Michael Ignatieff has written an interesting article on the mantle of well-meaning Jeffersonian democratic imperialism - by which he means the notion that freedom and democracy will spread to all nations because they are everyone's birthright, as well as the notion that we should actively push the spread. He untangles some complicated stuff here, and does a good job of illuminating why Ds are so unsuccessful at arguing against the war in Iraq (and, for that matter, the war in Vietnam). How do you argue against freedom and democracy in a country where those things are at the root of our political self-concept? Of course that's a false dilemma, but it's the one the Republicans have put forth, and we have not changed the terms of the discourse on this issue. It ain't the ends, here, folks, it's the means, and it's also how well they match up.
What he didn't talk about, probably because it's slightly irresponsible, but I will, because blogging lends itself well to the sort of slightly irresponsible speculation and analysis one is prone to after enough red wine, is why the argument over the means is a tough one to make in this country.
I think there are a couple of things going on here. One, USians like big ideas - natural in a country founded on some of the biggest of them all. We like ideas better than details. For example, of course the country was also founded on middle class economic will to power - but we don't like to talk about that. Why? Well, it doesn't fit with our myths. It's not nearly so glamorous, and doesn't allow us to think of ourselves as noble pioneers in the midst of a grand experiment. We want to believe we're exceptional. Texas has this disorder worse than most - "everything's bigger in Texas" - but I think it's a national phenomenon. This tendency to wave a hand in that do-not-trouble-me-with-facts kind of way is very nasty indeed. Grandiosity and insensitivity are a bad mix.
Similarly, USians don't deal well with complexity unless it's packaged in a simple way. We throw around words like "freedom," "truth," and "democracy" very lightly, and almost always as though they are unambiguous goods. The extent to which we do this is really disturbing. Anyone who's ever taken a halfway decent philosophy class can tell you that limitless freedom isn't a good thing - fire in a crowded theater, yada yada. Truth, same thing - just read Miss Manners for that one. But despite all evidence to the contrary, we in the US seem to have an unshakeable faith in these things. Republicans, most notably Luntz and Rove, are incredibly good at capitalizing on this and couching things in terms of values and symbols, which are very hard to argue against. This leaves Democrats flailing around with facts, which have less impact.
This is what framing is all about, and why Lakoff is such a rock star in Democratic circles. We have to market our ideas more effectively, couch them in terms of values and ideals, not facts. Politics is not a high school debate round. It's not about winning every point. It's about making the overall case, telling a story. Ds are often bad at this. Because, like my man Governor Dean suggested, the Ds are a much more diverse party, we have to spend so much time coalition-building and arguing over tiny points among ourselves, we're used to the quibble over a comma, and we think those commas can be incredibly important. But to what my dad refers to as The Folks Out There, that can look like nit-picking and missing the forest for the trees. It's something that makes us look like we aren't leaders, more like the annoying guy in the meeting who can't let anything go. We have to change this conception.
I think he's quite wrong when he asserts that, "The Michael Moore-style left conquered the Democratic Party's heart; now the view was that America's only guiding interest overseas was furthering the interests of Halliburton and Exxon." Clearly he hasn't talked to many Democrats in leadership positions lately, or paid attention when they flee from Moore's excessive rhetoric as fast as humanly possible. Clearly he also hasn't spoken to any of the feminists who pushed for intervention in/targeted aid to Afghanistan on human rights grounds. There is certainly wider consensus among progressives that corporate interests now take precedence over... hell, almost everything, but it's reductive to think that's everything; and it's a radical misunderstanding of the fractious nature of our big tent to think that the Democratic Party thinks one thing on any topic. But generally I found the article provocative and smart.