From the diaries--Chris

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There is an important new commentary by Michael Walzer in the journal Dissent.  It should be required reading for any liberal interested in proposing a "Contract with America"-type program on the left.  We have encountered the issue of "framing" and electoral problems, but there has thus far been little talk in the blogosphere about deeper intellectual shifts that have occurred on the left in the last 50 years and the impact these shifts have had on the coherence of our message and cause.

Walzer has a unique take on where we have been and where we are going--but his prescription in the final analysis is attractive in its simplicity.  For Walzer, we must organize around a renewed commitment to "freedom from fear" and the logical policy implications such a project entails.  His suggestion recognizes the intellectual shifts we have experienced and attempts to move forward from them while at the same time avoiding the view that these changes are necessarily negative.

Where we have been:

Walzer argues that we have experienced three "crossovers" in American politics in which political and intellectual traits formerly found on the left now find their home almost exclusively on the right and vice-versa.

The first crossover is that "ideological certainty and zeal have migrated to the right." Walzer sees few "people on the left who are absolutely sure about their political position and zealous in its defense.  But they don't set the tone... Most of us on the near-left live in a complex world, which we are not sure we understand, and we move around in that world pragmatically, practicing a politics of trial and error." Even though this might seem puzzling to some liberal bloggers, I think Walzer's take is pretty evident in how we (liberal bloggers) define ourselves as a poltical community.  The vast majority of us are "reform Democrats" meaning that we are partisan but we are pretty decidedly opposed to ideological litmus tests--as it is often pointed out, we support Harry Reid even though he is pro-birth.  Contrast this with the ideological nature of the right wing blogosphere.  One of our uniting traits is our disdain for politicians who are NOT skeptics on various issues.

Which leads to the second crossover: "ideological uncertainty and skepticism about all-out solutions to social problems have migrated to the left." Here he is talking about how we have long since discarded all encompassing policy goals seeking to radically change society--such as eliminating poverty and changing relationships between classes.  He speculates that a lot of this has to do with the fact that Marxism was discredited, which contributed to the rise of a new kind of meta-ideology surrounding free markets and democracy.  This new incarnation of free market ideology is zealous.

Finally, as these two intellectual shifts have occurred, the left has seen a third crossover:  that there are now "definitely general intellectuals on the right" but not on the left.  Walzer continues:

This has encouraged a flowering of intellectuals on the right who have their hands in many different areas.  In contrast, intellectuals on the left are highly specialized.  It is important to draw a connection here to an issue Lakoff addressed in Don't Think of an Elephant.  He argued that our big non-profits are concerned with doing good things for society and that they are issue specific--liberal by virtue of their policy positioning, not by virtue of their connections to a unified liberal reform program.  Lakoff goes on to argue that funding these non-profits while ignoring ideological and party infrastructure is a main area of liberal deficiency vis-à-vis the conservatives.

All of this leads Walzer to an interesting conclusion--that liberals are obsessed with values and principles because we lack ideology that implies a program of reform:

Walzer then asks "why isn't the moral character and the value-driven politics of the near-left more widely recognized" even while, for the right, "vast areas of social life are left to the radically amoral play of market forces?" He continues:

The problem with the left is that we are competing against a right wing that has an ideology that hangs together, spawns and supports general intellectuals, reduces the world to basic forces and therefore is able to subsume and defeat competing arguments very quickly and also very passionately--in a TV-ready sort of way.

Where we should go:

Walzer proposes that we organize our ideology around "freedom from fear," which he sees as a way to tackle both domestic economic insecurity and critique terror and religious fundamentalism abroad in a coherent way.  In this sense, he agrees with Peter Beinart of the New Republic who argued that we should return to "fighting liberalism" of the Cold War.  He agrees that the left should not ignore terrorism or Islamic fundamentalism but rather critique it from our own perspective.  But instead of going along with the right wing and favoring a zealous, statist militarism:

While Beinart harks back to the Cold War, Walzer sees that time period as a failure for liberalism--the "fighting liberal" zeal had a hand in misleading us into Vietnam and it was not particularly committed to social justice either.  No, the left should look to 1930s anti-Fascism as a model.  Anti-fascism, says Walzer, achieved sweeping domestic reform:

This brings us to an important issue for the left: egalitarianism and equality.  Walzer argues that the key to coherence for us is a return to this core liberal principle:

He sees "freedom from fear" as a uniting feature with political potency.  He is careful to remind us that the Bush administration is big on the fear and nonexistent on the "freedom from." In Walzer's words, "The Bush administration exploits our fears, but it is not interested in a collective effort to cope with them-that is, to provide the necessary forms of protection and to stimulate the necessary forms of mutual assistance." That is where we come in.  Instead of exploiting fear like the Republicans, we can coherently fight fear:

Egalitarianism comes into play when we treat "freedom from fear" as a basic right of all citizens in all walks of life.  Walzer observes, "Franklin Roosevelt had already said in 1937, have a right to expect that democracy will provide `continuously greater opportunity and continuously greater security.' We should still be committed to that democratic expectation." He concludes that "we can tell a plausible story about "freedom from fear" that addresses the actual vulnerabilities of ordinary people and advances the cause of democratic equality."

It seems to me that this is a good way to bring together our various factions.  Egalitarianism and freedom from fear are indeed our uniting characteristics and, taken together, they advance both our domestic and foreign policy goals.  Moreover, it is important not to make a deal with the devil, so to speak, and support the brand of zealous militarism of the Bush administration.  It is bad policy and it also obliterates our domestic agenda.  But we should be able to talk about the economy and terrorism in the same breath without seeming incoherent.  Remember, coherency is the name of the game.  Freedom from fear unites us.

Note:  I am impressed to see that Chris Bell, the Congressman who filed the ethics complaints against Tom DeLay last year and likely candidate for Governor of Texas, is using in his stump speech the claim that government should "dispense hope" not fear and anger. It is his refrain. I think that he is on the right track and Walzer would probably agree. [Full disclosure: I am interested in working for Chris Bell's campaign.]