65 Responses to “Framed Again. Anti-Lakoff Again.”

1. reg Says:
   July 10th, 2006 at 10:19 pm

   Here’s a piece on conservative governance and the tendency to incompetence that I think is better argued than Lakoff’s:
   Alan Wolfe’s “Why Conservatives Can’t Govern” from the Washington Monthlyh.

   http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2006/0607.wolfe.html

2. chuck Says:
   July 10th, 2006 at 10:24 pm

   Remind me again which Republicans have been calling for a budget deficit reduction?
   They’ve had the legislative and executive branch for 6 years leading to the record deficits we have. Could Grover Norquist and his ATR group have telegraphed the plan any more clearly? Someone is going to have to pay our bills at some point and it will be all of the expense of the “discretionary” programs we hold dear. Defecits are the republican strategy for making government “small enough to drown in a bathtub.”

   Remind me which Republicans have been calling for better environmental policies? Now that they’ve finally finally finally acknowledging global climate destabalization, the Cato institute is advocating for an “adaptionist approach”. Nothing about – god forbid – trying to improve environmental standards.

   Remind me which Republicans spoke out against the war in Iraq? Pat Buchanan, you say? Ahhh… I see. An unelected marginalized republican.

   Remind me which Republicans have been calling for humane standards at Abu Ghraib, etc.

   Remind me which Republicans criticized Bush when his approval ratings were at 60, 50, even 40%

   Just because many Democrats make poor progressive standard bearers doesn’t somehow mean that progressives stand for sticking it to the poor. For example, raising the minimum wage helps the poor. Progressives stand for raising the minimum wage. Conservatives stand against it. Seems pretty clear to me.

   If conservatives don’t stand for what we’ve gotten out of our government the past 6 years, who are all these people roaming the halls of the white house and congress?

   Go ahead and blame incompetence.
   Next go ’round maybe we’ll get a “competent” Republican president with the same folks in Congress.

   And then we’ll get more of the same.

3. Adam Says:
   July 11th, 2006 at 8:33 am

   Spot on, Marc. As long as Dems believe their problems are of style rather than substance, they will remain in minority status. And as long as there continues to be a complete leadership vacuum in the party, they will continue to be easy prey.

4. Mark Schubb Says:
   July 11th, 2006 at 10:24 am

   Great post , Marc. Especially the final graph. If the democrats had that much vision, we wouldn’t be in this mess.

   Still, there’s a kernal of truth to the idea of “framing” in that the dems are like little bugs on flypaper in a big values debate strategically rolled out by the republicans. But you’re also very right that the answer won’t come from inside the Berkeley bubble — where the sign by the xerox machine says “white paper” and “paper of color.” (and you know I didn’t make that up)

   A new political vision will need clear language — but of course what it needs first is geniune leadership. Giving the current crop a cheap linguistic makeover won’t fool anybody. (Especially after Laykos starts denouncing them all cause someone forgot to order fair market coffee. )

5. Chris Hundley Says:
   July 11th, 2006 at 10:43 am

   Marc, I think your rebuttal missed some of the points that were made in Lakoff’s piece. The Bush Administration HAS accomplished many of its large goals; cutting taxes and running up budget deficits is a clear tactic to shrink the size of the federal government. Gutting environmental regulations is another “success”. I don’t think anyone can deny that securing permanent bases in the Mideast via Iraq was one of the primary goals of the invasion. The success in reaching this goal is still up in the air, due to the poor progress of the Administration’s war, but I don’t see the U.S. being pushed out easily.

   Lakoff’s broader point, I think, is that if you merely criticize the conduct of the president in carrying out his policies, rather than the goals of these policies, it is very easy for a less incompetent politician to come along and adopt them as his own. The electoral success of such a politician would subject us to the same disaster all over again.

6. Marc Davidson Says:
   July 11th, 2006 at 11:40 am

   Chuck is right. Marc, you’re ignoring the huge difference in the core agendas of the two parties. Both John Kerry and Mike Dukakis ran on the competency issue, and we see what that got them. A clear articulation of a heartfelt progressive agenda is the best winning strategy for the Democratic Party.
   Where indeed are these “competent” Republicans who would redirect the current agenda? The fact is they are not that unhappy with the results and only become squeamish when they look at polling numbers.

7. modestproposal Says:
   July 11th, 2006 at 12:32 pm

   Lakoff et al clearly never talk to conservatives. Many conservatives are furious with Bush and think he is incompetent, too — on immigration, on his handling of the war in Iraq, which is a self-evident disaster to anyone regardless of political ideology, on budget management and government spending, etc etc.

   I know this not only from opinion polls, but also from personal experience. Spent a fascinating afternoon in ultra-conservative Escondido on the day of the Bilbray-Busby special election last month, and the voters there were spitting blood at the very mention of Bush’s name (and holding their noses to vote for Bilbray, too). Partly they don’t think Bush is conservative enough (on immigration, certainly, and on what used to be known as fiscal conservatism). Mostly, though, they think — like so many others — he’s a bumbling twit who doesn’t know what he’s doing.

   Like Marc, I’m not one of those who thinks George Lakoff has much of value to offer politically. He strikes me as someone who lives in his Berkeley liberal-academic bubble and doesn’t have any real insight into why people feel about politics the way they do. This piece is typical, an attempt at a clever-clever argument that falls flat on its face. If Bush is really promoting an agenda conservatives love, how come so many conservatives can’t wait to see the back of him?

8. chuck Says:
   July 11th, 2006 at 12:54 pm

   I still don’t get where these conservatives with such strong objections were before Bush’s approval rating tanked to 35%.

   Their objection on immigration is that he ISN’T conservative enough.

   And it’s not clear what they’re really objecting to with regards to Iraq. I haven’t heard many objections that going there in the first place was wrong. Are they advocating for more troops? It’s not clear that that would have helped the matter and that still doesn’t address the fact that the pre-emptive attack has forced many countries to pursue the nuclear bomb as their only defense against another neo-con crafted preemptive invasion.

   If conservatives want a pull-out, they’ve certainly been quiet about it, hiding behind the cut-and-run rhetoric which effectively shuts down the discussion.

   Conservatives want him gone because of the effect he’s going to have on the electorate. Or that he’s not conservative enough (see: Miers). Personally, I think we’ve had enough of the conservative philosophy for a few years.

   I think Edwards has shown that advocating for class warfare doesn’t win over the people that think they will one day be on top – which is most Americans.

   Americans don’t vote based on self-interest, economic or otherwise. What’s the Matter with Kansas showed that pretty clearly. They vote on their belief of how they think the world works and how government should work.

   Dems need to start talking about what values they believe the government should adhere to. Tomasky’s a Common Good is a good example. Maintaining a minumum standard of decency for all Americans (minimum wage, health care, job security) is another.

   Regardless of whether the broad strokes of the article were too broad and didn’t articulate the subtle differences of opinion in the Repub. party, the fact of the matter is that many of our problems today can be traced to conservtism. Sure, croneyism and incompetence, too, but conervatism is a big part of it.

   It’s unfonrtunate that this point, which seemed clear to me, was missed.

9. Wall Says:
   July 11th, 2006 at 12:59 pm

   All too typical Cooper. In fact “typical” isn’t really right, it’s how he’s always wrong. It’s hard to argue, even minus the reverse snobbery (Berkley bubble) against what Mark has found; when, like Paul Simon, he has gone out to look for America. I guess we all base our beliefs, to some extent, on the unscietific measure of the folks we run into along the way. It’s not much use in debunking, however, somebody from Santa Monica City College let alone Berkley.

   What Bush brought to the White House, first in a “I’m a uniter” Trogan Horse and then brazenly in his more legitamite reelection, was an agenda further to the right of any to inhabit the White House since WWII.

   He’s not exactly dazzling in his people skills,
   and Iraq, based on pathetic strains of far right denial of reality( those lefty politicans lost us Vietnam!) has certainly taken him down a few pegs. But the Bush White House doesn’t have to be reelected again; and it’s craven victorys are considerable.

   He was quite honest in his admiration for the most reactionary vote on the Supreme Court, now he has added two more to the wing. His hand outs to the rich would have seemed unthinkable ten years ago, and have could only have occured in a media enviroment that spent years as a flip slide of ugly malace of the Clinton days. For quite awhile, we should not forget, Mo Dowd was their gal. In any event, the central challege Democrates may face in the next ten years is to figure a way for the working poor to not get stuck with the bill for K street.

