One Utah

Bill Scher is one of my favorite bloggers – his site www.liberaloasis.com - is consistently one of the best, most insightful around. LO follows a consistent pattern that I appreciate – it combines Lakoffian framing with hard-headed policy and refusal to knuckle under to Conservative bullies.

So, I’ve been waiting to get time to dig into Bill Scher’s Wait! Don’t Move to Canada for quite a while.

The wait was worth it.
I’m about half done with the book and want to offer some bits of insight. Scher argues that we have no choice but to reclaim the term liberal. It’s simply too ingrained in our political psyche – the liberal-conservative dichotomy is not going away and with Republicans constantly attacking the term liberal, we have no choice – we have to defend our principles as liberal principles.

Scher defines the three R’s of liberal governing philosophy:
Representative
Responsive
Responsible
Issue by issue, a solid majority (sometimes overwhelming majority) of Americans hold liberal positions – from choice, to same sex marriage, environmentalism, taxation, social policy, and civil rights. But there’s no larger narrative connecting those issues.

So we have to make the larger case consistently. It’s not that liberal principles work well on Social Security while working badly on other things. Social Security is good because everyone is covered, because it is fair, because it is a good program, good social policy, and good for America. The same principles need to apply to Medicare and education - access for everyone, protection for everyone.

Another example: 60% of Americans favor some form of legal recognition for same sex couples. The larger story is a simple one: Americans believe in fair treatment for all couples, gay and straight. There is no history of same-sex marriage, so many people are uncomfortable with the concept, but support civil unions. That’s understandable and normal. It’s something very new, but something consistent with treating all people equally before the law. In that states that have adopted civil unions and legalized same sex marriage, we now have evidence that tells us it’s good for our communities. Massachusetts has the lowest divorce rate in the nation. Vermont has had civil unions for years now and marriage is a strong in Vermont as it was before.

Fair treatment of all citizens is good for America. It’s good liberal social policy.
Scher makes another important point: responsive, responsible government is about recognizing when government programs are ineffective and fixing them. As liberals, we don’t defend government programs because they’re government programs – we defend the one’s that work, we fix the ones that don’t. FEMA is a great example. Under Bush I FEMA was a corrupt, crony run agency. Clinton reformed it and it became a success story of representative, responsible, responsive government. Under Bush the Lesser, it has become a crony run patronage agency. And it has utterly failed America. The larger story is easy – professional, competent people with a clear mandate for their agencies, and clearly held to standards of conduct will product effective government agencies responsive to the needs of the American people. This is good, liberal government at work – enacting the will of the people, responsive to the needs of the people, responsible to the people for doing what it is charged with doing and doing it effectively and well.

This entry was posted Sunday, October 29th, 2006 at 9:37 pm and is filed under Equality, National Politics, Society. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.