Reply #120: Oh my good Lord, I missed this part. [View All]

[madfloridian]

A lot of people on this thread realized I was not talking just about Dean's supporters being criticized. I was talking about the world view of these men who look down from aloft, and they can not differentiate between liberals, moderates, or anything else..

But then I realized why I was so upset. They don't want to see reality of what we are...that I am a pretty moderate person who went along to get along and voted for what the party said always. I realized they have to define us according to their goals, which do not include most of the regular party members.

Read these paragraphs, then read them again. They are talking about educated people, moderate people, people like Howard Dean who governed as a centrist, people like my husband and me who are just average people in the middle of the road. Then read the paragraphs again, and after that stop pretending this is just another wing of the party.

Again, Range is speaking of the Pew Poll, but then he veers off into civil rights and more. Read it and think. This is the editor of a so-called Democratic magazine, and this does not sound like a Democrat.

"By living to a large extent in a world of academic isolation and activist enclaves (41 percent have post-graduate degrees), the liberal wing is often alienated from many traditional Democratic constituencies -- even the minorities that liberals have always claimed to work so hard for. It's painfully ironic for an old civil rights liberal like me to note that the presence of more blacks in the Pew sample would have made it much more conservative, especially on issues like gay rights and church attendance.

Yet if you've tasted the successes of, say, the Voting Rights Act and the near-impeachment of Richard Nixon, when the liberal view was the winning view, it's easy to keep confusing your beliefs with the popular will. From there it's a short step to the conceit -- which I harbored for many years -- that liberal views on everything from gun control to same-sex unions to suburban sprawl should be the majority view of the Democratic Party, if not of the nation. If you say it long and hard enough, they'll finally get it.

That's wrong. Liberals today are a minority party within a multiparty system known as the Democratic Party. In any other country, they would run separately, and then negotiate a coalition government afterward. In America, we need to negotiate our coalitions before the general election. This requires a readiness to compromise that, alas, is not always a hallmark of dedicated activism.

Indeed, because of the good old days, the liberal wing's instinct is to try to take over the party -- to force its agenda on the other parts of the Democratic coalition -- as we were able to do in the civil rights era. We did it again in 1972, nominating a presidential candidate who was the clear choice of liberal activists -- and was rejected by voters in 49 states in the general election." END QUOTE

Think about it. Think of who he is describing as liberals. I am one here who advocates compromise, often get criticized for that. I have issues I get touchy about, but I have often been critical of those who say their way is the only way.

He is in effect forcing his agenda on the rest of the party while accusing us of the same. His description is not real, it is not sensible.

He is in effect also saying that those whom he defines as "liberals" are the ones who do not have a right to impose their agenda. He is saying that in another country we would have to form our own party. Hey, guy, it used to be my party.

Rather than seek better gun safety laws, liberals seek total gun control. Rather than fairness and restraint in the death penalty, the liberal instinct is to swim totally against the popular tide by trying to ban it. Rather than enthusiastically embrace a strong federal role in school accountability, liberals have let Bush hatred reflexively force them to take the states' rights side of the most important civil rights battle of our time. Imagine that!

If liberals consider themselves progressives, they must take seriously the progress part of the word -- as in change. That means sometimes releasing old dogmas and embracing new ones.

Heaven knows we need our activists, and God bless 'em. Let's just get them engaged in the larger center-left undertaking so Democrats can win elections, not just arguments. The Pew survey strikes a sobering note, and we should take it as a wake-up call.

Excuse me, but Mr. Range, we did it your way last year. I won't go into details, but your guys meddled in the primary. Then you meddled in Kerry's campaign forcing soft-pedaling. Don't imply we need to start our own party. We just might someday.