Muscular Liberalism

November 2^nd, 2004. 

I remember it well. Some good, loving, liberal friends threw a post-election ‘wake’, giving us all an opportunity to mourn the electoral defeat of John Kerry, a good man, an intellectual, a war hero and a terrible candidate, to George W. Bush, who possessed the exact opposite characteristics. We all correctly feared more war, more economic demise in the coming years and wondered what could have been done differently.

The food was wonderful. The kinship was enjoyable. The determination to do what it takes to actually beat the massive machine that Movement Conservatism had become was tragically self-defeating.

Getting fed up with Democrats and Liberals from Carter to Mondale, from Dukakis to Gore and finally to Kerry, I told everyone that we had to stop apologizing for what we believe. We must stop allowing ourselves to be defined by this powerful message machine comprised of conservative think tanks, Rush Limbaugh and all his wannabe talk radio mimics, and the nascent and newly powerful conservative force, Fox “News”.

The title wave was only going to get bigger and more powerful. I told everyone that we had to stop being nice. We had to force Conservatives to defend themselves as being a threat to individual rights, working class Americans and families struggling to get by.

The push back I received was what I expected. “We don’t want Republicans to think we hate them. We just want them to try to understand where we’re coming from.”

Sigh.

The 2006 and 2008 elections were victories won the only way modern Democrats have been able to win in the last 30 years; with Republicans having governed for more than 2 years. Democrats won those elections mainly because Republicans in full power had governed the way we knew they would and their governing was having a traumatic effect on our nation and its economy.

Having Sarah Palin as a Vice Presidential candidate didn’t hurt our cause either.

The Iraq War was, in 2006, a full blown humanitarian disaster. Tens of thousands of Iraqis were being slaughtered and millions were forced to move from their homes, never to return.  American soldiers were losing their lives by the hundreds while going back to tour after tour of duty. Al Qaeda, a non-presence in Iraq before the war, was now fully present and operational, adding violence and terror to an already vicious mix.

And the economy was starting to crumble. Warnings of a pending housing crisis were beginning to be realized, employment was getting worse and our national debt was piling up. The veneer of George W. Bush as a swashbuckling President creating an all-powerful America was falling apart with frequent verbal gaffes and extraordinary failure in Iraq, in the war on terrorism and the economy. Dick Cheney’s lies were becoming more and more exposed.

The Bush/Cheney failure, the economic disaster that was unfolding and the Republicans weak candidates opened a path for a young and unproven Barack Obama to take the election in 2008 with positive messages of hope and change.

Then after the 2008 election Democrats and Liberals went back to their apathetic and apologetic political zone. They and our new President once again settled into to my friends’ operational belief that if we offer an olive branch of peace to conservatives they’ll work with us to forge a great American partnership.  They believed that conservatives would see the history of the disastrous Bush/Cheney administration and realize they could not repeat it.

Then disaster struck once again. Every effort by President Obama—doing  his best John Kerry impersonation—to find middle ground with Republicans was met with a stab in the back.  In fact, a newly published book by journalist Robert Draper, “Do Not Ask What Good We Do”, reveals that Republicans leaders past and present and pollster Frank Lutz, gathered on the night of inauguration and conspired to simply block every item on Obama’s agenda through his entire term using any means possible. Not surprisingly Newt Gingrich led the discussion.

A growing force that emerged as the Tea Party began to dominate the conversation. Tea Party sympathizers and members started believing the lies of an angry Sarah Palin, that there were death panels in Health Care Reform. Millions believed in the strategically created lie that Barack Obama may not be an American citizen and that he surely must be a closet Muslim who, as Palin asserted, “pals around with terrorists.”

Obama’s Health Care Reform plan was going to force millions of Americans into a plan they didn’t want and couldn’t afford.

None of it was true of course. These were carefully crafted lies repeated over and over on talk radio, on Fox News and in conservative newspapers.

The mainstream media, after 30 years of being frightened at being labeled “liberally biased”, treated every false accusation as if it might be true, just as they had with the buildup to the Iraq War, just as they had during Clinton’s impeachment, just as they had with the Swift Boat Liars who successfully turned war hero John Kerry into a coward with questionable patriotic credos.