   Yes, we know, many Americans call themselves “conservatives” when strickly speaking they are not so much. They probably don’t want to be insulted by the mainstream media, who has made the word “liberal” a buzz term for irresponsable hippy.

   Yet, somebodies watching American Idol and going to those dumb movies. Grown men, I’ve heard, actually enjoy seeing ANOTHER version of “Superman.” “Deeply shocked by Gitmo and Abu Ghriab?” I wish these conservatives would call their congressmen.
   Al Franken’s weekly exchange with his dittio head friend Mark Luther is both funny and illuminating. Granted, anyone put in the posisition of justifying a patholigcal liar starts at a great disadvantage, but Luther does quite well considering. If the MSM took a page out of Franken’s book here we would get something at the very least was a llittle more entertaining than the endless echo chambers, including the “tit for tat” one.

   It’s all well and good to find Ann Coulter “distasteful” and leave her to others to sort out. Well the Horowitz/Fox news kids dragged out phony defenders with absurd arguements so rancid they degraded the listener. The American right is sick; and they are largely divorced from a rudementary sense of right and wrong.

   Neither derison or an appeal to better angels alone is the answer. We must proceed, I think, with the assumption that people are basicly fair. Given the facts, there is no reason why progress can’t be acheived. When Micheal Moore showed us the kid flying the kite in Iraq, reminding us how many of them were likely to die, and how those deaths would be on our heads, he was warning us with one such fact. For that he should have been appluaded rather than insulted. Others who challege the right wing power stucture should be applauded as well.

10. John Mc Says:
    July 11th, 2006 at 1:53 pm

    The Dems should stay away from pinheads like Lakoff, and model themselves more after guys like this who ‘get it’.

    http://www.kinkyfriedman.com/2006/06/its_official.html

    he’s not liberal, he’s not conservative, he aint a Democrat, and he sho as hell aint a Republican. He’s Kinky! I don’t even live in Texas and I contributed.

11. richard Locicero Says:
    July 11th, 2006 at 3:41 pm

    Back in the mid nineteenth century Freidrich Engles wrote a little breezy bestseller called “The Condition of the Working Class in Britain.” As some of you know Engles family had interests in Manchester and Fred toured the city with one of the millowners. After seeing all the deplorable sights – right out of a Dickens Novel – Engles told the Capitalist that he had never seen a more poorly run city. “That is true”, the owner said, “but a great deal of money is made here.”

    Yes Bush is incompetent. In fact, if Sean Wilentz and his historian colleagues are to be believed, this crowd will earn “high honors” as the worst ever – certainly the worst of the past hundred years (breathe a sigh of relief Warren, Herb, and Dick). But they have done well by their crowd. One massive tax cut after another to be capped by the repeal of the Estate Tax. Gutting of environmental laws and probably drilling not only in ANWR but off the coasts as well. And to say the regulatory agencies have been “Business Friendly” is like saying Sherman was careless with matches in Georgia!

    Now all of this was done by the same sorry crew. How? Well they’re lousy at governance but great at campaigning. And Bush’s numbers were in the tank in 2004 but he got reelected Marc – unless you believe Mark Crispin Miller, RFK jr Et. al, which is not out of the question and shows another area of competence in stealing elections.

    Remember Bush is our first MBA president and one think you learn at B-School is how to make the next quarter shine. So hell with everything else, just make those numbers look good. The next guy can clean up any messes – you’ll have your golden parachute. Bush even said as much when he told reporters that the next President would reolve the Iraq mess. Harvard must be so proud!

    But Marketing? Ah these guys are good. Remember you never introduce a new product in August? “Axis of Evil”? “Fight them there so we don’t have to fight them here”? “Death Tax”. They can’t run shit either private or public (see the business record of Bush and Chaney or John Snow for that matter) but they sure know how to manufacture a phrase or frame an issue.

    An d there is that word: “Frame”. Lamkoff may not know how to do it, being subsumed by that bubble in Berkeley, but he is dead on right about the need to dominate the discussion by framing the debate. The GOP knows this. Do Liberals/progressives understand this? Just wondering.

12. reg Says:
    July 11th, 2006 at 5:06 pm

    Shit, RLC…two A’s in two days.

13. dougf Says:
    July 11th, 2006 at 5:21 pm

    For an ‘incompetent’, and someone who Chuck feels has collapsed in the ‘polls’, golly stupid, immoral, George is sure hanging in there, guys.

    A nasty war in Iraq -
    $3.00 gasoline -
    Hurricanes –
    Terrorist Rampages across the globe -
    North Korean Nukes -
    Iranian Nukes -
    General Angst-
    Immigration Headaches -
    Congressional Incompetence.

    And he STILL gets a 40%(and rising) approval rating. Was 31% in April; Is 40% in July’; Will be perhaps 46% in October?

    It’s all going the wrong way for the ‘good guys’, folks. Maybe you should go for the ‘framing’ idea. I don’t think it can hurt you at this stage. I get this odd little feeling that November will come as yet another nasty little surprise to the ‘reality based community’.

    Ah well, there’s always 2008. Oh but, GWB won’t be there in 2008. There will be a brand shiny new face that the Republicans can use to overpower the forces of right, by ‘framing’ the issue as one of National Survival.

    Oh well, there’s always 2010.

    Courage friends.

14. richard locicero Says:
    July 11th, 2006 at 5:46 pm

    Damn Reg! Where were you in College when I could have used you!

15. debfisher Says:
    July 11th, 2006 at 6:53 pm

    “there might not be many nowadays in the White House or in Congres but there are plenty of conservatives who believe firmly in avoiding imperial wars, who want to conserve the environment, and whose hair is currently on fire over the imbalanced budget. Believe it or not there are also some conservatives who cherish rule of law, freedom, and constitutional civil liberties and who are deeply shocked by Gitmo and Abu Ghraib.”

    Utter utter malarcky. This is classic Cooper and classic wishful thinking. Conservatives are centered around one central issue, tax cuts for the wealthy and cuts in social welfare [i.e. poverty] spending, in addition to futher curbs on the capacity of American workers to organize unions. Cooper’s wishful thinking ignores this central fact of conservative life. All the things he believes they are ‘concerned’ about are certainly existent, *but* abosohloooootely NOT central to their core belief and goals as conservatives. And Cooper knows this of course, despite his wishful thinking about some kind of ‘populist’ alliance with conservatives as the means to create a new American politics.
    Yes, Dems are sellouts on the key issues of corporate tax cuts, budget cuts, empire, etc. But Cooper’s fantasy about ‘building’ alliances with conservatives as the means to make positive change in America indicates more a lack of serious thinking about the politics of US capitalism than much else.
    Then again, when his strategy inevitably fails he can always blame the ‘left’ for its ‘failure’ to see his wisdom.

16. debfisher Says:
    July 11th, 2006 at 6:54 pm

    “Going to War with the Army You Have”
    Why the U.S. Cannot Correct Its Military Blunders in Iraq
    By Michael Schwartz

    The Latest American Theory about the Iraqi Resistance

    In early February, a Newsweek team led by Rod Nordland produced a detailed account of current theorizing among American and Iraqi officials about the structure of the Iraqi resistance.

    Here, in brief, is what these officials told Newsweek: The initial American assault on Iraq was so successful that Saddam Hussein’s plan for systematic resistance fell apart almost immediately, leaving a dispersed, unruly guerrilla movement with little or no coherent leadership. In the two subsequent years, however, the Saddamists formed a wealthy and savvy leadership group in Syria. In the meantime Abu Massab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian terrorist with ties to Al Qaeda, asserted his domination over the on-the-ground resistance. Pressure from recent American offensives drove the two groupings into an increasingly comfortable alliance. Here is how Newsweek described developments since last summer, based on an interview with Barham Salih, the Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister:

    “According to Salih, ‘The Baathists regrouped and, in the last six or seven months, reorganized. Plus they had significant amounts of money, in Iraq and in Syria.’ Those contacts and networks that Saddam’s key cronies began developing months before the invasion now paid off. An understanding was found with the Islamic fanatics, and the well-funded Baathists appear to have made Syria a protected base of operations. ‘The Iraqi resistance is a monster with its head in Syria and its body in Iraq’ is the colorful description given by a top Iraqi police official…. Zarqawi’s people supply the bombers, the Baathists provide the money and strategy.”

    The current situation was succinctly summarized for Newsweek by Brig. Gen. Hussein Ali Kamal, the Deputy Minister of the Interior: “Now between the Zarqawi group and the Baathists there is full cooperation and coordination.”

