Seriously though, there is a big realization that I’ve come to in the past year or so (or at least one that’s been brought home): the difference in honorable and/or pragmatic conduct is indeed largely binary, but it’s NOT “liberal” vs. “conservative.”

There’s an old saying that “most rational people can meet in the middle;” well I’d expand and modify that a bit to say that most rational people can debate different means to ends without screaming at each other or taking the animus too seriously.

Anyway, good post.

Thanks for writing that, Marian. I’ve met plenty of people in my life where racism = hate against blacks. Hate against any other race is fair game.

Jill, this is an excellent post and over the last few years, I’ve been more careful when criticizing people, but it’s not enough, and posts like this remind me to keep vigilant over word choices and proper criticism.

“Yeah, but you can’t trust the Democrats, ‘cuz they wanna take away all the guns.”

Now, I’d NEVER, EVER say that today. I’ve never owned a gun, and never wanted to. So why I said this continues to be a source of shame and embarrassment to me, in retrospect. But now, I think I’ve got a pretty good handle on it. We respond with the cultural values with which we have been indoctrinated, no matter how wrong or fucked-up those values may be. Sure, we have the power to recognize those flaws for what they are, but dismantling those old programs is hard. Back in basic, during an argument, I once called a guy I disliked by a racist remark referring to his Filipino heritage. It was completely wrong, and I immediately regretted it, of course, but it goes to show old programs die hard.

Republicans don’t own bigotry any more than we leftists. The difference here is that Repubs actively campaign to make that bigotry socially acceptable. As liberals, we are obligated to recognize and stamp out bigotry wherever we find it, even if it’s within ourselves. And when we fail, we should be glad when others call us out on it.

To be clear, I wasn’t trying to call out Atrios or whoever else who calls Jeff a paste-eater. I personally don’t think Jeff is dumb — I think he’s wrong, but I don’t think he’s stupid. However, I have seen him referred to as “retarded” on other blogs (not Atrios, not Sadly, No!, not Pandagon and not here, but elsewhere), and I’m fairly certain that he was called a “paste-eating ‘tard” on Scott’s blog. I think we’ve all heard the word “retard” used against people who we think are stupid. So I was just using Jeff as an example of how people toss around the word “retarded” as an insult. I take no issue with the term “paste-eater” as an insult.

As a current undergrad, I suppose I’m pretty well situated to clue you in on the current “Liberalness” situation here. However, I’m new to the blogosphere, so please be gentle – I’m tender:

Yes, NYU is a bastion of liberal thought. But it is fist-pumping, stupid-t-shirt-wearing, bawling-at-passersby-in-Washington-Square liberalism. It is ambitious but ultimately harmless uber-idealistic baby-fat flailing-armed liberalism, prosecuted faithfully by shivering hipster dudes in women’s jeans with thick-rimmed glasses and bellicose young ponytailed women in brightly-colored, slogan-bearing shirts, clipboards in hand, berating people with their ideology and crying at the generally uniform unresponsiveness they receive in return.

It is the kind of liberalism that gets all self-satisfied at kicking Coke off campus and marches gleefully through Union Square after Hurricane Katrina, toting tubas and coffins in a mock New Orleans funeral procession, but refuses to be quoted on its beliefs (cowards) and quietly chews its lip when you start talking about Palestine.

It is the kind of liberalism that gets in a big huff when the university administration busts our graduate student union, but only for a few weeks — then the inconvenience of hoofing it to Chelsea to attend class in a professor’s apartment becomes too great, and even the liberals with the BIG, SHINY GSOC buttons quietly cross the picket line on a daily basis. It is hypocritical, hip liberalism.

It is, in short, weak liberalism. A feminist blog may not be the best place to say this, but I’ve seen Cubist paintings with more balls.

Couch this shaky-kneed young progressive scene in the surrounding argument of a Democratic party picking its battles and bloggers hurling digital epithets at deserving but relatively unimportant targets like Ann Coulter. She is, let’s face it, Leftblogistan’s (stealing Matt Browner-Hamlin’s word — thanks dude) guilty pleasure. New as I am, I don’t need to go more than twice around this block to know how easy it is to take shots at her and how often people do.

So let’s start there. Aside from a much-needed angst escape valve, what is bashing on pundits like Coulter? Well, fun, but useless.

In the liberal community that surrounds me, I see activism, but it’s easy activism – it’s those marches around Union Square and occasional bus trips to DC. It’s stickers on the mailboxes most New Yorkers have tuned out already (see “saturation” in the media sense) with the rest of the graffitti here. It’s not just preaching at the choir, it’s getting out the goddamn pulpit and beating them bloody with the Bible.

This liberal community picks its battles too. They’re worthy battles.

I think it’s the battlegrounds that need more attention.

While agreeing on the whole with what Scott wrote, there are some things that are bothering me. Like,rights for women and gays are minority interests. To whom? Aren’t most Democratic voters women? Don’t women and gays vote disproportionately Democrat? Why should their issues become tactically disposable when they are the Party and its base?Why are rich white men the ones whose interests must be played to when they are not the voters the Party has? Are you aware that most voters in the whole population are not rich white men?

You hit the nail on the head. There’s a fine line between “pragmatism” and being ashamed of one’s base. There’s something defensive about calls for “universalism” as issued by many on the left. It’s as if they’re hell-bent on proving to the right that they’re not held hostage by those noisy “interest groups” (although why the right’s constituency of religious fundies and corporate plutocrats aren’t likewise considered “interest groups” is a mystery no one feels troubled to explain).

