“A House divided against itself cannot stand.”
-“Joltin” Abe Linkin’
Almost midway through 2005, Bush has been in office nearly three months, and even when provided holy a-manna-unition by the truckload from the Gods of political capital, the American left is still consistently getting it wrong.
This series of diary entries is intended to help calibrate their efforts.
Abraham Maslow was a scientist, studying psychology. Interested in behavior, and how folks satisfy their needs.
He developed a thought model known as the “Hierarchy of Needs” which breaks down the base motivation of man into 5 quantifiable areas of concern.
These are (in descending importance):
Physiological – food, air, water
Safety – security, a sense of calm in a chaotic world
Love – acceptance by those around us
Esteem – mastery of abilities, power over others
Self Actualization – the desire to transcend the baser needs and seek spiritual and personal fulfilment
Abe’s theory states that in order to move down the list and satisfy higher needs you must first attend to the baser needs.
Makes perfect sense, doesn’t it?
Okay, well, yeah, certain brands of mystics and aesthetics do seek self actualization through the abandonment of the other four rungs of the ladder. This, however, is not a break from the hierarchy, as one would immediately conclude, it is merely the fulfilment of the model’s wisdom. To more fully accomplish actualization, energy is diverted from Physical, safety, love, and esteem needs. The adherent has supposedly passed the need for these through the expansion and understanding of his own consciousness.
But I digress, this is supposed to be pertinent to American politics.
Look at the rhetoric of the right? Where are they aiming their message?
Here’s a quick copy of the model for your reference.
Physiological
Safety
Love
Esteem
Self Actualization
Let’s pick a few arguments, shall we?
Terrorism: “The terrorists want to kill you, and we are the only ones that know how to protect you.”
Gay Marriage: “Your own marriage will fail if we let the gays have it.”
Ideology: “Those crazy-cat-lady liberals sure are nutty, aren’t they? Poor misguided bastards, too bad they don’t get it like me and you do.”
Welfare: “You work hard for your money, and you’re barely making ends meet. They want to take even more from you and give it to lazy, no-account, unemployed minorities that share no common values.”
What’s being done here?
The rhetoric and propaganda being sold, at it’s base, directly undermines the solidity of the american people’s feelings of satisfaction with their hierarchy of needs.
Pop quiz, hotshot.
SHAVE
AND
A
HAIR CUT
Did you think “TWO BITS” when you read that?
If so, you’re in a statistical majority.
Some things are so automatic, they occur without our even noticing.
Until a person feels secure in all the layers of maslows hierarchy below him, he cannot advance his efforts to the satisfaction of the next. In fact, the mere act of considering higher pursuits is impossible.
Don’t believe me? Try living in the woods with no gear for a week and tell me how many days the plight of Tasmanian pickle farmers is able to stay in the forefront of your consciousness.
The rabbit hole only gets deeper from there.
“Okay,” you say, “yeah, I get it. So what? What’s that got to do with Liberals?”
Everything.
Where is the liberal rhetoric aimed?
Outside of certain abstract issues like healthcare (Yeah, I know healthcare is hardly abstract, but the fact is that any citizen in this country can walk into a hospital and be treated, regardless of insurance coverage. The abstract damage of debt and bankruptcy are what health insurance seeks to prevent.) the left aims squarely at the self-actualization plataeu and doesn’t dare to address anything baser.
Why?
Because when we do, the republicans generally beat us at it.
Let’s look at some liberal arguments and their response.
Iraq: War is bad. Response: This is necesarry to protect america.
Welfare: Poverty is bad. Response: I got a job, why can’t they?
Gay Marriage: Gays are people, too. Response: No, they are disgusting abominations.
The vast majority of americans already have their physical and safety needs met, but have yet to advance to self-actualization. They’re still stuck firmly in the love and esteem stages of need.
The left’s only course of action is to play to the extremes, the folks that are so disenfranchised that they lack the basest of needs, and the ones that have mastered their base needs and need actualization above all else, to feel complete.