    This portrait has been further fleshed out in other accounts, including a New York Times report in which U.S. Commanding General George W. Casey declared that the Baath Party in Syria was “providing direction and financing for the insurgency in Iraq.”

    This new theory about the nature of the Iraqi resistance helps to illuminate the renewed saber-rattling against the Syrians, which began even before the assassination of the former Lebanese Prime Minister. On January 25, for example, former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, writing together for the first time, made the connection explicit in a Washington Post op-ed. They asserted that the Bush administration must have a “strategy for eliminating the sanctuaries in Syria and Iran from which the enemy can be instructed, supplied, and given refuge in time to regroup.” The new theory may also help to explain why (according to such diverse sources as Newsweek and former U.S. weapons inspector Scott Ritter) the U.S. is considering using assassination squads to eliminate enemies. One whole category of targets for these squads (if formed) would certainly be the Syrian-based leadership of the resistance.

    And then, at the end of February, came news of the first fruits of American operations based on this new insight, the capture in Syria of Sabawi Ibrahim Hassan, a half brother and political lieutenant of Saddam, and one of only 11 of the original “deck of cards” Saddamist leaders who still remained at large. The capture vindicated the saber-rattling as well, since high level Iraqi officials told reporters on February 28 that the “capture was a goodwill gesture by the Syrians to show that they are cooperating” with the new American campaign to decapitate the insurgency by removing its Syrian-based leadership.

    The New Theory Is Probably Not Accurate

    This new portrait of the Iraqi resistance may be an accurate description of one aspect of the ongoing war; and its key new element — a working alliance between Saddamist exiles and Zarqawi’s fighters inside Iraq — may be an important new development. But the foundation upon which these descriptions are built — that these forces now dominate the resistance, supply its leadership, or provide the bulk of its resources — is likely to prove profoundly inaccurate.

    This is most easily seen by consulting — of all sources — the CIA, which issued a contrary report about the time the Newsweek article appeared. According to the CIA, the Zarqawi faction and his Saddamist allies were “lesser elements” in the resistance, which was increasingly dominated by “newly radicalized Sunni Iraqis, nationalists offended by the occupying force, and others disenchanted by the economic turmoil and destruction caused by the fighting.” There is, in fact, a vast body of publicly available evidence in support of the CIA’s perspective, including, for example, most first-hand accounts of the resistance in Falluja and other cities in the Sunni triangle.

    In the short, dreary history of America’s Iraq war, our leaders have repeatedly acted on gross misconceptions about whom they were fighting — sometimes based on faulty intelligence, but sometimes in the face of perfectly accurate intelligence. This is, in all likelihood, another instance where they believe their own distortions, and it is worthwhile attempting to understand the underlying pattern that produces this almost predictable error.

    One way to characterize this propensity to mis-analyze the resistance is to see that all the portraits thus far generated of the Iraqi resistance have been based on the assumption that it is organized into a familiar hierarchical form in which the leadership exercises strategic and day-to-day control over a pyramid shaped organization. Such a structure is described by both military strategists and organizational sociologists as a “Command and Control” structure. After the battle of Falluja, Air Force Lt. General Lance Smith even used this phrase to characterize Zarqawi’s operation: “Zarqawi… no doubt …is able to maintain some level of command and control over the disparate operations.”

    This command-and-control image applies well to a large bureaucracy or a conventional army; but invariably provides a poor picture of a guerrilla army, which helps explain American military failures in Iraq. Whether or not Zarqawi maintains command and control over his forces (who are, as far as we can tell, not guerrillas) no one exercises such control over the forces that fought against the Americans in Falluja or Sadr City and those that are currently fighting a guerrilla war in Ramadi and other Sunni cities that boycotted the recent elections.

    Guerrilla wars violate the command-and-control portrait in two important ways: local units must, by and large, supply themselves (since an occupation army would be likely to interdict any regular shipments of supplies); and they are likely to have substantial autonomy (since hit-and-melt tactics do not lend themselves well to central decision making).

    This lack of command and control is a curse and a blessing. On the negative side, lack of central coordination means that guerrilla armies are normally doomed to small, disconnected actions — a severe limitation if the goal is to drive an enemy out of your country. On the positive side, they are less vulnerable to attacks on supply lines and to the targeting of commanding officers — two key strategies of conventional warfare.

    The resistance in Iraq reflects this dialectic of guerrilla war. The mujaheddin in Falluja, for example, seem to have been notoriously decentralized; even local clerical leadership reportedly achieved only a tenuous discipline over the troops. This same lack of discipline, however, made it impossible for the U.S. to identify and eliminate key leaders. During the second battle for the city in November, their hit-and-run tactics allowed them to hold out for over a month against a force with overwhelming technological and numerical superiority.

    The command and control portrait is not a useful tool when it comes to analyzing a large component of the Iraqi resistance, and it is of little use if it is applied to the movement as a whole.

    The Drumbeat of Command and Control

    Nevertheless, the U.S. military has assumed such a structure at every juncture in the war.

    In the Fall of 2003, when the resistance first began to trouble the occupation, U.S. military strategy was based on the conviction that the resistance was led by Saddam Hussein and the “deck of cards” leadership. Here we see command-and-control logic applied for the first time.

    By mid-December 2003, the occupation forces had arrested or killed the vast majority of the men on that deck of cards, while Saddam’s sons Uday and Qusay Hussein had died in a spectacular gun battle, and Saddam himself had just been captured in a dirt dugout. Occupation authorities confidently predicted that the Baathist “bitter enders” were done for and the resistance would subside, since without its leaders, local fighters were expected to be rudderless and ineffective.

    Instead the disparate parts of the resistance became stronger, and in April 2004 emerged with a victory in Falluja — after a siege of the city, the Marines pulled back without taking it — and a bloody standoff in Najaf. By then, American intelligence had discovered Abu Massab al Zarqawi and declared that he was actually the linchpin of the resistance.

    Once again, a command-and-control portrait of the enemy remained dominant, and the second battle of Falluja was fought in good part on the basis of that theory: to disrupt or destroy the Zarqawi leadership group. But despite the expulsion of the guerrillas (and just about the entire population of Fallujans) from the city, the rebellion quickly spread to other cities and intensified, refuting the claim that the decapitation of the movement would be incapacitating.

    The command-and-control theory has, in fact, turned out to be as resilient as the resistance itself. American commander Lt. Gen. Thomas F. Metz, for instance, explained the post-Falluja battle of Mosul to the New York Times by saying that Zarqawi and/or his leadership team had moved to that city and fomented the uprising, ignoring the indigenous character of the mujaheddin who were fighting there. Later, it would be announced that Zarqawi had set up a new “nerve center” south of Baghdad and a major new search-and-destroy operation would be mounted there.

    Even after these actions failed to quell the fighting, the occupation forces clung to command-and-control logic. General Kamal, for example, told Newsweek, “Even if Zarqawi continues to elude capture, nailing al-Kurdi [one of Zarqawi's lieutenants] was a critical score. It might — just might — -eventually help change the course of this war.” Similar statements were made a month later when Saddam’s half-brother, identified as a key leader and funder of the insurgency, was captured in Syria.

    Evident in all of this is the faith that American military leaders have in a strategy of identifying and targeting the supposed leaders of the insurgency. Despite the direct evidence of an increasingly ferocious movement, the capture of a key leader, it has repeatedly been claimed, could “change the course of the war.”

    Why the U.S. Military Can’t Abandon “Command and Control” Logic

    So why does the U.S. military relentlessly build its anti-insurgency strategy around the idea of decapitating the leadership of the Iraqi resistance? The answer lies just beneath the surface of Donald Rumsfeld’s now infamous statement, “You go to war with the Army you have.”

    This is a comment pregnant with meaning for organizational sociologists, because it illustrates a familiar pattern of organizational problem-solving. If a product is not selling well, for example, an engineering organization might conclude that better engineering of the product was in order; a manufacturing firm, that more efficient production technology was needed; and a marketing company, that better advertising would do the trick. This sort of organizational idée fixe has led to some truly horrendous failures in business — and military — history. For example, when a flood of automobile buyers began to demand fuel-efficient cars during the first oil crisis in the early 1970s, the American automobile industry did not have the capacity to produce such vehicles. Instead of investing vast resources in developing that capacity, it tried to use its superior marketing skills to win Americans back to luxurious gas guzzlers. That is, the Big Three “went to war with the army they had” and convinced themselves that they were facing a marketing problem. The results: a permanent crisis at General Motors (during which it lost world leadership in the industry), a fundamental restructuring of Ford, and the demise of Chrysler.

