F Words
Yes, the speech was meaningless piffle, an attempt to apply retroactively a crusading veneer to Dear Leader’s blind, bloody blundering through the Middle East.
But don’t think we’re scoring political points by mockingly setting up a toteboard showing how many times he said Freedom, or by pointing out that our equivocal position in the real world frequently demands disregard of oppression and accommodation with dictators.
Support for the Iraq war and Bush’s approval ratings may be cratering, but it’s going to translate into more anger and contempt for the Democrats’ failure to capitalize on Bush’s weaknesses than gratitude to the sideline liberal Cassandras for pointing out what chumps the voters were.
What’s our Lakoffian alternative to Bush’s Freedom fetish? Are our F words the accusatory litany of Futility, Failure, and Folly?
Be careful.
Those words are not the exclusive property of a conservative political movement that is now at the pinnacle of its success and backed by the power of the presidency and the immense political, military, financial, and media machine that underpins it.
Most of the bad faith in American politics can probably be traced to the Republicans, but most of the bad decisions certainly belong to us — the progressive Democrats.
We have to come to terms with the fact that for 40 years we fiddled while Rome burned.
When the liberal journey transited the promised land of legally guaranteed equal rights for all (well, all except for women and gays) and entered the difficult terrain of social justice for minorities, we blew it.
We let the African American community — the moral core of liberalism — be decimated by drugs and incarceration and delegitimized by sneering attacks on the social programs that benefited them.
When the U.S. economy restructured, outsourced, and globalized, leaving unions — our demographic core — vulnerable to management assault and government indifference, we blew it.
We let the free market grind unions — and their promise of economic security for American workers — into fragments.
When our movement lost its political heft and its intimidating, inspiring identity as an expression of progressive militancy, we blew it.
We made a spectacle of our helplessness and futility by forgetting that our moral imperatives had to be backed up by political muscle if we wanted to be a respected and viable political force.
We let a principled, popular movement — that had led America through its most glorious era and to its greatest victories over depression, fascism, and segregation — degenerate until the Right could mock it as an impotent tool of unpopular “special interests”.
We became the coulda been shoulda been party that couldn’t even hold its own, let alone expand its base.
We blew it.
And that’s what allowed an intellectually and morally bankrupt party like the GOP to pretend it’s the expression of the popular will.
They got to stand for Freedom because we became known as the party of Failure.
I’m not saying the fights were easy, or even that they could have been won.
The Right got a powerful assist from the demographics of white flight and social fragmentation, and the business and technological developments that enabled them.
And Democratic politicians were too easily seduced by the idea that trickle-down campaign contributions from corporations — and pro-business policies — would somehow lead to a rising tide for all Americans.
But when you look at where we are now — outside, looking in — we have to look at what went wrong and what we did wrong.
And we have to decide if there’s anything we can do.
The good old days of effective, progressive union and minority militancy — and the great leaders it created — is irrevocably lost.
The African American community is geographically and politically isolated, and demographically on the defensive.
We can’t put the union Humpty Dumpty back again, not while the multinationals can stream jobs away from America and into India and China at will.
But there is a huge disconnect between the popular yearning for a secure, happy life and the corrupt GOP establishment that pretends to speak for it.
The problem isn’t with liberalism.
The problem is with us — its practitioners — and America’s doubts about whether it can trust us to understand what is happening to this nation and offer a plan to rally it and move it forward in the face of an entrenched reactionary opposition.
Can we move beyond what we have lost, and look on to what we can still achieve?
Americans need to regain control over our destiny as a nation and our progress as a people.
That’s true freedom.
The political road ahead probably runs through economic nationalism and development of domestic physical and social infrastructure — not superpower delusions of grandeur, mindless obeisance before the perfectly efficient gods of international free trade, or blind faith that the free market will create the best life for Americans.
Contrary to Bush’s assertions in his inaugural address, we won’t secure our freedom by rushing into rabid, distracting overseas crusaderism meant to perpetuate the fear, mistrust, and division that disfigure this country and enable his rule.
Securing freedom begins at home, by rediscovering a shared commitment to hope, justice, and security that will first exalt our nation and can then reinvigorate our foreign policy with honor and optimism — and success.
We can’t just rail at George Bush’s abuse of the word Freedom.
We have to make the word Freedom our own — again.
If we can’t, where is the future for the Democratic Party — or this country?
Copyright 2004 Peter Lee
Peter Lee is the creator of the anti-war satire and commentary website Halcyon Days. He can be reached at peter@halcyondays.info.
