another opinion piece on iraq/vietnam that i found
* I am thirty-one. I have no memory of large-scale political victory, except 1992, which was quickly and painfully reversed just two years later.
* I have grown convinced that outside of the gay rights movement, we progressives have been losing ground to conservatives on every front for a number of years. On some fronts, we have been losing ground for around twenty-five years.
* I do not, and will not, believe that this is because we are wrong about the direction we want to take the country. As such, I can only conclude that our failure is a result of poor organization.
* I have come to believe that for too long we relied on a modernist notion of national consensus to develop our ideas and our policies. We used non-partisan academic institutions and non-partisan issue groups to develop our ideas and policies long after the national consensus was utterly smashed and the ability of these institutions to affect change within the national consciousness and to combat an overtly partisan and ideological movement was lessened dramatically. That was our first failure.
* I have come to conclude that for too long we relied on the government, via our long-term position as the natural ruling party of the country, to spread our message to the nation, while the conservative movement built a vast and unchecked anti-consensus message apparatus. That was our second failure.
* I have come to believe that for too long we relied on simply repeating long-standing means of mass public protest to object to the rising tide of conservatism. We kept doing this while the media changed and the ability of those protests to affect public opinion lessoned dramatically. That was our third failure.
* In line with everything else I have said, I have come to conclude that almost all of our current uses of political resources within the electoral realm assume that we still live in an age of national consensus. Among other areas, this can be seen in our mass canvassing operations that harken back to the era of mass participation civic organizations, and in our tendency to engage in an endless focus upon the "swing voter" who can be swayed through truth-telling and rational debate. That is an outdated view of the public sphere.
* I believe that our current failures as a party and a movement rest almost entirely within large segments of our leadership currently failing to recognize these past methodological failures as the cause for our current political backslide. As such, they continue to rely on old methods that have led to nothing but defeat for over two decades. Worse yet, many rely on trying to adopt conservative ideas.
* Perhaps because of my age, for me, hearing activists compare Iraq to Vietnam resonates as just such a failure to recognize that continuing to use our old methodologies will continue to yield nothing but defeat. Please--in the language of my generation--for the love of Jeebus, don't tell me we are going to continue doing things the same way we have been doing them for decades. They just don't work anymore.
This formulation does not require someone to be old or young or in between to begin taking a new, more relevant path. Those who fail to recognize our current problems can just as well be young as they can be old. In fact, during much of my life, I myself longed for a national return to the great days of activism and upheaval of the third-quarter of the twentieth century. In my mind, I had somehow raised up on a pedestal the people who lived during those times. I came to beleive that they were somehow superior people than those who lived now because of what they accomplished. I don't think I was the only one who did this. It is a dangerous form of conservative progressivism.
I now believe that, at least partially, our collective, progressive unrequited worship of the people who changed the world for the better during those great days has unfortunately led to an equally powerful worship of the techniques and methodologies they used to accomplish that change. This is the case even though those techniques and methodologies have greatly diminished in their effectiveness as our opponent has greatly changed in both shape and practice. As a result, we continue to engage in outdated political strategies that result in defeat after defeat after defeat. We desperately need to contemporize the organizational structure of our movement, and age is not a factor in someone's ability or inability to recognize that need.
I am indeed arguing for a break with our past, but not with the people of our past. Instead, I am arguing for a break from their political strategies, organization structures, and other methodologies of affecting change. This will include a break from the methodologies of the anti-Vietnam war movement. I think such a break is made more difficult if we are consistently saying the Iraq and Vietnam are analogous, even if just for a sound-bite or a useful metaphor.
That's it. As a final note, I would like to add that I have in no way bought into the "dirty hippie" meme. Anyone who knows me is well aware that for over a decade my entire life has been immersed in the ways of the bohemian. While I may be young, I am certainly not so young to be unaware that for about two hundred years every generation in the industrialized world has given birth to some new variation on this type of lifestyle. No matter what it is called at any given moment, it exists on the fringes of the dominant economic structure of our times: wage-labor. Of my many ancestors in this regard, hippie culture was one of the most memorable and vivid. I would never disrespect that.