    Or take the French in World War II. They knew about the new German tanks that had made World War I trench warfare obsolete, but the French army was only equipped to fight in the trenches. So they “went to war with the army they had,” devising a trench-war strategy that they managed to convince themselves would contain the German Panzer divisions. They lost the war in three weeks.

    The American army is also fighting with the army it has. This army is the best equipped in the world for advanced conventional warfare — with tanks, artillery, air power, missile power, battlefield surveillance power, and satellite imaging to support highly mobile, well equipped, and superbly trained soldiers. No supply route is safe from its firepower, and no conventional army would be likely to hold its ground long against an American assault. But the most intractable part of the resistance in Iraq is fighting a guerrilla war: they do not have long supply lines and they rarely try to hold their ground.

    Guerrilla armies hide by melting into the local population. (Everyone knows this, including, of course, American military men.) To defeat them, an occupying force must have the intelligence to identify guerrillas who can disappear into the civilian world; and it must station troops throughout resistance strongholds in order to pounce upon guerrillas when they emerge from hiding to mount an attack. American military strategists know this, too. But these lessons — painfully drawn from Vietnam — can’t be implemented by the army that Donald Rumsfeld sent to war.

    The Americans, in fact, have neither of these resources. Anti-guerrilla intelligence, after all, requires the cooperation of the local population, which, at least in the Sunni-dominated areas of Iraq, the U.S. has definitively alienated, largely through its use of blunt-edged conventional army attacks on communities that harbor guerrillas. And it cannot station enough troops in key locations because too small an occupation force is spread far too thinly over contested parts of the country. Estimates for the size of an army needed to pacify Iraq range upward from General Eric Shinseki’s prewar call for “several hundred thousand” troops.

    The American military simply lacks the tools it needs to fight the guerrillas, just as in the 1970s the Big Three automakers lacked the production system needed to produced fuel-efficient automobiles, and the French army lacked the technology it needed to defeat German tanks in 1940. In response, military leaders are doing exactly what their organizational forbears did: They continue to develop theories about how to win the war “with the army they have.” This backward logic leads inevitably to imagining an enemy that might be far more susceptible to defeat with the tools at hand; that is, an opponent with long supply lines (from Syria, for example) and a command-and-control leadership (Zarqawi and his Saddamist allies, for example) capable of being “decapitated.” This portrait of the enemy then justifies a military strategy that seeks, above all, to kill or capture the theorized leaders. Such tactics almost always fail (even when leaders are captured); and in the process of failing, only alienates further the Iraqi population, producing an ever larger, more resourceful enemy.

    The newest portrait of the resistance as a Zarqawi-Saddamist led amalgam will sooner or later die a lonely death — in all likelihood to be replaced by yet another command-and-control portrait of the insurgency whose features are as yet unknown. As long as the U.S. continues to fight “with the army it has,” it will also continue to generate — and act on — distorted (sometimes ludicrous) descriptions of the nature of the rebellion it faces.

    Michael Schwartz, Professor of Sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, has written extensively on popular protest and insurgency, and on American business and government dynamics. His work on Iraq has appeared on the internet at numerous sites including TomDispatch, Asia Times, MotherJones, and ZNet; and in print at Contexts and Z magazine. His books include Radical Politics and Social Structure, The Power Structure of American Business (with Beth Mintz), and Social Policy and the Conservative Agenda (edited, with Clarence Lo). His email address is Ms42@optonline.net@optonline.net

17. bunkerbuster Says:
    July 11th, 2006 at 7:23 pm

    “But Marketing? Ah these guys are good.”

    The RNC owes its political marketing success not primarily to skill, but to a compliant press. While the news media may skew left on cultural and some social issues, on military matters the mainstream press is far to the right of the average American.

    That being said, Democrats and progressives have to operate from the assumption that their opponents will continue to enjoy that advantage.

    This is one reason it’s ridiculous to play patty-cake about being opposed to the war. The press is going to continue to favor the right’s portrayal of the war’s opponents as traitors.

    The progressive/peace agenda can only expect to prevail by circumventing the mainstream media unless and until it catches up with popular opposition to the war.

18. NeoDude Says:
    July 11th, 2006 at 7:43 pm

    RLC is so down with this.

    Have you seen what kind of crap good PR can sell? Capitalism doesn’t sell what’s best, ask Microsoft and Beta manufactures…what is marketed the best, gets sold. Bush was a cheerleader for God’s sake he knows what the crowd wants. He never should up to serve his country…yet folks thought he was “tougher” than those liberals…he has never been a member/active in any Christian churches, however he is “born-again” and only the left questioned that.

    They have attacked and attacked and attacked…they sell their lousy shit better.

    Quality doesn’t mean shit, but you better have some kick-ass commercials and spokespeople!

19. NeoDude Says:
    July 11th, 2006 at 7:51 pm

    And knowing how to fight, when it matters, helps as well.

20. debfisher Says:
    July 11th, 2006 at 7:51 pm

    What Was the Matter with Ohio?: Unions and Evangelicals in the Rust Belt
    by James Straub

    It was a fittingly ironic end to an election full of grotesque twists: When George W. Bush was narrowly reelected president of the United States, it was the electoral votes of the state he had harmed most that gave him the final nudge across the finish line. Ohio went for the second election in a row to the Republican clown prince. But if the first Bush victory was tragedy, the one in 2004 was surely farce: has world history ever turned before on the artful elevation of gay bashing to an electoral tactic?

    “In twenty-one years of organizing, I’ve never seen anything like this,” former trucker’s union organizer Phil Burress told the New York Times shortly after the election. “It’s a forest fire with a 100 mile-per-hour wind behind it.” Burress was speaking not of the efforts of unions and community organizations to register and turn out hundreds of thousands of new voters to the polls in Ohio to vote against Bush, but of his crusade to mobilize even larger numbers to pass a state constitution amendment prohibiting gay marriage.

    The demographics and causes of Bush’s slim victory in Ohio and the country continue to be debated—for instance, while 25 percent of Ohio voters identified themselves as white evangelicals (and 78 percent of them voted for Bush), the Washington Post’s number-crunching later revealed that the percentage of frequent church-goers voting in Ohio actually declined 5 percent in 2004—and Congressman John Conyers has documented evidence of electoral fraud that indicates Ohio my have been this election’s secret Florida. However, it remains undeniable that Bush’s Ohio victory did come in part from a massive outpouring of socially conservative evangelical Christians to the polls. A large majority of these Republican evangelicals were blue-collar Ohioans voting against their self-interest, many mobilized by Burress’s anti-gay marriage amendment.

    Karl Rove’s savvy manipulation of opposition to same-sex marriage was mirrored, however, by a far stranger picture at the state level in Ohio. The amendment, which also prohibits legal recognition of any domestic partnership short of marriage, was widely expected to drive even more of Ohio’s young people (and even businesses) away from the state—further hurting the state’s economy—and thus it was opposed by most of the state’s top Republican politicians and corporations. Ohio’s Republican senators, governor, and attorney general, plus the state’s Chamber of Commerce, all attempted to halt Burress’s homophobic firestorm—with no success. Few voters realized the amendment would strip health benefits from even unmarried heterosexual domestic partners.

    The evangelical churches organized one of the most energetic grassroots political campaigns in state history. With the enthusiastic support of just a few prominent right-wing politicians, like Ohio’s black, evangelical secretary of state Ken Blackwell, the amendment against same-sex marriage easily won an electoral majority of 62 percent. Among white workers over forty without a college degree (who make up a majority of this mostly blue-collar state’s electorate), the amendment did particularly well.

    This working-class twist on the election immediately led to one left-leaning pundit’s stock going through the roof: Thomas Frank, who had diagnosed the malady earlier in 2004 in his book, What’s the Matter with Kansas? The book ponders the rise of a solid Republican majority in Kansas, which was once the incubator of American populism. After election day, Frank’s book became required reading for endangered and desperate American liberals. However, while Frank’s detailed case study grounded the book’s insights in a fascinating microcosm, it is worth remembering that Kansas itself is far from the most pressing political battlefield in the country. Kansas is part of the solidly Republican heartland, and it will likely remain so for the foreseeable future. However important rebuilding the left in the heartland may be in the long term, neither that state nor its neighbors will soon be a decisive electoral battleground. Rather, as polls regularly show, the region holding back the floodtide of indefinite Republican supremacy is the northern Midwest, Great Lakes region—otherwise known as the rust belt. And the dike is about to burst.

