The "Values Gap"
There is no question that if the Democrats lost on a single issue in this election, it would be the issue of "moral values". The real hot issue in this election wasn't the economy, Iraq, or the War on Terror. It was what the electorate judged to be each canidate's moral orientation.
There are several reasons for this somewhat surprising result. First, during a time of war, the personal qualities of the commander and chief suddenly becomes much more relevant. The political situation changes so fast, knowing the solid core of a person provides comfort.
Second, the modern campaign emphases almost unavoidably the personal qualities of the canidates rather than their ideas. When was the last time you've read a party platform? People used to base their vote on those! But now, with television campaigning and negative advertising, the personally of the president suddenly becomes much more important. Canidates are always on TV, and they are expected to act like it. Always funny, always presidential, always charismatic, never tired, never weak, never stopping. The better actor seems to win (as evidenced by the fact that our Conneticut born Andover-Yale-Harvard prep school child has transformed himself into a local Texan rancher), not the better canidate.
Third, there is a true reactionary conservative Christian movement in this country whose numbers only grow in size. Whatever they prefer to be called evangelicals or the Christian right, these people have hijacked the Christian religion and turned the faith of Jesus, the man who walked among the prostitutes, chastised the rich, broke bread with the lepers, said the meek would inherit the Earth, and advised the wise to turn the other cheek into a militant intolerant faith persecuting gays, minorities, and the "seculars".
The Democats' response to this rising Christian movement has been timid. They have stayed defiantly secular in their outlook, despite the increasing mixture of politics and religion. This is a mistake. The Democrats need to confront the religion gap head on, and they need to do it by tearing down the Christian Right and expose it as the intolerant, phony, sacrilegious fraud that it is. Jesus was not a warmonger. Jesus would not approve of the death penalty. He suffered from it. Jesus was not a supply-sider, robbing from the poor to give to the rich. The hypocrisy of the Christian Right is there for the exposing, and the Democrats only need to provide a strain of humanistic true Christianity to combat it. Perhaps the next pope will humanize that church in the coming years. Already the Episcopalian are humanizing theirs. The Democrats need to latch on to that leftish faith in order to combat the increasing militancy of the right. If they do not the "values gap" will only widen as the largely religious electorate rejects what it sees as the party of atheism.
There are several reasons for this somewhat surprising result. First, during a time of war, the personal qualities of the commander and chief suddenly becomes much more relevant. The political situation changes so fast, knowing the solid core of a person provides comfort.
Second, the modern campaign emphases almost unavoidably the personal qualities of the canidates rather than their ideas. When was the last time you've read a party platform? People used to base their vote on those! But now, with television campaigning and negative advertising, the personally of the president suddenly becomes much more important. Canidates are always on TV, and they are expected to act like it. Always funny, always presidential, always charismatic, never tired, never weak, never stopping. The better actor seems to win (as evidenced by the fact that our Conneticut born Andover-Yale-Harvard prep school child has transformed himself into a local Texan rancher), not the better canidate.
Third, there is a true reactionary conservative Christian movement in this country whose numbers only grow in size. Whatever they prefer to be called evangelicals or the Christian right, these people have hijacked the Christian religion and turned the faith of Jesus, the man who walked among the prostitutes, chastised the rich, broke bread with the lepers, said the meek would inherit the Earth, and advised the wise to turn the other cheek into a militant intolerant faith persecuting gays, minorities, and the "seculars".
The Democats' response to this rising Christian movement has been timid. They have stayed defiantly secular in their outlook, despite the increasing mixture of politics and religion. This is a mistake. The Democrats need to confront the religion gap head on, and they need to do it by tearing down the Christian Right and expose it as the intolerant, phony, sacrilegious fraud that it is. Jesus was not a warmonger. Jesus would not approve of the death penalty. He suffered from it. Jesus was not a supply-sider, robbing from the poor to give to the rich. The hypocrisy of the Christian Right is there for the exposing, and the Democrats only need to provide a strain of humanistic true Christianity to combat it. Perhaps the next pope will humanize that church in the coming years. Already the Episcopalian are humanizing theirs. The Democrats need to latch on to that leftish faith in order to combat the increasing militancy of the right. If they do not the "values gap" will only widen as the largely religious electorate rejects what it sees as the party of atheism.
