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CB: I'm down with what you say, down on Earth. Your focus on the narrative as a model for us to imitate is right on. We have to learn to impact feelings and emotions.
In developing our New Rhetoric, as implied by your references to American Workers' History, I think we should weave in American Old School , like Roosevelt's 2nd Bill of Rights Inaugural Speech. As you say, rehabilitate "Bleeding Heart" Liberalism. I heard Howard Dean and Jesse Jackson ( junior and senior) on a talk radio show today, saying something along those lines. We can echo some of Lincoln too.
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I'm not asking for a referendum on whether we should start pushing for Obama's candidacy. Or even for a judgement about Obama's biography. I'm talking about Obama's _story_ of why people are democrats: "When a kid on the southside of Chicago goes hungry, that bothers me."
He is trying to balance what some social theorists have called the moral logics of the market, the state, and civil society.
I mentioned a book I'd read. Part of it was about how Scandinavian societies managed to overturn a reliance on the market by creating a welfare state.
They did so through social struggles and in the process of that social struggle, they created a shared set of cultural stories which told the tale of how the "working class took political power and created a society based on principles of equality and solidarity." These mythopoetic narratives tell people a story of why they should sacrifice for a greater good, why they should pay taxes. Those stories do by defining who they are as a people now, and how they are connected to their past and to their future. Distant others don't just exist now (the kid on the southside of chicago), but past and present, and we have obligations to them all. We have a legacy to the slaves who built this country and that's why we should make reparations. We have a legacy to our heritage and that's why we should steward the environment. People make these sacrifices because they sense a deeply felt moral obligation to do so, not just because they belong to the socialist party.
Obama is providing the _nutrients_ that feeds the soil that can grow the plant of a socialist society. It isn't _the_ story. It isn't going to be _the_ story that inspires people even once they live in that socialist society. Rather, it is a story that nourishes the soil that we have to work right now. We need to work a soil that is conducive to the world we want.
Don't we? Don't we want to create a world where the terms of discussion are about how it's okay to be "bleeding heart" liberals once again? Or something like that?
Obama narrative of why democrats are democrats--because it bothers them when strangers on the southside of chicago go hungry--seems like the very moral vision that we could use right now. It isn't foreign to us, is it? Or, am I just a fruithat, speaking Neptuneese