[Mb-civic] Time to Scrape the Kerry Sticker Off - ZNet

[William Swiggard]

ZNet Commentary

Time to Scrape the Kerry Sticker Off:
On Democrats, Values, and the Lakoff Thesis

By Paul Street

Have you run across this person and/or his car? He is a white male in 
his late 30s with long curly hair. He drives a 1990-something green 
Toyota Corolla and lives near the campus of a major metropolitan 
university. There is a cloth peace symbol hanging from his rear-view 
mirror. The back seat of his car is littered with copies of the New York 
Times, The Nation, and Mother Jones, and a plethora of crumpled 
Starbucks cups.

He has an unusually large number of bumper stickers on the back of his 
car. They read: "Wage Peace;" "No Justice, No Peace;" "Wal-Mart: Always 
Low Wages;" "Flush Bush;" "It Will be a Good Day When the Pentagon has 
to Hold a Bake Sale to Pay for Another B-52 Bomber;" and "Bring the 
Troops Home." At the bottom right, a sticker says "Kerry-Edwards: a 
Stronger America."

"Reporting for Duty"

If you see this gentleman, please ask him to review the record of John 
Forbes Kerry's presidential campaign. It's fine for Kerry to bemoan the 
media's failure to adequately cover the "fixed-intelligence" Downing 
Street Memo (see Jefferson Morely, "The Downing Street Memo Story Won't 
Die," Washington Post, 7 June 2005). But the Democratic "opposition" 
candidate did not seriously oppose George W. Bush's illegal and immoral 
and occupation of Iraq or the culture of messianic militarism that Bush 
has advanced.. John "Reporting for Duty" Kerry ran on the claim that he 
was more qualified to properly finish the Iraqi mission. "I," Kerry 
proclaimed (to crudely paraphrase), "am the better, more sophisticated 
man of empire. I am also," he added, "the only presidential candidate 
with direct service in the American military assault on Vietnam."

"Not a Redistribution Democrat"

A review of the Kerry campaign will show that the Democratic candidate 
lived up to his middle name by assiduously avoiding the pressing issues 
of poverty and economic inequality. Consistent with Kerry's vast 
personal fortune and related aristocratic bearing - so obvious that the 
satirical weekly The Onion depicted Kerry delivering a campaign speech 
to workers from the bow of a yacht - the Kerry campaign's socioeconomic 
radar barely registered anyone beneath the middle-class.

For what it's worth, Kerry would have been the richest U.S. president 
since another multimillionaire Democrat from Massachusetts - John 
Fitzgerald Kennedy. As he told a wealthy audience in New York City, "I 
am not a redistribution Democrat." Given the corrosive impact of 
America's steep socioeconomic disparities (the top 1 percent owns more 
than 40 percent of the United States' wealth)on functioning democracy, 
this made it impossible for Kerry to be any kind of democrat at all (see 
"Kerry's Predictable Failure to Make Bush Pay for Rising US Poverty," 
Dissident Voice [September 8, 2004], available online at 
www.dissidentvoice.org/Sept04/ Street0908.htm).

Missing Connections

As an openly declared non-enemy of both empire and inequality, Kerry was 
naturally unwilling to make the basic connections between those two 
great and dialectically inseparable problems. The links were well 
understood by the people who came up with the B-52-bake-sale slogan in 
the 1960s, when Vietnam War expenditures were strangling the "War on 
Poverty" in its cradle and Martin Luther King, Jr. denounced what he 
called "the triple evils that are interrelated": militarism, poverty, 
and racism.

In 2004, as for more than two decades now, the Democratic Party 
leadership's silence on poverty and the other "triple evils" created a 
populist void that the hyper-plutocratic Republicans rushed to fill by 
ironically posing as the party of "the little guy."

Facts, Frames, and Values

The problem with the Kerry campaign was different than what George 
Lakoff describes in his bestseller Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your 
Values and Frame the Debate (2004), which is being marketed as "the 
essential [political] guide for progressives."

According to Lakoff, Democrats lose because they are unskilled at 
articulating the core "traditional American values that progressives 
hold." Those values, by Lakoff's account, include "fairness," 
"community," "open communication," "equity," "equality" (by which Lakoff 
means "political equality," not social equality, revealingly enough), 
"democracy," and "values-based foreign policy."

Democrats fail, Lakoff argues, to use their "liberal/progressive" values 
to develop persuasive "issue frames" for understanding and acting upon 
the troubling facts of American social and political experience. They 
operate on the false Enlightenment-era assumption that stating those 
facts will bring the masses into their electoral camp.

