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Micah L. Sifry is a senior analyst with Public Campaign. He is the author of Spoiling For A Fight: Third-Party Politics In America, (Routledge, 2002) and the web log www.iraqwarreader.com, and recently co-edited The Iraq War Reader: History, Documents, Opinions (Touchstone, 2003)

If American progressives hope to counter the Right, we're going to need more than a laundry list of grievances and a souped-up infrastructure for projecting our message. We're going to need to articulate a counter-vision to the Right's drumbeat themes. Greater competence in placing our talking heads on TV or feeding our policy proposals to legislators won't be enough: we need a common world-view, or what used to be called an ideology.

Consider, for a moment, the ideology of the corporate-religious Right. Grover Norquist, the Right's most accomplished organizer, can put it on a bumpersticker: "Leave Us Alone." Under that banner, he's got anti-tax taxpayers, property owners who hate regulations they say reduce property values, small businesses that fear both taxes and regulation, gun owners who don't want their weapons taken away, religious conservatives who don't want the government imposing foreign values on their families, parents who send their kids to private schools, and of course the most venal and least labor- and minority-friendly elements of corporate America. As Norquist explained in a seminal speech:

...the "Leave Us Alone" coalition is built around a single political principle consistent with American history and tradition -- that government should be limited and the people free. As such, it is a "low maintenance" coalition. Conservative leaders can meet in a room [indeed, they meet at Norquist's offices every Wednesday], and the taxpayers can agree not to throw condoms at the children of Christians and orthodox Jews, the gun owners can agree not to raise everyone else's taxes, the Christians can agree not to steal anyone's guns, and they can all agree not to take anyone's property.

I recently read two pieces on TomPaine.com that discussed opposing the folks now in power. They made the same point: progressives need to learn from the rise of the New Right, pool their resources and start marching together in a coordinated way. Joe Bevilacqua called for "planful discipline" of the kind practiced by Norquist, Paul Weyrich and Karl Rove, along with more funding to promote progressive scholars, hold conferences and better package information to Congress. Robert Borosage of the Campaign for America's Future counseled against the Democrats' drift to the center-right. He called on progressives to develop "an independent capacity to drive their message, their values and their movement into the political debate."

Bevilacqua and Borosage are right on the mechanics (though, as my friend Doug Ireland points out, there are serious self-inflicted obstacles to getting progressives to cooperate). But what about a unifying counter theme?

Their answer to Norquist's "Leave Us Alone" team is a liberal "Fight Back" coalition. Bevilacqua and Borosage say: The forces of greed are undoing the good things we created or inherited (Social Security, Medicare, environmental protections, civil rights, progressive taxation, etc.), and all the fragmented groups on the liberal side of the spectrum have to unify to beat back this assault.

The myriad constituencies offended by the Bush administration have to do a better job of getting their message to the public.

Rep. Jan Schakowsky pushed this theme in a great speech to a recent gathering of liberal and progressive activists in Washington. She argued that the myriad constituencies offended by the Bush administration have to do a better job of getting their message to the public: lawyers and judges should speak out louder to protect civil liberties and privacy rights; seniors should get loud and angry about efforts to privatize Social Security and Medicare; enviros should protest at Big Oil shareholder meetings; women should rally to defend reproductive rights; all of us need to defend labor's right to organize. And so on.

"Fight Back" is the default position of many of my progressive friends, and it's understandable why. But my gut says you can't emulate the New Right in deed without recognizing the need for an affirmative counter-vision, a unifying theme that explains why we're fighting the Right. Without one, we're just talking about defending a goulash of disparate interest groups' entitlements.

To counter "Leave Us Alone" I suggest "We're All In This Together." Its rationale might go like this:

We must protect the environment because its degradation threatens us all. We must invest in universal health care because disease observes no boundaries -- gated communities won't protect you from SARS, AIDS, asthma or anthrax. The benefits of democracy are not reserved for the wealthy, they belong to everyone -- we fight for an equal voice for all Americans and to protect politics from the distortions of big money. We are only as well off as the poor, elderly and disabled among us, and there but for the grace of God go I -- we need a viable social safety net. We believe every person has the same intrinsic worth, that society's health depends on everyone having an equal stake, and that there is strength in diversity -- we want an inclusive society that values everyone regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation or religion. Money is not the measure of all worthwhile things -- markets left to their own devices will not care for the poor, educate our children, create public parks or seek justice for all. Those who benefit most from what democratic society provides have a greater obligation to give back to it -- we believe in progressive taxation. The multiple crises facing the world require multilateral cooperation, not go-it-alone imperialism.

This is a quick attempt to frame an affirmative program. Others may have better ways than this -- I'm interested in hearing from readers.

But here's my point: Investing in mechanics (like better training and promotion of spokespeople) is essential, but not enough. Without a commonly understood world-view, progressives will fail no matter what the size or strength of their megaphone.


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Published: Jun 16 2003