    By any pundit’s math, the grim truth of the 2004 election was that Bush was threatening Kerry in many more “blue” states than was true for Kerry threats in the “red” states. The states in the entire northern Midwest rust belt—Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Michigan, and Ohio, a list that sounds like a roll call of states that benefited most from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal—all stood within a percentage point of being swept by Republicans, continuing a trend of becoming inexorably red. Meanwhile, the poorest state of the rust belt, and long the most militantly Democratic, West Virginia, has gone entirely over to the dark side, with Bush winning by a shattering 13 percent. If Republicans begin to win decisive West Virginia–style majorities in the rest of the Great Lakes region, they can become a permanent ruling party—able finally to legislate away what remains of the public sector, unions, reproductive freedom, and minority rights. The pressing question to be asked, from a tactical last-stand standpoint, is this: What’s the matter with the rust belt?

    To take Ohio, specifically—well, what isn’t the matter with Ohio, these days? Throughout Bush’s first term, the state constantly vied with Michigan for the dubious honor of most jobs lost. The hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs lost since 2000 were largely high-wage, stable, union jobs, which served as employment multipliers in the larger local economy. For every plate glass factory or tractor plant that shuts its gates, a locally owned grocery or barbershop goes out of business too. Though poverty has been endemic to Ohio since the great steel shutdowns began in the late 1970s, on Bush’s watch Cleveland officially became the poorest city in America (with Toledo several spots behind). And with General Motors on the brink of bankruptcy, the state may be on the verge of another great crash in industrial employment. Anonymous blue-collar towns like Canton, Springfield, and Akron continued to bleed jobs and people, while former steel capital Youngstown has lost more than half of its 1950 population. Local teens there, savvier about American political economy than most credentialed cultural critics, call their town “Yompton”—in reference to the urban devastation of Compton, California as famously depicted in NWA’s hip-hop album, Straight Outta Compton. The comparison is telling—as the state continues to deindustrialize, African-Americans bear the brunt, stranded as an underclass in every dying urban core. Indeed, in the past decade Ohio has exhibited symptoms of a genuine 1960s-style racial crisis, with the second-longest prison uprising in America (at Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville, 1993), the execution of a black inmate widely believed to be innocent (John William Byrd Jr., in 2002, also in Lucasville), and a major race rebellion sparked by police brutality (in Cincinnati, 2001).

    The Compton of NWA, of course, weathers its woes in a different statewide context than any Youngstown or Akron. For Ohio lacks significant taxable resources—the Mahoning Valley is no Silicon Valley, and there is no housing bubble of note there. A list of today’s boom industries (biotechnology, energy, computers, and tourism) reads like a list of things Ohio largely or wholly lacks. And with few economic opportunities mixing with the state’s Midwestern patriotism, Ohio’s blue-collar towns and small cities bear a disproportionate share of the burden of their president’s imperial adventures. The Ohio-based Third Marine Battalion, for example, has had forty-seven soldiers die in Iraq as of this past summer, seventeen of whom died riding in an unarmored vehicle. The lives of mere leathernecks from the rust belt are not quite as expendable as those of Iraqi civilians to the neoconservative world-shapers safely hunkered down in air-conditioned Green Zones, but then again, what’s a few less laid-off Ohioans to Paul Wolfowitz? Indeed, such deaths are as close as Bush has come to decreasing Ohio’s unemployment figures.

    This landscape of poverty and brutality is all the more bitter for Ohio, since it was the sweat and blood of places like this that originally made the American Dream a reality for many people. In countless coal mines, steel mills, and industrial factories, Ohioans have prided themselves on doing the arduous work of actually producing the goods many saw as American prosperity—and in just as many strikes and struggles, assuring that those who produced would also have a share of the wealth. For as long as Ohio has been an industrial megalopolis, workers there have been contentiously demanding their rights and their share. Since the mid-nineteenth century, working people in Ohio organized, struck, fought, and even rioted—from machinists in Dayton to streetcar operators in Columbus, on rails up north and in dockyards down south. A frequent epicenter of both class conflict and labor organizing, ragtime Ohio hosted the founding conventions of labor federations as diverse as the large, conservative American Federation of Labor, the early industrial United Mineworkers of America, and even the short-lived, Communist-led Trade Union Unity League. Workers’ struggles in the state produced socialist mayors in towns like Lima and Lorain, outright mobs in Cincinnati and Toledo, and intermittent unionization everywhere a worker drew a paycheck.

    It was not until the 1930s, however, when a structural disaster in American capitalism (the Great Depression) coincided with a new form of labor organization—wholesale industrial organization of the mass production industries—and workers in Ohio changed not just their paychecks but the world. Mass unionization swept outwards from the Great Lakes region, all the way to traditional anti-union strongholds like the south’s textile mills and Hollywood’s sound stages. This Depression-era birth of an “American Dream” social contract came via the labor pains of often insurrectionary upheaval against the forces of property and government.

    The year 1934 in the Ohio cities of Toledo and Akron provides salutary examples. The northwest-Ohio city of Toledo was in the grip of a comprehensive local banking crash that put a greater percentage of the city’s residents on public relief than anywhere else in the country. Across the state in Akron, widespread tax fraud by property-holders cut the city’s revenue base so drastically that public schools were forced to close their doors, while the city’s huge rubber companies protected their multimillion-dollar annual profits by enforcing wage cuts with the outright violent terrorization of their workers.

    Such draconian expressions of top-down class war confronted local workers who had previously tried union organization and strikes, only to fail bitterly. However, growing radical movements in both cities refused to cry uncle. In Toledo, socialist organizers were key in mobilizing large crowds of thousands of unemployed to join picketers on strike outside an auto plant—battling the National Guard and trapping scab workers inside the factory. Meanwhile, in Akron, a strike of rubber workers resulted in the spontaneous invention of the “sit-down” strike, where workers occupied their factory, thus threatening the bosses with the destruction of expensive equipment in the event of violence. In both Toledo and Akron, such tactics—support from mass crowds and “sit-down” factory occupation—heralded their use in hundreds of successive labor battles. They also resulted in victories that gave unions a foothold in the new mass-production industries: collective bargaining at the Auto-Lite plant in Toledo, and industrial union recognition at the Akron rubber plants. In imitation, workers at a Cleveland General Motors plant several years later began an angry sit-down strike that sparked a multi-state wave of workplace occupations that culminated in the victorious Flint GM sit-down—the victory that unionized GM and paved the way for a social contract in American workplaces.

    Despite all this left-led industrial conflict, Ohio never developed the kind of mass counterculture or the left-wing third parties that unions birthed in places like New York City or Wisconsin. Instead, Ohio’s class struggles simply gave the state an exceptionally blue-collar self-identity and left pockets of radical workers scattered across its industrial hinterlands. This is the ideologically varied class sentiment that brought modern Ohio such diverse populists as Dayton talk-show host Phil Donahue, Cleveland left-wing politician Dennis Kucinich, Youngstown’s flamboyant oddball James Traficant, and Cincinnati’s Jerry Springer (a little bit of all the above). As a state that was heavily industrialized and unionized, but always seen as a bit of a cultureless manufacturing backwater, Ohio, like neighbors Michigan and West Virginia, has remained a singularly working-class place, with deep reservoirs of economic resentment.

    It was this smoldering blue-collar spirit that brought a trickle of New Left radicals to Ohio in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Searching for white working-class support for rebellion during America’s Vietnam-era upheavals, young revolutionaries of all stripes began to see the factories of the Midwest as their Petrograd. When New Left intellectual Staughton Lynd met a handful of ordinary, meat-and-potatoes Youngstown steelworkers who were also anti-war radicals, he thought, “On this rock shall I build my church,” and teamed with local “mill hunks” John Barbero and Ed Mann to build a labor left in the Mahoning Valley. Members of their Worker’s Solidarity Club formed rank-and-file caucuses in the United Steel Workers of America (USWA) and led wildcat strikes in steel mills; sent electricians and steelworkers to revolutionary Nicaragua to help build similar industries; and created a vibrant blue-collar antiwar movement (steelworker John Barbero, whose parents were Italian and Czech and whose wife was Japanese, used to explain in meetings that he was antiwar because in any conceivable war he would have to fight a relative).