The problem is that between those two extremes there lies the mother of all bell curves, and every iota of energy this great consumer machine can direct at devlopment is going to ensure that it gets wider and taller every single year, as it represents their target demographic.
So, in conclusion, (Don’t you hate essays that end with that?), what liberals need to do to advance the cause is to appeal to base needs. Rather than attempting to elevate the consciousness of a nation by appealing to their altruistic traits, people need to be shown, and made to understand, exactly how the one-party system that is being developed is going to destroy their hierarchy of needs.
The only questions then are:
Will it?
How?
and
How can I put this in terms that a soy bean farmer could understand?
Being right just isn’t enough, you’ve got to be right, right, and do it better than the right can do it.
this is almost a form-piece by now, though.
It is part of the ‘framing’ genre which is currently so popular. The premise is that Democrats don’t need to change their policies or beliefs, they just have to spin them better.
And it is, unfortunately, at least partly true.
Let me give you a different perspective.
I spent the campaign working in a North Philadelphia office (and mostly in the field) that was at least 95% black. The organization hired me to organize voter reg and GOTV in the Philly suburbs. But their real work is fighting predatory lending, helping people avoid foreclosures, fighting usury from income tax preparers like H & R Block, and other issues that directly affect the poor.
Those issues get lip service from the Democratic Party, but they would prefer to take H & R Block’s money.
This hypocrisy is at least as big a problem as the Dems failure to sell anti-poverty legislation to soy bean farmers.
They are failing to sell themselves as anti-poverty fighters to people in poverty.
I registered over 10,000 people to vote in this last election, but many of them didn’t bother to actually vote. Many more refused to register because we did NOTHING about Florida in 2000. And of course, we had OHIO this time to teach us our lesson. We STILL haven’t learned it, and we will have many votes stolen in 2006. Because we are stupid.
Just a little different perspective. It doesn’t refute your point…IMO it just adds to it.
I think that at the base, it’s about the policies themselves.
To clarify:
For the right, the issues are not the issues, the election is the one and only issue, all else is corollary. From Reichsmarshall Rove to Petey Propaganda Pusher on AM 1205 every last syllable and stance is about one thing, winning the election. It’s not about progress, it’s first and foremost about party control. This is understood and accepted throughout the ranks.
Republicans aren’t evil, just machiavellian.
For the left, winning the election is merely a requisite step to accomplishing the progressive goals of the candidate. When we stray from that (and the constituency gets wind of it) things like the Green Party happen.
Of course, the same COULD be said of the right, but there’s a difference in nuance that is profound. Fifty people working together on a common task for fifty different ends are never going to be as effective as fifty people working together on a common task for a common end.
The long term answer is to eliminate political parties.
The short term answer is to change focus from issues to elections.
Republicans aren’t evil, just Machiavellian.
Absolutely true!
I think part of the problem is that we get cowed during the elections in that we avoid words the Repubs throw at us as if the are bad. I’ll never forget or forgive Bush1 for turning “liberal” into a dirty word. At the time it should have been embraced. This time round it was “flip flopper”. That too could have been embraced. (It could have been put in terms easy to understand like – two weeks going into a diet you find out it causes cancer so you quit and don’t stay the course). You now have the opportunity to turn their phrases into dirty words. We need to play by their games otherwise we look ineffectual and I think many people will not vote for someone who doesn’t appear sure of themselves.
this is a repost of a blogrant written during the US primary elections, but I believe it is not only still relevant, but relevant to this thread.
Ask the average party hack, and they’ll tell you it’s gotta be Sharpton. Or Kucinich. Fringe, they’ll tell you. Too radical.
If this were a musical comedy, the party dude would now lean forward conspiratorially like Richard O’Brien in the Rocky Horror Picture Show and hiss “They would CHANGE things.”