Call me postmodern, but I really don’t think history provides much evidence of an ironclad law such that “majoritarian” politics are always and in every case superior to identity politics. My hunch is that the actual record is far more mixed, and that the efficacy of majoritarian vs. identity politics can only be determined on a case-by-case basis, not by an a priori argument. The Republicans have practically handed the Democrats a number of huge, majoritarian issues (the environment, health care, working people’s issues, even national security) that the Dems have thus far utterly failed to capitalize on. I’m skeptical that a doctrinaire insistence on majoritarianism is a solution for the across-the-board ineptitude shown by the Democrats.

In fact, recent history provides at least one example of a moment in which the Democrats’ refusal to respond to the demands of one of its “interest groups” actually cost them the reigns of power: the 2000 presidential elections. African-Americans wanted nothing more than to be good majoritarians and vote Al Gore into office, but the Democrats effectively denied us this opportunity by refusing to fight for our interests, screwing themselves in the process. It sent a subliminal message that if the White House had to be delivered to them by mere black folks, they’d rather not have it. Instead of the pabulum about “healing the country,” a little more divisiveness might have led to a better outcome for everyone. If it were a Republican constituency that had been disenfranchised (bible-thumpers, anyone?), we could expect them to remorselessly paralyze the national business for as long as it took them to get what they wanted (and to bear a mighty long grudge afterwards that they would no doubt try to parlay into future political gains). They wouldn’t have been suckered by any “healing the nation” rhetoric, because only Democrats fall for shit like that.

there are some things that are bothering me. Like,rights for women and gays are minority interests. To whom? Aren’t most Democratic voters women? Don’t women and gays vote disproportionately Democrat? Why should their issues become tactically disposable when they are the Party and its base? Why are rich white men the ones whose interests must be played to when they are not the voters the Party has? Are you aware that most voters in the whole population are not rich white men?

Those things bother me too. As I said, “I’m upset that I live in a country in which the ‘quality’ of political discourse and the realities of the political environs compel me to say something I find intellectually dissatisfying and outright condescending.” I don’t know why this is a political reality, but it certainly seems to be. I would be overjoyed to be proven wrong, ecstatic if someone could demonstrate that a Democratic Party which hied to something resembling the philosophical consistency zuzu mentions above could win — but I haven’t seen that happen and, sadly, I don’t see it happening soon. I’m not happy about this, and I wish someone could tell me how to change it; but right now, I think the best way to support a feminist/queer/minority agenda is to vote Bland Democrat and pressure them to install progressive thinkers on the bench.

This may all come down to me slowly concluding that large social trends are more in the hands of the judicial than executive or legislative branches. Yes, those two prosecute wars, create fiscal disasters, &c., but I think domestic social change isn’t legislated so much as adjudicated. I could be wrong, however, and I’m open to all counterarguments.

Matt Bronwer-Hamlin:

Sometimes it’s nice to regress to the diction of a four year old when dealing with right wing regressives.

But if you “deal with” them by “regressing to the diction of a four year old,” are you actually “dealing with” them? Aren’t you just venting? I understand how satisfying it can be to release some steam, but in terms of the quality of the discourse, what does it contribute? I also think you’re missing one point of my original post: a discursive space is something that everyone creates through interaction. If you behave like a four year old, you’re creating an environment in which such behavior is acceptable; your opponents will respond in kind, but whereas you’ll think to yourself “I was just responding to them,” you’ll think “that’s how they actually are.” While that may be true, it may also be the case that they’re behaving the way they are simply because you earlier behaved they way they are — in other words, I guarantee that they think you as puerile as you think them, when the case may be that neither of you is as puerile as you think each other are. You may simply being playing out a script written before you arrived but performed daily.

Civility doesn’t mean letting someone be wrong time and again to the point of proving their shear unintelligence and not call them out for it. I don’t see a problem with how lefty bloggers make cracks at the intelligence of rightwing bloggers. Call me stupid, but I just don’t think it’s a big deal.

See above, but also check out the discussion on my blog. Sure, it’s getting a little rough, but for the most part it’s a group of people with diverse political opinions telling each other they’re wrong, dead wrong, unbelievably wrong, but in a fashion which allows the conversation to continue, positions to be nuanced, informed detentes to be drawn, &c. (Look, for example, at how I’ve convinced a conservative that the “gay marriage sits atop a slippery slope” meme doesn’t work. What would have happened had I shouted him down?)

I could scarce believe the vitriol some of the supposed “progressives” were using.

Choosing to dump on her because she had some money , and ignoring that the *real* illumination in the article was the hoops she had to jump through even though she *did* have money — and how much worse it demonstrably is for those *without* access to money and opportunity.

Just to get details right, the guys would not say that to Ms. Malkin, the idea is that Ms. Malkin says that herself, “me love you long time” being, allegedly, a phrase non-English speaking prostitutes in Asia used to say when soliciting American G.I.s. This crap pissed me off every time I’ve seen it. I know this rap about Michelle Malkin’s c*nt is supposed to be funny but it’s not. What it achieves when so-called progressives issue these imbecile slurs against Malkin (besides, of course, getting a laugh out of Beavis) is it gives right-wingers something to howl about in order to distract opponents from the ridiculous flimsiness of Malkin’s logic.

Certainly it cannot be denied that Malkin writes like a snotty ninth-grader. I think one can even legitimately criticize her as an immigrant’s daughter of foreign, non-Aryan extraction, when she parrots the Stormfront line regarding immigrants. In real life, she actually does this; but in real life she doesn’t accost G.I.s down at the seaport bars. And even if she did have a scandalous personal life, she hasn’t built her career as pundit on excoriating others over their sexual transgressions. Whereas, for example, to have attacked Laura Schlesigner or Henry Hyde, even in indecent language, over their personal behavior was legitimate, as they both made their reputations for attacking others over precisely the same offenses against conventional morality of which they themselves actually were guilty.