    Nor was such mainstream radicalism confined to Staughton and Alice Lynd’s work in Youngstown. Across the state in Dayton, for instance, the 1960s saw women from progressive churches and unions join counterculture radicals in a prominent local women’s liberation movement. This group, Dayton Women’s Liberation, achieved local prominence by starting abortion clinics, women’s centers, and clerical labor organizations. Given the fundamentalist assault on reproductive rights today in Ohio, who would guess that in Dayton in the 1960s those rights were won by groups founded by churchwomen! While such labor-New Left hybrids never brought any Ohio cities to wholesale rebellion the way Detroit’s League of Revolutionary Black Workers did, such radical moments in places like Youngstown and Dayton reveal a political space in the heartland that was once open to the left.

    Yet this small door would slam shut in the 1980s, and not just from the general rightward shift of the time. Deindustrialization itself did as much or more to terminate the Ohio left. In Youngstown, after years of being the rank-and-file opposition in their steelworkers’ union, radicals John Barbero and Ed Mann assembled a winning coalition of black and progressive white steelworkers to win the presidency of their steelworkers’ local in 1973. But shortly after they had been reelected in 1976, the Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company announced plans to close the great Brief Hill steelworks. Barbero and Mann (along with the Lynds and their fledgling Youngstown labor-left group) fought a brave and innovative campaign to stop the shutdown, but they were ultimately unsuccessful. Far from leading a revolution by halting steel production at a key moment, radicals saw the company cease steel production on its own, in the face of cheaper imports and lower wage competition abroad—leaving Mann to spend his remaining years haunting the bankruptcy courts of Youngstown, continuing to courageously protest the foreclosures and evictions of laid-off steelworkers from their American Dream.

    The economic catastrophes of the 1980s laid waste not just to the seeds of a new labor left, but also to Ohio’s cities and industrial areas. In Cleveland, where the labor-left politician Dennis Kucinich had become the youngest mayor in America, plant shutdowns and white flight destroyed the city’s resource base, causing social chaos easily blamed on the radical kid mayor. The local banking elite, eager for a confrontation with Kucinich, ordered him to privatize the city’s electric utility. He refused, and the banks called his bluff by calling the city’s loans into default. In the ensuing economic meltdown, Kucinich lost his reelection bid, making local government safe for capitalism again.

    Ohio’s cities, manufacturing industries, and unions have been on life support ever since. The old interlocking forms of New Deal social democracy—urban machine/social safety net/unionized mass-production industry—are on a terminal slide to extinction. As all over America, they are gradually being replaced by a new comprehensive social organization—nonunion Wal-Mart jobs/antisocial exurban sprawl/hyper-individualist consumerism—whose value system is as oriented towards the Republican right as the old New Deal was to FDR Democrats. In this equation, the role of ideological prime movers has switched: just as left-wing CIO unions used to be the instigators and organizers of the discontent that created the rest of the social structure, now it is the equally (but oppositely) ideological evangelical churches that stoke the fires of blue-collar anger in Ohio. Wal-Mart has replaced the steel companies as the state’s largest employer; the sprawling exurbs of Columbus and Cincinnati have replaced Cleveland as its fastest growing areas; and the Assemblies of God and Church of the Nazarene are the new Steelworkers and Autoworkers.

    Ohio has always been a devout place—there are more Methodist churches than post offices in the state. However, as all over the country, more liberal, old, mainline denominations like the Methodists have lost parishioners just as the industrial cities have bled jobs. Taking their place is a mass movement of largely fundamentalist, right-wing Protestant churches—the born again, or evangelical, movement. And while not every born-again Christian is a fundamentalist or a conservative, there is no denying that this conservative evangelical movement is leading to both a growth in adherents and a shift to the right for mainstream Christianity. Such churches operate as a more decentralized network than their proprietary forefathers, and their common denominator is not just traditionalist social conservatism. It is a missionary zeal for spreading the word, recruiting in large numbers, and developing members’ emotional commitment and ability to further proselytize. This is, by the way, a classic grassroots organizing model, one that is unused not just by the dwindling mainline churches, but also by the dying industrial unions and the left in general. Stepping assertively into a vacuum of grassroots organization in so many communities, evangelical churches have flexed awesome political muscle, and they have become the political foot soldiers of a far-right Republican new world order in the same way unions used to secure the New Deal. In an episode of the television show Frontline about Karl Rove’s Republican organization, Dana Millbank of the Washington Post said, “Now, where Karl’s interest is, is in the mechanics of this. And I think it’s fair to say that religious conservatives, evangelical churches, have become sort of the new labor unions.”

    While it may appear that evangelical traditionalism has cleanly stepped in to fill a void in working-class organizations left by the decline of both unions and the urban-industrial social contract, the reality is more complex. Evangelicals, even Pentecostal Holiness churches, are no longer the singularly working-class religion they once were. The fortunes of some 1970s evangelicals were boosted greatly by the Texas oil boom and the economic growth of the Sun Belt—creating the conservative nouveau riche that work in the energy industries, pray in the fundamentalist churches, and run for office in the Republican Party. The growth of industries in suburban sprawl, armaments, agribusiness, and energy has a symbiotic relationship with other social meta-processes, like the move from rust belt to sun belt, the decline of urban cores and growth of exurbs, and de-unionization. Superprofits in those sectors, meanwhile, fatten more Republican campaign coffers; through conservative movement groups and church collection plates, they provide the resource base for the organizing work evangelicals do. The evangelical churches could thus be seen as a cross-class movement where super-profits in Republican-dominated industries are tithed out to fund sophisticated grassroots organizing by the fundamentalist cadre.

    The presence of this kind of money allows these churches, especially the enormous megachurches that dominate the political landscape of America’s burgeoning exurbs, to provide the kind of material social programs the New Deal once stood for. As Barbara Ehrenreich pointed out in an article on the religious welfare state earlier this year,

    [At] McLean Bible Church, spiritual home of Senator James Inhofe and other prominent right-wingers…dozens of families and teenagers enjoy a low-priced dinner in the cafeteria; a hundred unemployed people meet for prayer and job tips at the “Career Ministry”; divorced and abused women gather in support groups. Among its many services, MBC distributes free clothing to 10,000 poor people a year, helped start an inner-city ministry for at-risk youth in DC and operates a “special needs” ministry for disabled children.

    While McLean is an archetypal exurb megachurch, Ehrenreich notes that also

    many smaller evangelical churches offer a similar array of services—childcare, after-school programs, ESL lessons, help in finding a job, not to mention the occasional cash handout. A woman I met in Minneapolis gave me her strategy for surviving bouts of destitution: “First, you find a church.” A trailer-park dweller in Grand Rapids told me that he often turned to his church for help with the rent. Got a drinking problem, a vicious spouse, a wayward child, a bill due? Find a church.1

    What separates these evangelical social programs from those of liberal churches or even resources provided by the left is that they implicitly and explicitly harness loyalties to the Republican Party, which seeks to destroy the hard-won public sector that is supposed to provide such safety nets in the first place. Of course, here the Republicans are well-aided by the Democratic Party, which no longer even pretends to legislate for such material gains. With the pro-business Democratic Leadership Council firmly in control of the party, anything that smacks of old New Deal social spending is jettisoned for vain appeals to the copious cash (and few votes) of the entertainment, finance, and information industries.

    The economic benefits of evangelical faith, however, are not the prime motivators for most peoples’ church membership. In an essay challenging the idea that liberal evangelicals like Jim Wallis can offer the devout a progressive version of their religion, radical former fundamentalist Roxeanne Dunbar-Ortiz points out that the current evangelical movement was born first as a mixture of Protestant fundamentalism and Cold-War anticommunism, that was later energized to mass political action by the women’s and gay movements. “One thing I know about Protestant Christian fundamentalists from having been one, however, is that it cannot be substituted by ‘spirituality.’…The system rests on quite simple assumptions: you have heard the word of god personally calling you; you have been ‘born again’ or ‘saved’; you recognize that Jesus is the true son of god who died for your sins; the Bible is literally the truth, the word of god.”2 These churches all have complex mixtures of passion and patronage at their core—where traditionalist protection of the symbolic cultural status of straightness, whiteness, and maleness mixes with both genuine religious conviction and genuine religious-based social programs.