That’s the cue for the Neo-Condescention Chorus to come in with the “but they’re heart of the party, the sou-wo-wooouuul of the party” refrain, puncutated by a little spotlight on the basso-profundo “Surprised to learn that Al’s so SMART” and the NCC goes all Gilbert & Sullivan – “He’s surprised to learn…”
The Democrats are so shocked and awed by the bush regime that their efforts are focused on coming up with a candidate who will guarantee the status quo, but look better and talk better than Bush. Put the same policies into prettier words. They have become leftist neo-hawks, stuttering friable and tenuous arguments for imperialism, as studiedly oblivious to the horror and suffering as Old Granny Bush of the Beautiful Mind. Gotta beat Bush, they chant. Beat Bush.
Beat him at what?
The beatBush frenzy, born of their own distaste and loathing for policies that threaten not only the social fabric of the nation, but its very sovereignty, not to mention the future of the human species on earth, has turned on itself, devoured its placenta of logic and become an absurd single-minded conviction that the only way to “beat Bush” is to maintain those same policies under the apter and more metrosexual direction of a more telegenic piece of on-camera meat.
They even have their own Bible, a PNAC alternative, a much better-written document, whose authors clearly made better grades in composition class, and took lots of Rhetoric and Persuasion electives, because they care.
Its aim is ambitious: to make imperialism sound palatable to people who a year ago were engaged in assiduous letter-wrtitng campaigns and organizing marches and demonstrations against it.
All the while, they shake their heads in worry. What if they don’t beat Bush? What if the impeccably groomed silver-throated talent they have chosen does not move the NASCAR dads with their lofty messages, their precision-worded monologues wrapped like fine chocolate round the core promise that nothing will change?
Forty years ago, the Democratic party did flirt with change a little, and raised the hopes of millions upon millions of Americans that change IS possible. The party, however, quickly retreated, and the grandchildren of those hopeful people are now in jail, homeless, or too busy working 3 jobs to think much about grandma’s stories about the Movement, much less the state of politics in America today.
And when they do think about it, their eyes are more likely to roll in derision than light up with enthusiasm.
If the poor, and ethnic minority poor in particular have learned anything about politics over the past forty years, it is that politics is a rich white man’s game, and no politician is going to do anything that changes their lives, unless it changes them for the worse.
Voters tend to be the top 25% income tier. That leaves 75%. And the concerns of that 75% are not capital gains taxes, maintaining the status quo, or imperialist strategies to keep America’s defense and energy industries strong.
Their concerns are a roof over their heads, earning enough money to pay for basic needs. Their concerns are child care, health care. Health care as in get sick, go to the doctor, get treatment, not health care as in keep the insurance companies happy and reduce what those lucky enough to have an HMO have to pay by $10 a month.
Even if there were a candidate who promised them a Living Wage, a Right to Housing, Health Care, who guaranteed it, by Executive order if necessary, within 14 days of taking office, many would just roll their eyes anyway. Fool me once.
But if that 75% is going to get excited enough about any candidate to risk their jobs by skipping a day of work to vote, to risk their lives by leaving their hovels and braving the gangbangers on the way to the polls, to put up with the annoying chirpiness of the clueless ride to the polls volunteers, it will not be for an affluent comfort candidate, it will not be for silver-throated trills of reassurance to the corporate oligarchy.
Affluent people love to hear rhetoric about the poor. It makes them feel better about themselves. “Something must be done!” wailed King Edward VIII, shortly before his abdication in favor of the arms of the woman he loved, and the English middle class loved him for wailing it.
The American affluent love hearing their candidates intone it solemnly, declare it passionately, and they nod approvingly, smiling on their way out at pepole whose paychecks are not enough to provide housing and food for one. Forget children, forget electricity and especially forget doctors.
There are so many of these people that even Diebold might have a tough time doing its job if they voted. Even before Diebold, the system was designed to make it unlikely that they would.
They are also a stick with several times as much bushBeating potential as a steaming dish of status quo with better reading skills and more skillfully applied hair gel. But they are not as gullible as their better-heeled brothers. They are not as easily seduced by airy prose-poems and charisma. They’ve been there, done that, still couldn’t afford the t-shirt.
