This article was originally published in the webzine put out by Cross Left.
In light of recent events, particularly the Bush administration’s casual brushing aside of habeas corpus, and the recent Doonesbury series on “Fear itself,” I print it again
“We are not afraid.
We are not afraid.
We are not afraid today.”
-We Shall Overcome, Fourth Verse.
In his recent personal memoir of his Second World War combat experience, Major Richard Winters identified the one quality that made him an effective leader: he never asked his men to do something he would not do himself. When Easy Company of the 101st Airborne Division went into battle in Normandy or in Holland, “Dick” Winters would be at the lead, instilling courage by exhorting, “Let’s go, Let’s go; Follow me!
Major Winters knew that shared risk overcomes the paralysis of fear. His personal courage inspired those under his command to more readily put their own lives on the line–a contribution that was all too necessary to destroy the Nazi threat to the common good. But then again, true leaders in the American democratic tradition have always led by personal example.
Perseverance in times of peril has always required an appeal to our common heritage of intrepidness. Conquering nameless terrors is not achieved by delegating risk to others, but by being at the forefront of hazardous advance. Richard Winters as well as many of his New Deal-Second World War generation–the heart and soul of the last golden age of America Liberalism, one that spanned from 1932 to 1968–had the fortitude to lead by example in spades.
It is no accident that courage is also found at the very heart of a consistent Liberalism. Those who achieve progress constantly place their own personal safety in jeopardy for their beliefs. This was true of our Founding Fathers who suffered at Valley Forge during the American Revolution; the abolitionists who were shunned while they advocated an end to slavery; the suffragettes who were jailed and force-fed while seeking the vote; and Civil Rights workers who were beaten at Birmingham.
Yet in recent years, courage has become a forgotten Liberal theme. Such amnesia has led our nation directly down a path to this present day where an inept administration rules out of a sense of fear. In fighting the war on terrorism President Bush, Vice-President Cheney, Karl Rove and others do not appeal to American courage, but draw upon its very antithesis to maintain power.
Instead of a President of the People, we are left with “a unitary Executive” who more and more resembles Leo Strauss’s idealized “benign tyrant.” Such undemocratic leadership demands compliance and timidity, not freedom and boldness. To that end, the president’s associates purposely inspire fearfulness as the means of creating the need for a strongman who will create an illusion of security while leaving certain threats unattended.
“Surrender all reasonable notions of privacy,” they suggest as they still fail to do the obvious; inspect cargo coming into our ports.
“Telephone calls must be monitored, even if there is no reasonable suspicion present,” they proclaim after they fecklessly allowed Osama bin-Laden to escape into the Pakistani mountains.
“In order to foil the terrorists, we demand information from Internet service providers without judicial oversight,” they bellow. Yet they fail to even threaten to regulate the quality of off-the-shelf Microsoft products that secure dams, power grids and air traffic control systems–After all, these irresponsible actors who now occupy the White House find it less important to protect infrastructure than it is to please a significant Bush campaign contributor such as Bill Gates.
In short, the majority power increasingly asks the American people to surrender liberties without first doing the obvious. Common sense measure are ignored or overlooked. It is as if they have concluded that there is no need to resort to the most basic measures of security–which often require little or no surrender of basic freedoms–when liberties often purchased with the blood of American patriots can be exchanged for the false notion of security. Ironically it is the very thing conservatism used to fear: Caesarism.
Surely there exists a threat from terrorist elements, but this is not how the Americans have traditionally reacted to such enemies. We never ran and hid behind a strongman but instead we reacted intelligently and as a self-sufficient people, led by those who fully understood our fierce independence. When Americans act heroically they are not ignorant of fear, but instead recognize its hazard and persevere in spite of its presence.
The philosophy of the current leadership is further reinforced by the personal cowardice and hypocrisy of its members.
Those who flippantly advocate pre-emptive invasions are not made of the same unselfish moral fiber as those men who boarded C-47s to be dropped into the early, still dark Norman morning of June 6, 1944. Men such as Douglas Feith, “Scooter” Libby, Richard Perle or Vice-President Cheney are not even half as honorable as the men who froze for liberty at Valley Forge, repelled treason at Little Round Top or stormed the violent beaches of Iwo Jima. Who among them chose to put aside their personal pursuits and travel to Mississippi in 1964 to bring democracy to their own fellow disenfranchised citizens? There is not one Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner or James Chaney among them. And just as they supported the Vietnam conflict from the sidelines, they dare not send their own children to fight an ill-chosen battle in the war on terrorism that is Iraq.
