Fighting Fire with Fire

There's a good article in the wapo this weekend on a new initiative to efficiently channel vast sums of money into progressive goals in American politics. Sit back and enjoy your Sunday morning coffee. I'm going to explain why this is more than just a good idea or a hopeful sign. This is something which has been missing from the progressive agenda for the last decade or more. First, a few snips from the article.

Rich Liberals Vow to Fund Think Tanks

At least 80 wealthy liberals have pledged to contribute $1 million or more apiece to fund a network of think tanks and advocacy groups to compete with the potent conservative infrastructure built up over the past three decades.

The money will be channeled through a new partnership called the Democracy Alliance, which was founded last spring -- the latest in a series of liberal initiatives as the Democratic Party and its allies continue to struggle with the loss of the House and the Senate in 1994 and the presidency in 2000. Many influential Democratic contributors were left angry and despairing over the party's poor showing in last year's elections, and are looking for what they hope will be more effective ways to invest their support.

The goal of the alliance, according to organizers, is to foster the growth of liberal or left-leaning institutions equipped to take on prominent think tanks on the right, including the Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institution, the American Enterprise Institute and the Cato Institute, as well as such training centers as the Leadership Institute and the Young America's Foundation.

Democrats have spent far too long riding on some base assumptions which used to be viable but are no longer true. There seems to have been a base mindset which said that the majority of Americans would naturally want to support a party that advocated the common interests of "regular Americans", was pro-choice and pushed for equality across lines of race, gender and sexual orientation. The results of the last several election cycles should be more than enough to convince us that just being pro-choice, just being progressive, is not enough.

For a long time now, both here and over at my home blog, Running Scared, Ron and I have been looking at these tides of so called "red state voters" and asking what seems to be the painfully obvious question: Why would people keep voting for politicians who consistently fail to govern in their best interest? The answer has, slowly but surely, become clear. The neocons' marketing machine is flat out better than that of the progressives by a large margin. By whispering the correct "panic button" message and handing out enough K-mart coupons and free beer to the rubes, you can paint enough lipstick on any pig to make it look like a supermodel.

Progressive candidates, confident in the sanity and moral preeminence of their message, have been standing on their soap boxes saying, "Look, people. The neocons are laying waste to the economy while making their corporate cronies richer, stealing away your civil rights, and killing your children in an unjustifiable war of aggression! You can't possibly go vote for them again!"

Unfortunately, the GOP has had foot soldiers in the field far ahead of them saying, "No! We're the real Americans. Terrorists! Terrorists! You're all going to die if you vote for them! And besides... we're gonna cut ya'll's taxes back so you can afford an extra six pack of Coors Light every month!" You may laugh, but it's been a particularly effective message in some parts of our society and, more to the point, it's been delivered in a lethally well organized fashion.

The right wing spent decades building up a huge propaganda infrastructure, while the left did nothing of the kind, simply assuming their message was the better one. Right wing think tanks and buzz control teams such as the Heritage Foundation, Cato and the Korner Kids at NRO have been putting out a spin tsunami supporting the destructive right wing agenda for years. Talk radio, as Air America is learning the hard way, had a lot more influence on daily commuters than anyone would have imagined in the eighties, and Rush Limbaugh and his ilk staked out that ground long before we arrived. "Experts" in every subject field have been dug up to publish scholarly looking papers explaining why the right wing agenda is "the right thing to do" and won't hurt the middle class nearly as much as those "extremist" left wing hand wringers are saying. Flags have long been flying across the media landscape explaining exactly why being "patriotic" is inseparable from "supporting Our Troops" which is equally bound to supporting the GOP agenda. This, of course, means that Democrats and liberals are "unpatriotic" and must, somehow, "hate America."

It takes time to build that sort of infrastructure. It took the GOP a full decade if not two, and a lot of money was poured into the effort. As we can see, it paid off in spades. Democrats have to stop flushing massive cash into single issue initiatives on a race by race basis. They can't simply assume that "common sense" is truly common. A wide messaging network and infrastructure is the only way that the higher level message can be effectively disseminated across the country. The Democracy Alliance described in the article above is the right starting point for progressives, but we mustn't lose patience if it doesn't bear fruit overnight. The right wing didn't build the current version of Rome Burning in a day. The advantage they gained won't be turned back instantly either.