If you're following the "extremist liberal" debate…

Posted on March 30, 2003 by Ampersand

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Then this post at Pedantry is a must-read. Sam argues that change comes from the participation of both radicals and moderates; the radicals make the issues hard to ignore, while the moderates provide a “reasonable” face that can be negotiated with. A sample:

…This kind of good cop/bad cop approach has on the whole been wildly successful in producing actual progress in almost every kind of industrialised, mediated state in the world.

It has failed primarily where demands have been met not with attacks on the radicals – who are generally well equipped to survive organised opposition – but by attacking the moderates who are not well equipped to win an ideological warfare against motivated opponents. The two most outstanding cases are in Central America and the Middle East. It was the attack on moderate land reformers in Central America, people like Jacobo Arbenz or the early Sandinistas, that led to a radicalisation of reformers and the prolongation of damaging civil wars. Even now – more than a decade after most of the fighting ended – it is hard for the different sides in Central America to trust each other enough to compromise.[…]

What has happened in America in recent years is that the moderates are under attack. The assault on “liberals” – mostly just moderate progressives who are hardly demanding radical changes to American society – has undermined the possibility of moderates driving institutional change. A radicalisation of American politics is the inevitable consequence. There is very little moderate force in America willing to stand for gay rights at all, even in the Democratic Party. Running on identity politics has become nothing but a way to lose elections in the US. The result is people turning to more radical expressions of their beliefs, with greater polarisation as a consequence.

Go read Sam’s whole post – it’s really excellent.

I tend to agree with Sam’s analysis, but unfortunately it’s hard to discern a solution. We need to make “liberal” a non-dirty word, but how can we do that? Kevin thinks the answer is restraining the extremists, but I see two problems with that. One, as Sam argues (and as I argued earlier), extremists are necessary in creating worthwhile social change. Getting rid of extremists is simply a bad idea, if you want progressive change.

Two, it can’t be done anyway, because reducing the numbers of “extremists” won’t reduce their prominence in the news (which is what Kevin really seems to want). If you hold a gay Pride march with 100,000 folks dressed in jeans and tank-tops and one person dressed in a sequined cape and pope hat, the news media will always focus on the person in the pope hat. (You can really see this at the anti-war protests; the cameras flinch from any demonstrator with an intelligent analysis, but if a drunken idiot shouts “we’re gonna shut this city down!” he’ll be put on the air every time).

Do I see a solution? Well, for extremists like me, I think our task is to try and build ourselves into the largest, most annoying, least compromising mass movement we can. I’m actually pretty optimistic about the movement that’s building… we’ve got a sort of “serial monogamy” approach going, where the issue changes from year to year (1998 anti-WTO, 2000 pro-Nader, 2002 anti-war) but the movement continues to exist and grow. The louder and more extreme we can be, the more moderates can take liberal positions while seeming reasonable and centrist.

For moderates like Kevin, I guess it’s not really my business what they do. I don’t think the “give in to the Republicans on everything” approach Democrats used before the 2002 elections was very successful. My favorite strategy for liberal moderates is for them to concentrate on building the kind of intellectual superstructure Seeing the Forest is always talking about… we need lefty counterparts to the Heritage Foundation, providing an endless stream of authoritative-sounding reports and talking heads, and we don’t have them.

The other huge problem liberal moderates face is the enormous anti-Democrat bias of the mass media. In the 2000 cycle, centrist Democrats refused to call the media on their bias, while the Republicans were unrelenting in their criticism of the “liberal media”… with the result that the media bent over backwards to avoid criticizing Bush, but felt free to slam Gore relentlessly. If Democrats don’t find a better way to handle the media by 2004, they might as well give up on the White House right now.

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