ordinary americans

(From an ordinary guy – promoted by Magnifico)

Liberals need another George McGovern-and perhaps conservatives do too

In the home stretch of the ’72 campaign, [George] McGovern said, “Government has become so vast and impersonal that its interests diverge more and more from the interests of ordinary citizens.”

I was digging around the internet for statistics on liberals, conservatives, and moderates. And ran into a conservative (Bill Kauffman) writing with reverence about the left’s George McGovern. Interesting, I thought.

Especially the part where he talks about McGovern crediting George Wallace’s appeal as a candidate to “a sense of powerlessness in the face of big government, big corporations, and big labor unions.” He asked Wallace for his endorsement, though as he recalls with a smile, “He said, ‘Sena-tah, if I endorsed you I’d lose about half of my following and you’d lose half of yours.'” Well, maybe, guv-nah-but just think of the coalescent possibilities of the remaining halves.

“It is not prejudice to fear for your family’s safety or to resent tax inequities. … It is time to recognize this and to stop labeling people ‘racist’ or ‘militant,’ to stop putting people in different camps, to stop inciting one American against another,” said McGovern, who called the Wallace vote “an angry cry from the guts of ordinary Americans against a system which doesn’t seem to give a damn about what is really bothering people in this country today.”

What hits me in my gut is that last line…

…an angry cry from the guts of ordinary Americans against a system which doesn’t seem to give a damn about what is really bothering people in this country today

I wonder if the liberals/progressives exerting power over politics, policy, and message understand that, dimensionally.  Do we listen to “what is really bothering people?”

I still want to be the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks. We can’t beat George Bush unless we appeal to a broad cross-section of Democrats.

^{Howard Dean}

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And it’s not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

^{Barack Obama}

I wonder about the angry cry… of ordinary Americans; more urgently, I wonder who these ordinary citizens are. Howard Dean tried to acknowledge them and got shut down pretty quickly. Barack Obama is being conditioned to NOT make such heretical assessments, like why ordinary Americans might turn to god and guns.

As I see it, here’s the problem for progressives (emphasis mine)…

Historically, the Confederate flag is a symbol of the Democratic Party.Today, however, Republicans can fly and wave it, but Democrats can’t talk about it–and current Democrats don’t know how to handle it …Democrats know the divide in the South is race. Republicans have exploited it. Democrats have evaded it.

^{Jesse Jackson Jr.}

This isn’t just a north and south thing; it is a them and us issue… whoever the them and us are.

But how to do this? Can we hear ourselves? Reject our own prefab prejudices?  All this sleight of hand, to distract from the real marauders in expensive suits, who have perfected controlling the narrative… their perfect story absolving me of responsibility because, and you know it’s coming: someone else is to blame. The bad people: the Rev. Wrights. Hippies. Communists. Osama bin Laden. Terrorists. Bleeding heart liberals. are responsible for all the bad stuff that happens

How can progressives unravel this toxic tangle of cultural/ethnic/racial biases without insulting those who have succumbed to the manipulations and machinations of greedy, power mongering politicians, corporatists, and religious extremists?  

Reality sucks.  

We do, btw, have statistics to tell us who we are and what we believe. And, according to statistics, we are a LIBERAL country. By alot… Democrats know this. Why are they content to leave us struggling, thinking we are sooooooo fucking alone? Why don’t the Democrats reach out to this middle, who may vote Republican but in poll after poll are much more like us???? WHY????? And why, dear good god, why haven’t we been better at bridging the chasms gaping in every direction among us?

…the average for the past 30 years [has been] (20 percent liberal, 33 percent conservative, 47 percent moderate). And yet when “moderates” were questioned by pollsters for Louis Harris and Associates in 2005, they turned out to share pretty much the same beliefs as self-described liberals-they just couldn’t bring themselves to embrace the hated label.

Over the past 25 years or so, regardless of the party in power, about 37% of the country has self-identified as liberal or progressive or Democratic or “Blue;” about 25% of the population has self-identified as conservative or Republican or “Red,” and the remaining 35% percent – call them moderates

It should come as no surprise that conservative media figures repeat the myth that most Americans share their views. Even when Democrats win, conservatives claim that their ideology is still dominant. On election night 2006, Fox News Washington managing editor Brit Hume acknowledged that Democrats were winning, but stressed that “from what we could see from all the polling and everything else, it remains a conservative country.”

But we don’t control the narrative. Even though we’ve had this almost 50 years of Democrats in control of Congress.

We have millions of American children under nourished, living in poverty, and in unstable conditions. These children are American children… white, black, hispanic, asian, christian, jewish, muslim. It matters not.

These are our children. These children will one day grow up to become neighbors and fellow citizens.

Who will be listening to them?

More importantly, will they be able to listen to one another?