Liberals are conservatives too, part 1

So I've heard that blogging is dying out, replaced by forms of communication that don't require long attention spans, like tweets and Facebook status updates.  Well, that may be true of this blog too, but it's not quite dead yet.

 

Since it's been so long since I last posted, I'm going to try to cram several topics in here under a single rubric, starting from the most recent and working my way back.  To conserve my motivation, I'll only cover one or two per post.

 

The first one is the simplest: Lots of liberals are "conservatives" in the sense of wanting to conserve wild lands, a position more typically referred to as "conservationism."  Last night I saw The Last Mountain, a new film about mountaintop-removal coal mining that makes this point starkly.  Rural West Virginia is largely populated by poor conservatives who work for the coal mining companies.  These people generally can't afford to consider the mining-related health problems they and their children face (including silicosis from coal dust in the air, and brain tumors from water-supply contamination) as more important than their jobs, to say nothing of the cost to the ecosystem.  Part of the reason they can't afford it is psychological: it would mean dishonoring the memory of all their coal-miner ancestors, who worked in what they believed to be an honorable trade, accepting the personal risks for the sake of progress in electrifying America.  So now it's up to the few local progressives, and some activist groups coming in from elsewhere, to resist the destruction of Appalachia and call for moving people into green jobs like erecting and maintaining wind turbines.

 

Moving back a few weeks, we come to the Rebuild the Dream rally that I watched on June 23rd via live streaming video.  Billed as the launch event for a Tea-Party-scale mass movement, the event featured Van Jones, founder of Green for All and brief holder of a minor post in the Obama administration, until a conservative smear campaign forced him out.  At the rally, Jones admitted that one of their attacks was accurate: in his youth, he "was further left than Pluto."  And of course he's still a charismatic representative of progressive causes; the rally was sponsored by MoveOn.org Civic Action, along with dozens of other progressive groups listed at the bottom of the Rebuild the Dream homepage.

 

But Jones also waxed nostalgic for a time when, learning from the harsh experience of the Great Depression, America demanded that big banks behave more conservatively when considering risky investments.  He also insisted that the Rebuild the Dream movement would be centered on patriotic pride for "the richest country in history," even while using that language to counter conservative claims that the U.S. government is "broke" and needs to make drastic cutbacks.  "Peace and prosperity, not war and austerity" was Jones's rallying cry (well, one of them anyway).

 

On the whole, I approve of what Jones, MoveOn, et al are trying to do, particularly the scale of their ambition.  It's going to take a mass movement to break through the wall of ultra-amplified right-wing rhetoric that prevents moderate voters in America from seeing where their true interests lie.  But I have two quibbles.  For one thing, moderates may not much care for Jones's argument about middle-class incomes, which have only risen a bit since 1980 (while those of the rich skyrocketed), but haven't actually fallen.  The problem isn't that we aren't getting richer fast enough; it's that the cost of things like healthcare is rising too fast, making us effectively poorer even with the same inflation-adjusted income.  Jones didn't make that point clearly enough.

Also, I believe that patriotism alone is not enough; just as conservatives claim to seek the betterment of poor nations through globalization and free trade, progressives also want policies that benefit more than just America.  Just because we're talking about rebuilding the American dream doesn't mean we can blithely condemn outsourcing, as Jones and most other progressives do, without asking what happens to foreign workers when outsourcing is scaled back.