They do not share the obsession with beating bush, because unlike the brie and SUV denizens of the dated community meetups and precinct gatherings, they do not find that the status quo is really really different when you say it in a nicer way. No matter how nicely they explain to their landlords that they do not have the rent, even if they quote directly from shining candidate speeches, the eviction notice arrives at the appointed time.
The Democrats’ greatest weakness, their weakest link, is their failure to realize that they cannot beat Bush at his own game. Combine that with their unwillingness to use the only weapons of mass destruction they have: the double whammy of the so-called “fringe” candidates and those masses of people who don’t see it like that.
What you call fringe is what they call a baby step.
Changing the government has a better chance of beating Bush than imperialism with hope, feudalism that cares, or, with props and apologies to Arundhati Roy, reverent rape.
——
In the interest of full disclosure, I did not support any of the candidates. Nor did I receive from or donate to any of them any money, jewelry or vehicles, nor did I have sex with any of them.
anything I haven’t seen before is welcome.
Thanks.
Democrats certainly have to learn pretty damn soon how to get their act together on the framing of issues..and better learn how to get the media to cover them. Just like the tired old ‘fact’ that minorities make up the welfare roles when of course the main percentage of people on welfare are white.(usually poor women with a few children whose minimum wage job doesn’t suffice)
A for instance is the fact that Repukes consistently fight tooth and nail against any raising of minimum wage standards and always have yet everyone(well almost everyone agrees that minimum is not livable)…and most people are now living on not much more than that yet they’ll turn around and vote for republicans who are against raising their standard of living. Yet we can’t seem to get that across to ordinary working people, why? That should be a no brainer.
Your diary mentions healthcare in the abstract and you also state that anyone can walk into a hospital and get treated. I can tell from lots of first hand experience with lots of people that this is not a fact and absolutely inaccurate.
The health care issue is one of the very most important issues that needs to be addressed. It is literally killing this country that health care coverage here is so poor. People are literally dying or being crippled for life because of lack of coverage or having their life completely destroyed by medical bills even with health care coverage. We are not even in the top 15 in the world for health care and coverage….Cuba has better mortality rate for newborns than this country does for instance and so does Singapore I believe.
Or in other words I guess I’m saying that we really have to learn how to frame the health care crisis in this country.
and such.
I haven’t lived everywhere in the country, but I’ve lived a few places and never seen folks flat out turned away.
You can get seen and get trauma care anywhere in the U.S. without insurance though.
It’s treatment for the chronic illnesses that folks are denied, true. Anything that requires scheduling may be denied, but emergencies are dealt with regardless of the ability to pay.
I think the real answer to the health care crisis is two fold
I recently quit my job. In the two years I was at this job, I went to the doctor twice, once when I first got my insurance, once just before I lost my insurance.
I have the option to retain my benefits through corba, to do so would cost $340 a month, when I went to the doctor, I had a minor procedure and major lab work done, the total cost was $320.
Outside of catastrophic and chronic cases, the cost of routine healthcare is trivial for most Americans. We would be far better served by doing with our insurance dollars what the insurance companies are doing with our dollars, saving and investing and taking out what we need to cover the costs.
I’m pursing the legal framework necesarry to set up an individual insurance account structure for employees of my small business. If we all did the same, or perhaps pooled resources in even larger ways, we could provide the same insurance as Blue Cross/Blue Shield… with dividends for policy holders.
I have seen people turned away in emergency rooms without money or insurance and I am not talking about minorities either. Happens all the time.
Staying healthy isn’t exactly an option for people born with hereditary diseases who don’t have healthcare, then can’t get insurance and can’t get medical care. Or for many people with bi-polar or other mental problems who can’t work, thus can’t get medical coverage than can’t get real help for these and other mental problems.
Similary there are now many doctors who won’t even take Medicare patients.
I do agree that insurance industry just plain sucks.
This is so true–too bad it was buried in a long post! You should repeat this as often as possible.
Alan
Maverick Leftist