Liberal-tarians unite!

A friend of mine and I have been having an interesting email exchange over the political state of affairs in this country, interesting because for the first time that I can remember in years he and I have come to the exact same conclusion about what's gone wrong and how it might be possible yet to turn things around. Until the Bush Administration revealed itself to be a bunch of cavalier nincompoops with no regard for the big picture or our fiscal health and collective security, my friend and I broke down along liberal/conservative lines when discussing Beltway matters. It's not that he's a Republican - far from it - more of a libertarian if you had to pin him down politically, but above all else a cynic and a curmudgeon. The Left left him cold because of its progressivity, its feigned sense of outrage, its natural impulse to meddle where it was neither needed nor wanted; and for most the time I knew him that made him indifferent or hostile to anything but the Republican platform, in lieu of a strong political party in America that was conservative in practice but liberal in spirit. Call him a Liberal-tarian, if you will.

Then along came George Bush and his neoconservative coterie, and suddenly black was white, and white black. Suddenly my friend is grumbling about the same things that have got me upset, and is beating me to spiking the punch with a certain amount of vitriol reserved only for the truly incompetent. Suddenly the party responsible for throwing his money away, running around screaming hysterically about bullshit cultural issues, and sticking its finger into just about every single nook and cranny of the world at-large (not to mention the privacy of his own home) is the one he'd been supporting in principle for the past decade. Suddenly he and I can have a political conversation over dinner again, in other words.

Which got us to thinking - he and I can't be the only people who've noticed that the Right, in its overzealous attempt to conquer the entire world and remake American society in its own sorry image, has more or less abandoned the center, which was its Rock of Gibraltar during the 90's. Clinton of course sensed that this was the source of the GOP's newfound strength and moved to co-opt it, naturally incensing his more leftward leaning partisans but doubling or tripling his real political power. Now the Dems have been handed to them a similar but perhaps even greater opportunity - not merely to claim some of the Centrist vote, but all of it, the whole fucking enchilada. Already the truly conservative thinktanks are sounding the alarm on the Bush and all the big-spending, warmongering, and social engineering that has transpired on his watch. Not too long ago these were the same people who were celebrating the results of the 2000 Presidential (S)election, crowing that after eight years of Clintonism "the grown-ups were finally in charge again" - my friend was a voice in that chorus. Of course it's become all to clear to all but the most blindly loyal devotees that this Administration is off its rocker, with more petulance, temper tantrums, and irrational behavior in three years than were on display in two full terms of Clinton-Gore.

These are the people the Democratic candidates need to reach now - the disaffected Center, the fulcrum of the American two-party system. No one says we have to abandon our Lefty ideals in order to take back the White House, but if the front-runners want to win, they have to start talking about responsibility. Fiscal responsibility, as in bringing back the balanced budgets and surpluses of the Clinton Era. International responsibility, as in restoring America's good name in the world by recommitting ourselves to a global rule of law that we uphold merely when it is our best interest to do so. Social responsibility, as in preserving the ideals of the Great Society and ensuring that the social engineers of the New Right do not use their ideology and theology to destroy a century of progress for the poor and dispossessed. Political responsibility, as in honoring both the letter and the spirit of our Constitution, and not preying upon the fears of a terror-rattled American public to deprive them of liberties without any real guarantee of security in return.

In other words - The Liberal ideal is now nothing more or less than classic conservativism, and the Conservative ideal as espoused by the neocons is its progressive, nosy-neighborly, busy-bodied opposite. Do you see it now? American politics has experienced these kinds of tectonic reversals before, and it looks like the Democrats, if they play their cards right, can become the hands-down beneficiary of this one.