    In his analysis of Kerry’s ominous drubbing in rust-belt West Virginia, Mike Davis points out that local Democrats still won the governorship and two congressional seats in that state by equally large margins, partially because they pandered to social conservatism, but also because they crusaded vocally for government action to reduce unemployment and create high-wage jobs while the national Democratic Party did the opposite in supporting the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the World Trade Organization (WTO). “I am inclined to believe that literal ‘false consciousness’—embracing purely imaginary solidarities with one’s exploiter or oppressor—is not common. I am not denying the existence of symbolic wages and imaginary demons, but the cultural war rages most fiercely when it is able to mobilize material self-interest, however ignorant or short-sighted.” Davis continues,

    The “latte liberal” libel—visceral blue-collar contempt for the urban knowledge-industry elites—is, after all, grounded in a real historic defeat, in actual humiliation. Male workers of all races, without college education, have suffered dramatic erosion of their wage-earning power and cultural status. With union halls shut down and the independent press extinct, it is not surprising that many poor white people search for answers in their churches or from demagogues on the radio. Or that they equate the decay of employment security with the decay of family values.3

    This world of blue-collar religious conservatism is a mixture of real and perceived benefits, more akin to the concept of white-skin privilege than, say, a simple urban patronage machine.

    Evangelical conservatism is no all-white backlash phenomenon, however. For the modern evangelical passions have their roots in the poor, multiracial early Pentecostal churches of southern California. Evangelical religion maintains an enormous presence in the spiritual life of African-American and Latino communities in the United States, and the Republican Party is making its electoral inroads into those communities through the pulpits. Not only did the Republican Party dominate among white working-class people this last election, it won a majority of Protestant Latino votes. And in Ohio, where the black, evangelical secretary of state campaigned vigorously for Bush (in blatant conflict with his election supervising duties) and megachurch pastors like Rod Parsley speak (hypocritically but convincingly) to multiracial congregations about challenging racial prejudice and promoting a black middle class, Bush won 14 percent of the state’s black vote. This is not a relationship equivalent to that of white evangelicalism, of course; the grass-roots born-again Christianity that produces Chicago’s Kanye West or LA’s Tommy the Clown bears little connection to the bigoted zealotry of Tom Delay and James Dobson. But the Republicans are increasing their electoral showings in communities of color almost exclusively through socially conservative evangelical religion, and continued success could give them permanent majority-party supremacy—a fact they lustfully comprehend.

    This is exactly the intention of the Bush administration’s office of faith-based initiatives, a promise to direct eight billion dollars to religious social service groups. Anecdotal evidence indicates that the money is largely being funneled to evangelical churches in African-American and Latino communities that badly need the services. Two examples from Philadelphia give a sense of the breadth of this little-noticed repositioning of Republican theocracy: In one New York Timesarticle, the Baptist minister Rev. Luis Cortes was featured parlaying a friendship with President Bush into several million dollars in federal grants for a youth employment program, housing counseling, and AIDS education. His growing network of Republican-funded social service programs now encompasses Latino communities in half a dozen poor cities. The article noted,

    For a glimpse of one of the political currents running through the program, consider the after-school effort run by Mr. Castro, where a group of schoolchildren recently convened for what might be described as a Pentecostal poetry slam….“President Bush is Christian,” said Sade Melendez, 10, after a recent rehearsal. “He doesn’t believe in abortion, and the other man does.” “John Kerry believes in lesbians,” said Jorge Granados, 10. “He said if the baby was in the stomach, you could kill the baby,” said Krystalie Ocasio, 9. “He stinks,” Sade said.4

    Meanwhile, a mile east in North Philadelphia, the Bush administration has used millions of dollars in federal aid to court the “praying tailback,” Rev. Herb Lusk, a former Philadelphia Eagles running back turned preacher at Greater Exodus Baptist Church. Lusk heads People for People, Inc., a church-based social-services empire that has broken ranks with the mostly Democratic Philadelphia black clergy to support Bush, claiming his bottom line is halting gay marriage. Beyond mobilizing election-day support for the president (in another rust-belt swing state), Lusk has also given Bush political cover for his treacherous abandonment of the Global AIDS Fund by hosting Bush to speak on AIDS at Greater Exodus. Such a location and betrayal are particularly ironic in Philadelphia, since it was largely African-American mass protests on global AIDS led by ACT-UP Philadelphia, working with existing HIV/AIDS services and drug recovery houses, that helped win the creation of the global fund in the first place. The effective, progressive and socially activist network of AIDS programs and addiction-recovery centers that united in these protests, however, starve for funds while well-connected gay-bashing tailbacks build fiefdoms next door.

    This is the geography of religion, homophobia, and money—an inextricable Gordian knot of political power not just in Thomas Frank’s Kansas, but also spreading from the blue-collar suburbs and prosperous exurbs of places like Ohio to poorer African-American and Latino neighborhoods of cities like Philadelphia. These are the deindustrialized swing states; places where Republican dominance could mean that party’s control of the presidency for decades. The left has all but abandoned these places where the factories closed and unions died. Here in the rust belt, a right-wing network of churches and businesses offers exactly what the CIO once did: bothshort-term material gains for members and a militantly transformative vision of the world. Their vision is reactionary and fundamentalist, of course, but it remains in every sense a comprehensive moral judgment on a crass, decadent twenty-first century America. As former union activist and current evangelical crusader Phil Burress said in closing to the New York Times (in language that might have come right from an old CIO militant): “our movement is not concerned necessarily with Republicans or Democrats; people who are in positions with those parties do what they do because it serves their self-interest. Our movement will be something more, to change this world with our moral vision.”5

    Thus a trip to the dying industrial cities and vapid sprawl suburbs of Ohio can bring America face-to-face with the answer to so many liberals’ plaintive, hung-over question last November third: “Who are these people?” Snapshots of those who likely voted for Bush, against their interests, and tragically paid the ultimate price for the madman’s ambitions can be found in the brief obituaries the New York Times published in an article about the Marines of the Third Battalion. “Lance Cpl. Eric J. Bernholz, 23, was a devoted member of the Grove City Church of the Nazarene, and poured his energy into acting in its plays and coaching church youth sports. He graduated from Grove City High School and sometimes talked of wanting to be a firefighter.”6 Grove City is a blue-collar suburb of Cleveland, largely populated by folks like retired steelworkers—in a municipal area that lays off, not hires, firefighters. Another obituary spends a sentence recounting a life from a small town south of Columbus continually menaced by the possible closure of the paper mill that supports the local economy: “Lance Cpl. Aaron H. Reed, 21, a long distance runner on cross-country and track teams, was the president of class of ’01 at Southeastern High School in Chillicothe, where job opportunities are few and the military is a popular option. He has a brother serving in Afghanistan.”

    This is the 51 percent of voting America that will not be swayed from the Republican far right (back to a center-right Democratic Party?) merely by a different “framing” of issues. Indeed, the activists of both the left and the Democratic Party have seemed equally befuddled since Bush’s reelection, as well they should be. If the answer is not as simple as a different “messaging” or more blog-organizing, it is also not just another teach-in or protest in another college town or chic progressive ghetto. If the political loyalties of ordinary Ohioans were to be flung against the power structure in a progressive movement, it would likely only happen the only way it ever has happened in the state’s history—by a reinvigorated labor movement at the grassroots. The mass growth of unions not only organizes the membership of a social movement, it also begins to redistribute resources and power from the top down. In places like Ohio, the only feasible short-term economic gains for most people lie in unionizing the state’s remaining industries (those that physically cannot leave and are unlikely to shut down)—just as the only feasible long-term prospects for a revitalized left in the exurbs and church turf is in the workplaces that still bind people together. Fortunately, for this article seeks not to dwell in cynical pessimism, Ohio is home to some of the most unnoticed, but exciting, grassroots labor organizing in the country.

    Two unions that offer some hope in Ohio are the Toledo-based Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC, which represent some 6,000 farm workers in northwest Ohio and southeast Michigan) and the Columbus-headquartered Ohio District 1199 of SEIU (which encompasses some 25,000 health care and social service workers in Ohio, West Virginia, and Appalachian Kentucky). These unions have had little-noticed but important organizing breakthroughs in recent years—in different, and key, working-class demographics. FLOC’s farm-worker membership base consists almost entirely of immigrants from Latin America, and the union’s successes are a rare foothold to greater economic and political power for the culturally invisible army of Latino proletarians who increasingly do the farm work, meatpacking, and construction labor in the Midwest. District 1199 WV/KY/OH, on the other hand, is overwhelmingly female and multiracial, along the contours of health care employment in the region (largely African Americans in battered urban cores like Cleveland and Akron; and blue-collar whites from the steel suburbs to the foothills of Appalachia). District 1199 in particular has an unmatched record of new organizing in Ohio, winning almost all of the many union elections it files for and devoting more of its resources to organizing (some 50 percent) than almost any other union.