posted by Anomadic at 6:30 AM
3 Comments:
I am writing as a life-long Cathli-crat (Catholic Democrat) who has been estranged from the national party. For Progressives or the Left to become ascendant once again, they will need to repudiate the blatant hostility toward religious belief and moral vision. The Democratic party (which I do not hold to be absolutely identical with Progressivism or the Left) has expunged voters such as myself from its rolls since McGovern. Since the inauguration of Richard Nixon in 1969 until the inauguration of the next president in 2009, Democrats will have held the White House for 12/40 years or 30%. I do not know if it is possible to demonstrate causation between the aggressive secularism of the Democratic party and its electoral failures, but some have attempted to do so and are persuasive.
It is fiction to believe that Conservative Catholics and Evangelicals are a priori in the Republican hip pocket. The strong preference of the religious for the recent historical Republican party is based somewhat on platform positions, but primarily on the fact that the Republican party offers at least some space for religious voters. The Democratic party offers a barren wasteland for those with a religious vision.
I believe that a resurgence of Progressivism into the Democratic party is necessary to move the Left back into preeminence. At one time in history, the Left was driven primarily by a moral vision. The Progressives did not believe in the perfectibility or inherent goodness of man, therefore humanity required restraint and sanctions. The Progressive program, based upon the regulation of human conduct, was very successful. The present-day Democratic party has forgotten that slavery, child labor, segregation, corruption, greed of the robber barons, etc. were opposed on moral and religious grounds. The Progressives were anything but libertarian. Although the Democratic party has some remnants of that Progressive moral vision that led to the great successes of the US regulatory era, it is presently more libertarian than the Republican party. The Democratic party (then the Progressives) was once the center of an admirable regulatory impulse, attempts to regulate human appetites toward the good. Now the discourse has degraded from the moral framework to a rights-based platform, and the religious electorate has fled.
Religious voters have far more in common with the Left than the Left cares to admit. Basic human rights, criticism of capitalism, opposition to globalization and unfettered market-driven economics, a preference for the poor and recognition of human need, an eternal moral view of man superior to nationalism and allegiance to countries, political parties and other merely human inventions. However, these commonalities are not enough. The present-day Democratic party actively opposes the religious motivation of its potential adherents, thereby driving them away.
The Republican party is not necessarily a welcoming home for the religious voter. The libertarian wing in the Republican party is very powerful and growing. Religious voters do fear that Republican nods to important moral issues may be only lip service, but the Democratic alternative is barefaced opposition and contempt. Should the libertarian and individualistic stance of the Democratic party be rejected for the moral vision of the early 20th century Progressives, I believe that many, many religious voters (including myself) could finally return in good conscience to a party more reflective of our religious heritage. These voters are ripe for the picking, if only the Democrats would open their eyes to the barriers that keep these voters from switching current day voting preferences.
I recommend that Democrats return to the moral vision of their early 20th century Progressive forefathers to regain the ascendancy of not only US politics, but the moral highground as well.
Mark Kasper
"The hypocrisy of the Christian Right is there for the exposing, and the Democrats only need to provide a strain of humanistic true Christianity to combat it."
(Or humanistic true Judaism, or Islam, or Buddhism, or just about any religion you can name. These values are by no means unique to Christianity.)
One moral value common to most religions is that of telling the truth. Given that the "moral orientation" of the current right-wing political power structure does not include the value of truth-telling, might progressives effectively frame the coming struggle around this central point?
If "moral values" are indeed paramount to those who elected Bush, if the personal qualities of the commander in chief are particularly relevant in wartime, what would happen if they learned they could not, after all, take comfort in his "solid core" because he does not tell the truth?
Unlike many "moral" issues, this one has the great advantage of being an open-and-shut case where Bush is concerned, if only the case were to be made with sufficient force and clarity.
i agree that the party needs to be accepting of religious people. however, i cringe to think that means we have to forget about protecting minority rights (like gays and lesbians) and we have to forget about Roe. I can't do it. If it's really about morals, why support a war we didn't have to fight? why does morals have to translate into institutionalizing discrimination, rather than working on humility and helping the poorest among us? sigh.
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