Talk about the passion

The Oberlin president, who also happens to be a professor in the Politics Department, hosted an election post-mortem tonight: a panel of seven Oberlin profs, each of whom was alloted 8-10 minutes on a particular topic, with time for audience questions at the end. Three or four hundred people showed up, mostly students, which was encouraging. Some of the speakers were better than others, and I really need to outlaw the word "Um," but a few of the ideas really resonated with me:

• Marc Blecher posited that there aren't two Americas; there are six. He divides Americans into Right and Left, then into upper, middle, and lower class. The Right, he argued, is much better (right now) at unifying across class boundaries: those in the lower classes are more concerned with moral issues than with economic issues, and the rich conservatives are quite happy to let the poor have their moral issues if it means they can use this lower-class religious vote-generating machine to put their economic policies in place. The Left is more stratified; the urban poor and the intelligentsia don't have a lot of contact.
  
  
• He also put up a map. Right now, he said, liberals are venting steam, and it's okay to laugh for a while, but we need to be careful we don't incorporate these stereotypes into our worldview. Regardless, it did make me laugh.
  
  
• Community organizations tend to lean right these days: churches, benevolent orders (like the Elks), even the Boy Scouts. Rural conservative areas have stronger senses of community, and get together for pancake dinners; the Left doesn't really have these kinds of gatherings of hundreds of people anymore (except on campuses). When election time comes, it's a lot easier to pull a bus up to a church and get your whole congregation to vote than it is to round up a lot of scattered liberals. We need to be more community-oriented.
  
  
• On a related note: to the casual observer, the church in America is either fundamentalist evangelical or Catholic. Those are the two faces of the Christian God. There are a lot of left-leaning denominations, and left-leaning congregations within other denominations, who would be willing to talk about compassion rather than vengeance, but they're a whole lot quieter than the fundies. Leftern churches need to be louder...and liberal atheists need to stop alienating and attacking their liberal religious brethren. We rarely talk about this, but we need to.
  
  
• Harlan Wilson spoke last, and crystallized something that had been fuzzily congealing in my mind for a while: the Left needs to reclaim morality, and it needs to frame more of its arguments in moral terms. Intellectualism and enlightenment are moral values, values that we are rightly proud of—and that our founding fathers were proud of. Fairness and equality and open-mindedness are moral values which Americans support, and which should be associated with the Democratic Party, the party of civil rights. Pluralism is a moral value, and should be trumpeted. The argument can be made that being anti-intellectual or anti-equality is anti-patriotic...but accusations of anti-patriotism only come from the Right. By ceding morality to the Right, the Left has left itself with nothing but intellectual arguments. I personally pay attention to them, but they don't resonate with a lot of Americans. In other words, "This isn't fair" works better than percentages.
  

There's a lot of squabbling and second-guessing in the Democratic party these days, and probably there should be. But I don't think it's the party or its positions that need work; I think it's a packaging issue, a community issue, a hearts-and-minds issue. We are still right. And many many people agree with us. Enough people. We just need to bring them on board.