Lakoff is certainly on to something with the idea that facts and issues 
need frames. Many progressives do seem to be under the illusion that if 
only people get the real factual story then they will come along to 
challenge the powers that be. Lakoff is right, moreover, to note that 
the nation's in-fact radically regressive "conservatives" invest 
millions in the construction and dissemination of powerful, redolent 
moral-intellectual paradigms that do account (many Republicans sincerely 
believe)for many facts (e.g., mass American poverty and mass civilian 
casualties in Iraq) that drive leftists to fits of anger and despair.

He's correct to note that liberal foundations and academics spend 
insufficient time and money on developing values-based language to 
counter the authoritarian world view of the right.

But Kerry and his handlers weren't ignorant of their supposedly genuine 
but hidden progressivism. They didn't fail to "know their [progressive] 
values." Given their very own elitist, hierarchical, corporatist, 
nationalist-imperialist ideological framework, they were all-too pleased 
to ignore such basic facts as the number of Iraqi civilians the U.S. has 
murdered or the 1 million black children living at less than half the 
nation's inadequate official poverty level. These and countless other 
terrible social and political facts do not bother many top Democrats 
enough to compel them to look for the proper way to "frame" them.

An All-Too Perfect Foil for Rove et al.

If you meet the aforementioned gentleman with the green Toyota and the 
bumper stickers, tell him to take a look at Thomas Frank's book What's 
the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America 
(2004). How have Republicans been so successful in cloaking their 
militantly regressive, "economically royalist" policy agenda with 
"culturally workerist"(to use Frank's clever description of the 
Republican formula) political language that paints the Democrats out as 
elitists? Frank rightly places much of the blame on the Democratic 
Party's in-fact elitist determination to take popular economic issues 
"off the table."

That determination makes it hard to evaluate the accuracy of Lakoff's 
thesis that poor and working-class Americans are being diverted from 
acting in accord with their economic interests by Republican "moral 
issue frames" that encourage non-affluent people to vote "against their 
own pocketbooks." How do we know that the right's authoritarian frames 
are trumping workers' economic self interest in determining electoral 
choices (such as they are) when top Democrats have made the not-so 
"progressive" moral determination that courting corporate political 
money and flattering the well-to-do are more valuable activities than 
addressing non-affluent peoples' moral-economic issues?

It's a hell of a deadly formula the Republicans have working for them. 
Frank leaves out some of that formula's key ingredients because he fails 
to pay sufficient attention to the Republicans' exploitation of national 
security fears and (more hidden) racial conflicts. To make matters yet 
worse, the Republicans benefit from the reactionary biases of dominant 
corporate-state media, which favors strict-authoritarian over 
"liberal/progressive" values and frames.

The best way to fight back against the resulting Republican hegemony 
over the American political system is neither simple nor self-evident. 
One way NOT to resist is ought to be clear, however: putting forth a 
hopelessly aristocratic, super-opulent candidate who refuses to engage 
substantive facts and issues of social and moral-economic justice. 
Fundamentally incapable of calling Republicans on their pseudo-populist, 
false-"workerist" bluff, the economically royal and culturally elite 
Kerry was an all-too perfect foil for the Karl Rove Republicans. He was 
astonishingly well-suited to the G.O.P.'s Orwellian misrepresentation of 
itself as the party of ordinary, non-affluent people and its related 
parody of the Democrats as nothing more than snooty, latte-sipping elitists.

It didn't help, of course, that Kerry refused to call for an end to the 
occupation of Iraq, a murderous operation that most of his voting base 
and convention delegates opposed. On this and other issues, of course, 
he was all too accurately described by Republicans as a morally 
inconsistent "flip-flopper."

John Kerry was in fact "the lesser evil" in a "winner-take-all" 
political and media system that provides little if any space for a 
serious left presidential run. The world might well be a somewhat safer 
and saner place if we had in fact "flushed Bush" last November.

But the patrician Kerry was not the plumber for that job. He lacked not 
just the way but also the will to mount an effective "progressive" 
challenge to American Empire and Inequality, Inc., whose pinnacles he 
wanted to climb, not dismantle.

Individual candidacies aside, it is by no means clear that the 
Democratic Party will ever again channel significant popular resistance 
to concentrated wealth and power in the United States. It may well be 
too permanently subject and beholden to corporate-imperial direction, 
structures, and values to meaningfully play that role in the future. 
Only time and activism will tell. In the meantime, progressives who 
still can't seem to let go of their Kerry stickers and posters are 
displaying gross value confusion.

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Paul Street (pstreet99 at sbcglobal.net) is the author of Empire and 
Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Boulder, CO: Paradigm 
Publishers, 2004 ); Segregated Schools: Race, Class, and Educational 
Apartheid in the Post-Civil Rights Era (New York, NY: Routledge, 2005); 
and Still Separate, Unequal: Race, Place, Policy and the State of Black 
Chicago (Chicago, IL, 2005)