On Sat, 1 May 2004, Jacob Conrad wrote:
> I find it simply astounding that anyone old enough to have some
> historical perspective, and certainly any native-born American, can
> blithely dismiss the impact of the 1960s cultural revolution.
I'm definately with you and Doug et al. on this. But there is a serious paradox here that is very worth discussing and right up lbo-talk's alley -- namely, that during the same 35 year period that social mores have become dramatically and pervasively more liberal, the national political spectrum has moved drastically to the right. And it has done so precisely because the right has been able to harness opposition to changing social mores to support for the Republican party. The paradox is that we on the left-liberal side of the spectrum clearly have more people on our side -- you can read that off the change in the center of gravity of social mores. And yet we have been spectacularly unable to harness that force to the Democratic electoral wagon. And consequently it has been disconnected from the ruling discourse. It has been translated neither into political power nor ideological power.
Partially it's a matter of desire: the marginalized right during the 60s set out purposefully to take over the Republican party; the equivalently marginalized left in our times is nauseated at the mere thought of calling themselves Democrats. But that desire goes both ways. The Republican party elite seems to think intensively about how to make its right happy while not making it too obvious -- which results in framing issues in such a way that a majority of the country can be convinced to define themselves as conservative -- while the Democratic elite seem wedded to a strategy of winning over people to their right by Souljahing their left, i.e., by overtly insulting it. A marriage that would build and energize the Democratic party base and use it to drive the national discourse is opposed from both sides.
You can see the end results in the very terms "conservative" and "liberal." Far right wingers fight about who is the "true" conservative -- the truest being the most right wing. The reverse is almost impossible to imagine. For leftists, there is a qualitative line between themselves and liberals. For them, to be more left is to be *less* liberal. The two concepts are diametrically opposed.
And that conceptual opposition (which of course doesn't descend from the geist, but is the condensate of all the strategic decisions, political instincts and intellectual commitments that brought us to this pass) is the reason social liberalism has not been harnessed to political liberalism the way social conservativism has been harnessed to political conservativism.
If one were a martian, one would look at this and say it makes no sense: they are beating us even though we outnumber them. But of course it all comes down to how we define "we." When "liberal" and "leftist" are defined as an opposition, it means the more left you are, the less liberal you are, and thus *the more minority you are by definition.* It thus seems almost tautologically true that getting more left can only hurt the Democratic party's electoral chances. But when rightwing and conservative are synonmous concepts, the more conservative you are, the more you are seen as the distilled essence of a broad majority, the keepers of the flame to which all pay obeisance. When conservatives excoriate the Republican party, they excoriate them as teammates. They exhort them to pay more than lip service *to their shared ideals.*
IMHO, until the left redefines itself so that it can do that with "liberal," we will continue to rule social mores without being able to translate it into political or ideological power.
Michael