(good link this one, from the same person, with lots of valuble links stating the differences between iraq and vietnam)
http://mydd.com/story/2005/8/24/162544/686
* I have grown convinced that outside of the gay rights movement, we progressives have been losing ground to conservatives on every front for a number of years. On some fronts, we have been losing ground for around twenty-five years.
* I do not, and will not, believe that this is because we are wrong about the direction we want to take the country. As such, I can only conclude that our failure is a result of poor organization.
* I have come to believe that for too long we relied on a modernist notion of national consensus to develop our ideas and our policies. We used non-partisan academic institutions and non-partisan issue groups to develop our ideas and policies long after the national consensus was utterly smashed and the ability of these institutions to affect change within the national consciousness and to combat an overtly partisan and ideological movement was lessened dramatically. That was our first failure.
* I have come to conclude that for too long we relied on the government, via our long-term position as the natural ruling party of the country, to spread our message to the nation, while the conservative movement built a vast and unchecked anti-consensus message apparatus. That was our second failure.
* I have come to believe that for too long we relied on simply repeating long-standing means of mass public protest to object to the rising tide of conservatism. We kept doing this while the media changed and the ability of those protests to affect public opinion lessoned dramatically. That was our third failure.
* In line with everything else I have said, I have come to conclude that almost all of our current uses of political resources within the electoral realm assume that we still live in an age of national consensus. Among other areas, this can be seen in our mass canvassing operations that harken back to the era of mass participation civic organizations, and in our tendency to engage in an endless focus upon the "swing voter" who can be swayed through truth-telling and rational debate. That is an outdated view of the public sphere.
* I believe that our current failures as a party and a movement rest almost entirely within large segments of our leadership currently failing to recognize these past methodological failures as the cause for our current political backslide. As such, they continue to rely on old methods that have led to nothing but defeat for over two decades. Worse yet, many rely on trying to adopt conservative ideas.
* Perhaps because of my age, for me, hearing activists compare Iraq to Vietnam resonates as just such a failure to recognize that continuing to use our old methodologies will continue to yield nothing but defeat. Please--in the language of my generation--for the love of Jeebus, don't tell me we are going to continue doing things the same way we have been doing them for decades. They just don't work anymore.
This formulation does not require someone to be old or young or in between to begin taking a new, more relevant path. Those who fail to recognize our current problems can just as well be young as they can be old. In fact, during much of my life, I myself longed for a national return to the great days of activism and upheaval of the third-quarter of the twentieth century. In my mind, I had somehow raised up on a pedestal the people who lived during those times. I came to beleive that they were somehow superior people than those who lived now because of what they accomplished. I don't think I was the only one who did this. It is a dangerous form of conservative progressivism.
I now believe that, at least partially, our collective, progressive unrequited worship of the people who changed the world for the better during those great days has unfortunately led to an equally powerful worship of the techniques and methodologies they used to accomplish that change. This is the case even though those techniques and methodologies have greatly diminished in their effectiveness as our opponent has greatly changed in both shape and practice. As a result, we continue to engage in outdated political strategies that result in defeat after defeat after defeat. We desperately need to contemporize the organizational structure of our movement, and age is not a factor in someone's ability or inability to recognize that need.
I am indeed arguing for a break with our past, but not with the people of our past. Instead, I am arguing for a break from their political strategies, organization structures, and other methodologies of affecting change. This will include a break from the methodologies of the anti-Vietnam war movement. I think such a break is made more difficult if we are consistently saying the Iraq and Vietnam are analogous, even if just for a sound-bite or a useful metaphor.
That's it. As a final note, I would like to add that I have in no way bought into the "dirty hippie" meme. Anyone who knows me is well aware that for over a decade my entire life has been immersed in the ways of the bohemian. While I may be young, I am certainly not so young to be unaware that for about two hundred years every generation in the industrialized world has given birth to some new variation on this type of lifestyle. No matter what it is called at any given moment, it exists on the fringes of the dominant economic structure of our times: wage-labor. Of my many ancestors in this regard, hippie culture was one of the most memorable and vivid. I would never disrespect that.
(good link this one, from the same person, with lots of valuble links stating the differences between iraq and vietnam)
http://mydd.com/story/2005/8/24/162544/686