This was a tried and true method of the Movement Conservatives; turn your political opponent into a hated figure. That way, the people whom your opponent’s policies will most surely benefit—in this case working class and middle class professionals—will be blinded to the policies by their anger and hatred of the man.

The examples are abundant.

Dukakis and the furloughs of frightening black murderers.

Gore and his ties to an immoral President.

Mondale promised to raise taxes and make us weak.

 Liberals believed in free sex and allowing gays to ‘recruit’ young people into their world threatening family’s nation-wide.  Remember the era of the “angry white male” in the early 80s? They were angry at all the efforts to bring equality into our nation after 350 years of slavery and another century of minority disenfranchisement.

Obama was an easy mark;  a mixed race man with the middle name of our enemy and a full name that reeked of Muslim terrorist ties. I’ll never forget a video I saw during the 2008 election. A young man with a home video camera asked more than 50 people waiting in line for a McCain-Palin event what they thought of Senator Obama. Every single one of them said he was a Muslim. Every one of them!

The foundation of the Tea Party was born. Large corporations and health insurance companies knew that once they had the hatred of middle class Americans on their side, they could get away with creating policies that would cause great harm to those same people while generating huge profits and tax cuts for large corporations and wealthy individuals.

In 2010 all those factors created a big victory for right wing conservatives nationwide.

States like Wisconsin, Ohio, Virginia, Arizona and Florida elected far right wing Tea Party supported governments that began to strip away voting rights, reproductive rights and workers’ rights, while giving huge tax cuts to large corporations.

Right on cue.

Today former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney stands poised to be the next Republican to benefit from these false stereotypes and the historical amnesia of middle class America. He promises to enact economic and foreign policies that are not just similar to the Bush/Cheney model but far more destructive.

Romney has shown during the Republican primary and at the beginning stages of the general election campaign a willingness to make statements that are blatantly false, the most egregious being that he never supported “Obamacare” for the nation and that the statement about Romney’s wife, made by a CNN pundit, was most certainly attributable to the entire Obama nation.

That was then….

This is now.

Take that one statement by Hillary Rosen. She said that Anne Romney “never worked a day in her life,” and therefore doesn’t understand what life is like for middle and low income working moms. Romney’s campaign lashed out at Obama, falsely claiming that Rosen was speaking for the Obama campaign. For several days the Romney/conservative message machine was gaining traction with this phony “war on moms”.

This time the response was different. It was swift and it was destructive. Instead of a compliant media and apathetic liberals apologizing for, well for nothing, the truth came bursting through.

Facebook liberals started posting a video and quotes from Romney speaking in New Hampshire in January. “While I was governor,” Romney said, “85 percent of the people on a form of welfare assistance in my state had no work requirement. I wanted to increase the work requirement. I said, for instance, that even if you have a child two years of age, you need to go to work. And people said, ‘Well that’s heartless,’ and I said ‘No, no, I’m willing to spend more giving daycare to allow those parents to go back to work.  I want the individuals to have the dignity of work.’”

Facebook Nation erupted. The hypocrisy of Romney’s statements was impossible for the formally compliant and frightened corporate media to ignore. They, too, had to play the quote. Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Rachel Maddow, Chris Matthews, Lawrence O’Donnell all chimed in, exposing this huge hypocrisy before the entire nation.

Their satire, their reporting, their quick wit were instantly copied and posted on Facebook by the tens of thousands, opening up formerly complacent liberal eyes with their morning coffee.

Women who were already furious with state legislatures and Governors in Virginia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and other states forcing women who chose an abortion to take medical procedures that were medically unnecessary and as invasive as invasive gets, understood immediately what was happening.

This time they fought back with a vengeance.

For the first time since Lyndon Johnston’s era, liberals have found a fighting voice. They have found their muscle and they are ready to punch back. Even more challenging for Romney is where that muscle is derived; Social Media.

Facebook has changed our world. For many it’s a way to stay in touch with old friends and deliver family news to friends.

But Facebook has been a powerful force for change. Take Virginia for instance.

