Freedom

Digby puts something into words that's been swirling around my head for some time:

I don't think that reasonable taxation comes anywhere close to being as coercive to the individual as unregulated business, theocratic political factions or an unfettered police state.

Although he doesn't go into much depth concerning the why of this, it isn't hard to see what he means.

For decades the mouthpieces of the right have worked hard to make freedom a rightist virtue. Part of this has been done, with more intensity since 9/11, with the tools of nationalist propaganda. Freedom as a word, as an idea, has been devalued. Freedom of religion has been twisted in the "freedom" of Puritan Christians to tell the rest of us how to live. Freedom of choice has been twisted in the choice to buy my household products at a WalMart or a Target. Freedom from unreasonable search and seizure- well, say I walk into the WalMart, how many cameras trail me from the time I enter to the time I live? Not to mention the state itself, expanding every year the ways in which it can grind the Bill of Rights to dust.

I see a country becoming increasingly less free, not because our taxes are high or because "political correctness" forces people to tell fewer racist jokes (what a crock that is), but because powerful forces, both within the state and beyond, in the church and in private industry, have so few checks on what they can do.

The freedom I see inherent in our great nation is not the freedom of the police or FBI or CIA to do anything they can to get a conviction, it's not the freedom of pharmaceutical companies to poison us until they lawsuits force them to stop, and it's not the freedom of snake handlers to coerce whatever behavior they think God wants.

It's the freedom of people like me to think what they want to, to say what they want, to write what they want. To live how they'd like, live where they'd like, practice their faith or not in the manner they'd please. Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, all that shit.

What the Republican party offers is the freedom to live in a future where a few companies run by greedy old men control our private industry. They offer the freedom to breathe poisoned air and drink poisoned water because said greedy old men dare not see beyond short term profits. They offer the freedom to dream of upward mobility while living paycheck to paycheck. They offer the freedom to live in fear of some great enemy, internal or external, gay couple or Islamic terrorist.

The Democratic Party is the the party of Freedom, even if it doesn't know it yet.

Many in the blogosphere, like Matt Yglesias and Josh Marshall, have been pointing out that one of the major weaknesses of the Democratic Party is organizational. And we've heard time and time again that the Democratic Party doesn have any "new ideas." Much of this is true. And this needs to be resolved.

But what needs to be fixed most desperately is, and frankly this is going to sound like a bunch of New-Age hooey, but here it is- Democrats and liberals and everyone left of Zell Miller have lost both passion and vision. We've stopped believing that real change is possible. The bad guy always wins. Karl Rove is even now hatching a trap. And you know what that demoralization turns into. It turns into a reactionary, timid Democratic establishment. It turns into a Democratic establishment that thinks its candidates should quote a little more Corinthians and maybe it'll be better. Sell out the homos, that's the ticket.

I don't have any illusions that the American people aren't fearful, ignorant, and easily persuaded by absurd lies. But everyone wants to believe...

Part of the reason the Republicans won this last one is because the Democrats underestimated the American people's foolishness, but something else is at work. The solution to the Democrats' problem isn't to pander to people who thinks liberalism=socialism=satanism. As Ferris Bueller said, "You can't respect somebody who kisses your ass. It just doesn't work."

Those two at Pandagon have asked the right question- What do we believe in? It needs to be asked and it needs to be answered. We need to know what we want, and we need to express it with more passion than the Right does.

PS. One of the favorite sagacious pseudo-moderate tropes is that the Democrats need to reach out to the Red Staters (who said millionaires always perceive as Pious Primitives, Noble Savages) with religion and moral thingies. So they need to quote a ton of scripture and talk about praying and go to NASCAR events, kill some animals. Only if they do that, the sages of the McLaughlin group etc. know to say that Democrats who do this aren't really being authentic, that it's pandering. It's a trap, folks.
We really need to change the media landscape and quick. We need new blood among the liberal punditocracy. If they can push half-wits like Ben Shapiro, surely we can field actual wits. And the people we bring into the show need to be actual partisans. You can be thoughtful and actually believ in something, don't ya know.