NewsRack Blog, Thomas Nephew — Politics & Prose is quite possibly the best bookstore in the country, and I’ve seen some good ones. We went there again last night, ostensibly to pick up a birthday present for Maddie’s friend, in reality to feed our family’s book addictions, and just to go to one of our favorite places.
The hook for me: “Eric Alterman will be there, you want to go?” I would have gone anyway, but that made it better: the acute observer of modern media and politics, the pioneering big-time blogger (“Altercation,” currently ensconced at Media Matters), the prolific author (“What Liberal Media?”, “Sound and Fury: The Making of the Punditocracy”), the American historian made good — I didn’t even know what his latest book was and I wanted to go.
Turns out it’s “Why We’re Liberals: A Political Handbook for Post-Bush America.” From an online blurb:
Alterman examines liberalism’s development and demonstrates how its partisans have come to represent not just the mainstream, but also the majority of Americans today. In a crisply argued though extensively documented counterattack on right-wing spin and misinformation, Alterman briskly disposes of such canards as Liberals Hate God and Liberals Are Soft on Terrorism, reclaiming liberalism from the false definitions foisted upon it by the right and repeated everywhere else.
The book looks good — there’s a cover by Tom Tomorrow displaying the pantheon of liberalism — FDR, Teddy Kennedy, Tom Paine, you name it, with Mr. Alterman in the middle of the crowd. Alterman didn’t read from it, but described it to the audience in an entertaining, if somewhat rambling way.
Alterman’s point, as I take it, is straightforward: Americans are liberal, by and large, judging by opinion poll majorities or trends pointing to acceptance of liberal goals like health care, ending the war, even gay marriage. But they’re reluctant to apply the label to themselves, due to a successful propaganda campaign to make the word and the concept distasteful. American political liberalism in Alterman’s view is less a philosophy than a pragmatic outlook; “government might help with this problem; if not, we’ll try something else.”
The word “handbook” is apt: after a tour of liberalism’s antecedents, philosophy, history, and recent retreats in Part I, the book gets down to brass tacks in Part II with a kind of “how to” compendium of 10 to 15 page chapterlets with tongue-in-cheek titles in the form of questions, such as “Why Do Liberals Love Hollywood Smut Peddlers?”, “Why Are Liberals Educating Our Children to be Perverts?”, or “Why Do Liberals Hate Religion?” It looks to be an entertaining, yet well built set of polemics, or anti-polemics if you will, ready to be used at a moment’s notice by those who master its arguments.
My point, however, will not be to shower praise on what looks to be a perfectly serviceable book, but to question its author. In the question and answer session, Alterman was asked about impeachment — and he kind of went off on the guy, comparing impeachment advocates to Nader supporters in 2000, allegedly blind to the consequences of their actions, indirectly complicit in the disasters that followed.*
So I joined the short line of questioners, and wound up being the last one. I asked where he saw the rule of law and adherence to the Constitution in his definition of liberalism; in the tension between adhering to principles and focusing on winning the next election, where were the bright lines Alterman was willing to draw to say “this far and no further”, regardless of the cost? Because, I told him, his answer to the first questioner had me thinking, ‘maybe I’m not a liberal after all.’
This tacitly conceded what I shouldn’t have — that impeachment, even a failed impeachment effort, was all political cost and no gain. But the strong form of the question remains, since as I suggested to Eric, “the rap on liberals can be that they have no bright lines”, no principles they’ll go to the mat for and risk losing elections for — that they’re moral relativists, triangulators, etc., more interested in attaining or keeping power than in speaking truth to it.
Interestingly, Alterman had recounted an example of just the opposite in his remarks: LBJ noting that the Civil Rights Act he’d worked so hard for would cost Democrats the South for years to come. So when he sort of squared up and said that to him principles were a form of moral vanity, what I think he meant was that my principles were that kind of vanity, in the face of the looming election, in the face of people who were struggling to make ends meet. (I paraphrase, but not by much; and the “principles [are] moral vanity” were his words.)
That’s funny, though, because to me that particular principle — rule of law, or “playing by the rules” in 90s Democratic vernacular — is a core liberal value and is not some kind of luxury item we can do without in tough times. Without it, the little guy has no recourse against the high and mighty, whether they’re government officials or CEOs. To me liberalism, plainly put, is saying the little guy should always have a chance to get his grievance heard and to be made whole, and that there’s a public sphere where the big guy with lawyers, guns and money can’t expect to win.
And it seems self-evident to me that that credo starts at the top; the measure of a country isn’t just how it treats its weakest members, but the standards it applies to its most powerful ones. We are plainly failing both tests; I think it’s a single test, and that those failures go hand in hand.
I certainly didn’t set out to embarrass Mr. Alterman last night — but I also somewhat worry that I didn’t. By now I’m somewhat resigned to the fact that my opinions about impeachment seem to be a minority opinion within the cognoscenti and silverbacks of the Democratic Party; it’s not just Alterman, it’s commenters at Obsidian Wings, it’s the largely silent liberal wing of the legal profession and academia, it’s Harold Meyerson, it’s Van Hollen, it’s Pelosi, it’s Conyers.
And it seems shortsighted to me, even — indeed especially — by Alterman’s own “damn straight I’m a liberal” lights. At the time, I was nonplussed by Alterman’s protestations that he wasn’t advocating euthanasia or something — where the heck did that come from, I wondered. But I think he was pre-emptively answering the objection that occurred to me later — the old saw that “if you don’t stand for something, you’ll go for anything.”
I’ll stipulate that Alterman hasn’t gone for anything — but the presumably liberal Democratic Party arguably has. It has to all appearances been running a two year stall, a political “four corners” drill running out the clock to an anticipated win in 2008 — a strategy that may not be as clever as its authors thought. Late feints notwithstanding, it has effectively stood by — both before and after 2006 — and let the corruption of the Justice Department go unpunished; it has allowed the Bush administration to play semantic games about the meaning of torture and whether waterboarding fits the definition; it’s doing its level best to find as much as possible about warrantless surveillance to be legal after all — and it’s done nothing meaningful whatsoever to get out of a war built on lies that a majority of us (and a vast majority of self-described liberals) considers to be a disastrous mistake. If that’s liberalism, I want off.
I don’t think that has to be liberalism — but the evidence is against me. As it stands, liberalism as practiced by its leaders — and as hobbled by Alterman with his disappointing “moral vanity” remark — is in deserved disrepute. Impeachment proceedings would have let the word go forth that these things were crimes, crimes against the people of the United States, and that we weren’t afraid to say so and stand for who we are. That word has not gone forth — and we are thus lessened not just by our foes, but by ourselves and our friends as well, however well-meaning we may be. And people notice; they line up with those who fight, and avoid helping those who won’t.
Alterman claims to know “Why We’re Liberals.” I guess by now I question the premise. I just don’t know where that leaves me.