Defining Liberal Values

[athelind]

Carla Binion: "The Enlightenment vs. Bush's America: Defining Liberal Values"

While the article itself is quite good, I found myself especially impressed by one of the comments below it:

Re: Carla Binion: 'The Enlightenment vs. Bush's America: Def (Score: 1)
by mdjelder on Tuesday, November 23 @ 14:10:45 EST

Conservatives have been allowed to frame the debate without opposition for too long. It's time to take back the mantel of truth by exposing the cheap-labor conservative agenda for what it is: exploitation of the common citizen.

Every American enjoys more lifestyle enhancements due to the work of liberals than they realize - National Parks, 40-hour work week, minimum wage, social security, and the list goes on and on. For all working Americans who vote Republican because you are convinced that doing so is in your best interests, consider this:

We gave you ethics and science and you called us heretics.
We gave you civil liberties but you refuse to include everyone.
We gave you a public education system but you won’t help us fund it and then complain that it doesn’t work.
We gave you protected wild lands which you insist on polluting and exploiting for profit.
We gave you freedom of religion but you won’t respect the beliefs of others.
We gave you libraries but you ignore them because they don’t turn a profit.
We gave you a social safety net, but you destroyed it and sent 2 million people into the streets to die of exposure because you said they were lazy.
We gave you child labor laws and you shipped your factories overseas.
We gave you living wages and entitlements but you crushed the unions that guarded them.
We gave our lives to stop a war and still you insist on slaughtering our young for corporate profits.
We work to provide women the same reproductive rights as men but you set fire to their medical clinics and threaten the doctors.
We try to tell you the truth but your corporate media and religious leaders call us names and vilify us.

We’ve done everything we could to save the world from becoming a toxic, barren wasteland of poverty, ignorance and intolerance; we’ve done nothing but work to give every human being the right to self-determination without government intervention;

and still you demonize us as godless liberals who have no values.

Has it ever occurred to you that your true enemies are those who pollute your air, mortgage your future, curtail your rights, tell you what to think, claim to speak for God, exploit you as a worker and send your children off to die for diminishing oil reserves;

and then place the blame on us for all that you’ve lost?

Every working American owes everything they have to the liberal agenda and everything they've lost to cheap-labor conservatives who've taken it away for their own selfish reasons.

It's time that each American understood that before they lose even more.

We need to make this the Democratic platform again. We need to shout it as loudly as the Cult of Fear and Loathing shouts their hatemongering and screams about "values", and we need to practice it, to stop letting the plutocracy whittle away at the freedom and prosperity of individual Americans.

How did the public come to believe that the "intellectual elites" were were working against them -- and the moneyed elites were on their side?

Comments

[athelind.livejournal.com]

So, should us non-believers just resign ourselves to being left out of "political" discourse in the New Dark Ages?

[richardf8]

Absolutely not. To all intents and purposes non-believers have every bit as much at stake as anyone who is not part of the particular faith that is trying to seize power.

What you do need to do in political discourse is to make sure that there is a well articulated ethical system that you can bring to the table. This should not be a problem for you, Athelind, as I know that you have a strong sense for these things.

More than they are looking for "God," people are looking for politicians whose ethics they deem reliable. If Dems thing that they can ever lure fundamentalists with professions of faith, they are wrong. But a clearly articulated ethical position can win swing votes.

One of the problems Kerry faced was his Catholicism. First, because the verse he chose to emphasize (the good works verse from James) was guaranteed to put off any Christian who believes in salvation through grace. The second is that his church was agressively campaigning against him. This is more of a "sucks to be him" statement that a criticism of his strategy.

My point is this: If one is religious one should not feel constrained from giving voice to that in a campaign, so long as one is sincere. What galls me is the notion that I should shut up about my faith in public life while the right prattles on about theirs. That gives the appearance that they have a monopoly on God.

If, as in your case, one is not religious, the case for ethics still must be made, especially when there is an unethical opposition running a "God's Will" campaign. Don't underestimate the power that a coalition that includes liberals of all creeds, each speaking from their faiths (and although I suspect you will object to this assertion, Atheism is a faith) can have to turn things around; such a coalition is probably a far better representation of America than the Republican Party is.