    Both 1199 and FLOC are extending their Ohio gains outward from the state. FLOC, after waging a campaign against Mt. Olive Pickle Company for years, recently won a landmark organizing victory over them in North Carolina for 9,000 workers (which marks the single biggest collective bargaining victory ever in that Southern, right-to-work state). District 1199 WV/KY/OH, while sticking to its three-state region for organizing, has become a “flagship local” for SEIU nationally as that union attempts to gear its entire structure towards such an organizing focus. In the new Change to Win union coalition, SEIU and the similarly-focused UNITE-HERE are now reshaping union organizing entirely to rebuild union density before it drops to zero, and it is bypassing the AFL-CIO (and it’s slavish devotion to the Democratic Party) to do so. Such extensions of success outwards from Ohio to new terrain follow what must be labor’s path to rebuild power: consolidate strength in those regions and industries currently possible, in order to later take on the juggernauts of Wal-Mart and the non-union South.

    Despite a reinvigorated labor movement, many progressives (and certainly top Democratic politicians) have simply forgotten about unions as a unifying social movement of blue-collar people. In such a post-labor left, many social-justice activists wonder, legitimately, if it is even conceivable anymore that worker organizations could bring progressive values back into the hearts and homes of rust-belt evangelical communities. Certainly, fighting for a voice at work does not automatically imply an organizational challenge to broadly felt anxieties about abortion or homophobia. But the lasting effect of a mass fight for unionization can be seen in Akron and Toledo, the two Ohio cities that experienced virtual insurrections against established authority in 1934. While much of the rest of Ohio has tilted rightward with the times, those cities have remained overwhelmingly progressive and Democratic. Indeed, Akron, which contemporary journalist Ruth McKinney noted during the Great Depression was an “almost 100% native-born white city…with one of the highest percentage of veterans’ organizations in the country,”4 was notorious for being a conservative Republican town prior to 1934. After cataclysmic sit-down strikes against the rubber-factory tyrants, however, the city gained a broad swath of institutional progressive blue-collar organization. Compare this to Cincinnati, where some unionization occurred in the 1930s but certainly no transformative social struggle, and most working-class white people today vote Republican (indeed, such conservatism supports an out-of-control racist police force, whose multiple murders in the black community sparked riots in 2001).

    But can unions today, like FLOC and 1199, operating in such a different political context, possibly pull off similar unionization that leads to a mass changing of loyalties among ordinary working-class people? Indeed, these unions’ memberships encompass a wide range of political viewpoints about issues like abortion and gay marriage, and although they both certainly marshaled large majorities of their memberships to oppose Bush in 2004, it is debatable if many of those members also supported the initiative against same-sex marriage or Bush’s Iraq war. Any changing of consciousness will only happen through hard work and patience, individual by individual, in the communities and workplaces where different kinds of people are brought together by the material conditions of their life. But to close on an optimistic note, 1199 took two important votes at a statewide delegates’ assembly two years ago. The delegates assembly is made up of shop-floor representatives of each workplace—the grass-roots leaders of small groups, usually the people who carry union drives through management threats and firings with their personal bravery and integrity. The delegates’ assembly, meeting to oversee the continuing organizing work of the union, voted by a large majority to oppose the war in Iraq. They also voted—narrowly, after passionate debate by both sides—to support the right to same-sex marriage.

    Notes

    1. Barbara Ehrenreich, “The Faith Factor,” The Nation, November 29, 2004.
    2. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, “Being a Protestant Fundamentalist,” http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/dunbarortiz110805.html.
    3. 3. Mike Davis, unpublished manuscript, undated.
    4. 4. Jason Deparle, “Hispanic Group Thrives on Faith and Federal Aid,” New York Times, May 3, 2005.
    5. 5. James Dao, “Flush with Victory, Grass-roots Crusader against Same-Sex Marriage Thinks Big,” New York Times, November 26, 2004.
    6. 6. John Kifner, “Death Visits a Marine Unit, Once Called Lucky,” New York Times, August 7, 2005.

21. debfisher Says:
    July 11th, 2006 at 7:52 pm

    oh, that was from http://monthlyreview.org/0106straub.htm

22. debfisher Says:
    July 11th, 2006 at 7:55 pm

    I’d love to see Marc Cooper deliver that level of analysis as was delivered in Monthly Review by Straub btw.

23. Ryan Says:
    July 11th, 2006 at 8:48 pm

    Great analysis, Marc.

    Five years ago, a piece like his would be heralded by some of the conseratives he ignores, but, now, Bush is on a one-track snooze trip of half-butt diplomacy and weak military conviction in Iraq.

    I stand up for Bush on Abu Graib and Haditha only to say that war is hell and atrocities like that have been done by the U.S. And considering how ignorant of democracy the men in the militias over there are, today’s events should have been expected.

    Unfortunately, Bush wanted to rule on high and take over the entire country.

    Bush’s mistakes, though, are everywhere on the news. There is no absolute picture of the good deeds in Iraq; for every good, there is a suicide bombing.

    But to Bush’s defense, if we really wanted to fight terrorists, what should we expect to do? What is doing with North Korea? That’s a joke of a situation, and Kim is actually playing the diplomatic game. If we expect to take out regimes and terrorist groups in lands where politics is tribal warfare and hardline religion, these vacuums will be explosive.

    You can’t fault any President – Clinton, Bush, or anybody. No wonder Clinton waved a couple of missiles at bin Laden in 98. But the military/intelligence is testing their waters; unfortunately, the current president has an ego that allows him to ignore things for bliss…and, just like Clinton, their real potential is being hampered because he’s trying to look like his hands are clean…

24. NeoDude Says:
    July 11th, 2006 at 9:06 pm

    Bush is dishonorable greedy asshole, he should have had the balls to not seek reelection.

    However right-wing Alpha Males have an army of self-righteous fanatics who will gladly lick their boots and defend them against enemies.

    This is Rock for the Right.

25. Michael Balter Says:
    July 12th, 2006 at 6:58 am

    “I’d love to see Marc Cooper deliver that level of analysis as was delivered in Monthly Review by Straub btw.”

    I’d love to see Marc Cooper ban bloggers who continue to post long articles instead of providing links with a brief summary. It smacks of fanaticism, and I hate to see it among leftists.

26. richard locicero Says:
    July 12th, 2006 at 3:24 pm

    Amen, Michael.

27. richard locicero Says:
    July 12th, 2006 at 6:00 pm

    Oh and I hope some of heard about the right wing bloggers who advocated lynching the five concurring justices in the HAMDAN case. Just blowing off steam said INSTAPUNDIT. You see there is the difference. Marc aims his cannons at an unknown (Frisch) but Glenn Reynolds absolves his loonies. Remember the Eleventh Commandment? Well the right still does. So frame on lefties – eat your young! Its all a game right?

28. The_DC_Sniper Says:
    July 12th, 2006 at 7:54 pm

    debfisher, now that you’ve succeeded in making Proust look like Aram Saroyan you may have spare time enough to read something I found on the interweb. It’s a fascinating piece about how computer scientists now believe it may be theoretically possible to use something called anchor tags to create this weird thing called a hyperlink. Sounds like science fiction, I know, but you really should read it– it’s fascinating stuff.

    Click Me!

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30. Justin Delacour Says:
    July 18th, 2006 at 4:42 am

    “Further, any administration that has worked itself down to a 38% favorability rating is ipso facto a failure as the first rule of competent politics is… re-election!”

    Yeah, but that’s assuming that Bush’s low approval rating translates into low approval ratings for Republicans in general. I’m not sure that’s the case. I’m not that hopeful that the Democrats will win in 2008. I suspect McCain could defeat anybody the democrats nominate.

    How we frame issues is part of daily political discourse, but I agree with you that attacking “conservatism” would not be an effective way to frame the issue. Nonetheless, if progressives are to ever make any political headway in this country, the Republican agenda of increasing the gap between rich and poor does need to be attacked.

    Just like Republicans labeled their opponents “liberal” and then demonized them for it, democrats need to come up with a pejorative label for Republicans that they can blast them with. We need a term that really conveys the reverse-Robin Hood policies of the Republican Party. As you say, attacking Republicans for being “conservative” is a non-starter because “conservative” doesn’t have a pejorative ring to it. Until we can come with the the pejorative equivalent of “liberal” for the Republicans, I think we’re pretty much fucked.

    The reason that democrats are so gutless about attacking the Republicans, though, is that the democrats don’t have much that really distinguishes them from the Republicans. It’s hard for them to come up with a pejorative label that wouldn’t also apply to most of their own leaders. So maybe we are fucked.

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