When the Commonwealth’s right wing legislature and Governor passed the law calling for invasive medical procedures on women who were about to have an abortion, a Facebook protest was organized in less than a week, resulting in more than a thousand ‘silent’ protesters in front of the Governor’s mansion and making national headlines. Governor Bob McDonnell was compelled to remove the invasive procedure provision in the law. His opportunity to become Romney’s Vice Presidential candidate was severely hampered.

A bigger picture is August of 2011. This was arguably President Obama’s weakest point in his office. The huge mid-term victories by the Tea Party were still serving as fresh evidence that Obama might just be 21^st century version of Jimmy Carter. Those Tea Party candidates who were about to govern had yet to implement some of the extremist agenda that would quickly sour most people’s impression of the movement.

So the Republicans, with the media still frightened, with the Muslim/Birther issue still strong within their base, with the nation not happy with the economic recovery, decided to put the hammer down.

They took the debt ceiling to the brink. They forced President Obama into a weeks-long negotiation to prevent the American people and our entire economy from defaulting on our debt obligations. They believed they could force this weak president, and convince this weak generation of journalists, that the only way to cut debt was to cut spending and allow for a continuation of the Bush/Cheney tax cuts for the wealthy.

This time the compliant liberal base was no longer compliant. With social media providing the muscle they punched back.

Every news story on Eric Cantor and the Republicans’ effort to look like the true deficit busters was met with massive social media digging up the stories and the facts not seen on Fox or on Sarah Palin’s mythical “lamestream media”.

Facebook, web logs (Blogs), YouTube all became windows to a truth that had been effectively covered for decades by an aggressive conservative movement echo chamber.

As Cantor tried to position himself as the hero of debt reduction, his own record of voting to raise more than $5 trillion in debt during the Bush years was thrown right back into his face. The Daily Kos was one of thousands of sites that pounded on the proverbial bully.

Eric Cantor and the "tea party" Republicans …turned the raising of the debt limit—nearly a yearly occurrence, under Bush, and with zilch in the way of fanfare—into some new unholy amalgamation of the Battle of the Bulge, Custer's Last Stand, and a particularly plotless Michael Bay film. We must balance the budget! We must not raise taxes! And it must happen right now, because after ten years of sitting on our collective asses and ballooning the deficit with our own ridiculous demands, we conservatives finally realized all of this the very moment a Democrat moved into the White House!

This kind of language, repeated millions of times on social media sites gave formerly disheartened liberals factual ammunition and a powerful voice. They forced journalists to dig up archival stories they used to be too lazy or too frightened to do; like  Cantor & Co. raising the debt limit regularly for the better part of a decade.

Polls reflected this new-found strength in a year that should have been disastrous for liberalism.

The CBS/New York Times poll conducted in August of that year revealed, “A record 82 percent of Americans now disapprove of the way Congress is handling its job — the most since The Times first began asking the question in 1977, and even more than after another political stalemate led to a shutdown of the federal government in 1995.

More than four out of five people surveyed said that the recent debt-ceiling debate was more about gaining political advantage than about doing what is best for the country. Nearly three-quarters said that the debate had harmed the image of the United States in the world.”

That poll was followed by the beginning of the Occupy Wall Street movement. People young and old but mostly young, occupied valuable New York City territory for weeks, displaying their grave concerns over Wall Street and large corporations running government at all levels; leaving ordinary working Americans little voice and little economic benefit. The Occupy movement spread across the nation and the world. Suddenly the national conversation wasn’t about cutting spending but economic equality.

Occupy was fully organized with lightning speed on social media.

And it’s remained that way ever since. Republicans will continue to talk about spending cuts but they now are forced to fight the fight of economic fairness. This is, to say the least, an uncomfortable battle for them. When it became public that their shiny new presidential candidate is building a car elevator in one of his mansions, Facebook nation has revealed that, as Governor, Romney vetoed a $65,000 bill to enhance a few elevators to make them more accessible for people with disabilities.  

The biggest battle this new generation of muscular liberals will have to fight will be against the Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court that allows millions to be spent on behalf of candidates secretly.

Progressives must keep up the fight, keep talking and ignore those who say we’re not being polite enough to our fellow conservatives. Otherwise we will be enjoying delicious food at yet another progressive ‘wake’.