed to restoring the integrity of our democratic political process. In any event, the real point here is that, where the only conflict between progressives is over which standard is most important, we should learn not to fight, but to dialogue with each other in a way that builds mutual respect for our differences of opinion.

We have a tendency, especially on the internet, to view free speech as an endorsement of disrespectful speech. Free speech is supposed to empower our humanity, not degrade it. When we disrespect each other, we degrade our humanity and do no service to the progressive cause. We can engage in lively political discourse, but should also have the sophistication not to lapse into “bitching, whining, rooting, and hassling all we want”--not if what we want is victory in 2008. We have to “up our game” as a democracy. That means engineering a culture of political discourse built on proven tools of effective communication. Learning to respectfully accomodate our different gold standards is one of these tools we must learn to master.

That said, let me respectfully voice my opinion that the Israeli lobby would not be able to manipulate U.S. foreign policy in the manner it is accused of if the integrity of our political process was not already completely destroyed by the accumulated wealth and power of corporate America. If we dethrone corporate power and repair our political process, we will not have to worry about the Israeli lobby interfering with the pursuit American and humanitarian interests in our foreign policy. If we only destroy the Israeli lobby, however, our government will remain as dysfunctional as ever. Indeed, I think it is actually an advantage that Edwards and Kucinich are split on the issue of the Israeli lobby. This ensures that the world’s most complex problem will be addressed more fairly and thoughtfully than if only one side were represented in the White House.

As for gerrymandering, again, if we dethrone corporate power and fix our political process, we will prohibit gerrymandering. But if we just prohibit gerrymandering, we will still have hundreds of millions of dollars of bundled corporate cash purchasing the loyalty of our president. Therefore, I don’t believe embracing an “anti-corporate power” gold standard puts us at risk of choosing the wrong candidate. All the same, there is no reason for all of us to agree on the same standard; we just need to learn that having a standard empowers us and that sharing objectives unites us. Let’s use our standards to challenge our candidates to improve and use our shared objectives to maintain a politically powerful unity.

4. Timing and Intelligence

The final issue that seemed to me to arise from the forum discussion following my earlier articles is the issue of how and when the voters should compromise their values in order to ensure that the candidate supported by the political left is not at risk of being defeated by the candidate chosen by the political right.

Ever since 2000, the scapegoating of Ralph Nader for the theft of Al Gore’s presidency has been a sad testament to the fact that we still don’t appreciate the need to punish the Democratic Party in order to teach it to improve its democratic integrity. Al Gore, I think, understands this; that’s why he has refrained from entering the race. He values his new found integrity. The Democratic Party has not yet learned to embrace the integrity he represents.

Meanwhile, we have just suffered two terms under George W. Bush and the comprehensive pursuit of corruption in every branch of government by the Republican Party. Clearly, we must find the means to come together to support a candidate so strongly that the Republicans will be unable to steal, much less win, the election.

In the forum discussion focused on the prospect of an Edwards/Kucinich ticket, a good deal of argument went back and forth regarding the fact that Kucinich was the stronger candidate. On this point, I think it is necessary to define what we mean by a “stronger candidate.” Our task in choosing when and how to make an intelligent political compromise involves understanding the difference between strong progressive leadership and strong political capital. The two don’t always come in the same package. Kucinich has demonstrated genuine progressive leadership, but Edwards has far more political capital.

The strategy of uniting progressives behind an Edwards/Kucinich ticket early has appeal because it does not require us to choose between a doomed third party candidacy and a severely corrupt Democratic Party candidacy. Instead, it allows us to advance a more formal, more substantial alternative progressive vision than is offered by the front-runners in the Democratic Party while there is still time to change the party’s commitment. If progressives don’t use their influence to commit Edwards to a progressive stance now, the chances of anyone more progressive than Edwards getting the nomination are slim. That would leave us blaming supporters of a third party candidate for Hillary Clinton’s defeat. We ought to learn from history.

This strategy also does not require us to choose between strong political capital and genuine progressive leadership because together Edwards and Kucinich offer both. By actively cultivating our influence as a voting block, we progressives can further improve both candidates’ commitment to advancing an anti-corporate power campaign aimed at restoring our democracy.

Conclusion

When we succeed in engineering a political process that is sophisticated enough to maintain its democratic integrity amid the economic, technological, and cultural forces currently overwhelming it, we will be able to vote each according to his or her ideals. At present, however, repairing the system requires a different strategy that is intelligent and well timed. We can shape both the moment and the manner of the political partnership we endorse by applying the four ideas discussed above, but we also have to recognize the moment for action when it is presented to us.

I believe the time has come for us to begin exercising our influence by challenging Edwards and Kucinich to start working together and by actively striving to improve the culture of progressive political discourse. I am sure there are many who disagree with me on many points. Hopefully, the four ideas I have explored will be helpful to some in explaining where I err and helpful to others as a model for creating a structure of their own for explaining why progressives should unite behind a different slate of candidates. Ultimately, I do not believe which candidate is right and which is wrong is nearly as important as whether we progressives can achieve a sophisticated culture of unity in which we are masters at advancing our coordinated standards and shared objectives across the entire political stage. What do you believe?

Copyright © Hank Edson 2007