It is not difficult to understand how different these radical neoconservatives are from a more consistent leadership of an earlier time. During the Second World War, when Joseph Kennedy Jr.’s plane exploded on its way to attack Nazi V-2 bases, flying in the plane next to him on the same dangerous mission was the President Roosevelt’s son, Elliot. When a nation’s leadership detaches itself from the privations suffered by its people, it ceases acting as a liberal democracy.
We as Liberals need to begin undoing this exaggerated climate of fear. It is time to return to the simple wisdom of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first inaugural address. Our thirty-third president’s words will remind Americans how our philosophy once appealed directly to this inner steel that exists in all of us. His constant appeal to our common courage overcame economic depression, crushed authoritarian regimes and put our nation on a philosophical path that eventually toppled many of its own racist institutions.
The ability to inspire courage is a prima facie element of leadership. Liberalism has always maintained a legacy of eloquent leaders who successfully challenged the American people to do magnificent things. And they did so by simply using language that reminded them of this common heritage of transcending fear. Liberalism still offers that message to our fellow citizens, but the ability to inspire–and to quickly translate that inspiration into confident action–often depends upon the tone of the message itself.
If American Liberalism is again to flourish, rediscovering the very tone and language that done so much to inspire and motivate is a necessary first step. Since 1968 the mainstream Left has too often has been perceived in terms of what cannot be done. Our philosophy has become more reactive than proactive. Liberalism is a belief in the possibilities of what can and must be done–even at the cost of personal risk.
True Liberalism appeals to reason, not unrestrained emotion. Still, a certain amount of emotion is necessary for progressive action. Effective Liberal action is the condition of the heart and mind working as one.
Nothing should prevent us from appealing to the American attribute of courage. Much like Liberalism, true courage is built upon self-discipline and restraint of self-interest. It is a simple question of balancing the heart with the mind. In achieving this critical balance, the mainstream Left will once again prevail in the national discourse. Now, with our country domestically facing plutocracy, and multiple security crises internationally, we cannot afford to ignore the forgotten inner strength of the liberal platform.
Yes, displaying courage is a form of mental toughness. But there is nothing wrong with strength that suffers from no corruption. As Reinhold Niebuhr observed towards the end of the Second World War, “The preservation of a democratic civilization requires the wisdom of the serpent and the harmlessness of the dove. The children of light must be armed with the wisdom of the children of darkness but remain free from their malice. They must know the power of self-interest in human society without giving it moral justification. They must have this wisdom in order that they may beguile, deflect, harness and restrain self-interest, individual and collective, for the sake of the community.”
For more than thirty-five years there has been virtually no talk of bold challenge from either side. But, there was once a time when the Liberal’s voice was the creative voice of exciting, bold ideas. It was the voice that spoke against economic royalty, defeated fascism, conquered Jim Crow and landed a man on the Moon. The time has now come for Liberals to again dream of doing the impossible and of soaring to new heights. We must again talk about converting “retreat into advance;” we must remind each other “…that we can not merely take but we must give as well;” all while appealing to the “….great army of our people dedicated to a disciplined attack upon our common problems.” And that is why we must look back at FDR’s 1933 inaugural message to rediscover how to deliver our good message. It is no accident that this one speech marked the beginning of an age of Liberal ascendancy that was book-ended by similar call for boldness by Robert F. Kennedy who observed and declared, “There are those that look at things the way they are, and ask why? I dream of things that never were, and ask why not.”
We must now return to that way of thinking. And we must do so because Liberalism is the very essence of courage, the true tone of leadership. Courage as a Liberal truth is the ability to overcome the fear of seeking change necessary for improvement.
It’s time to turn the tables on the Right. We on the mainstream Left must talk about leadership by courage. Let us define the partyin power ffor what they truly are: the merchants of fear, cowardice and dependency.
This is how we mariginalize the GWBs, neocons and Rush Limbaughs of the world.
Beautifully said.
Thank you Kahll.
We Liberals always invoke FDR, Truman, JFK and RFK. Isn’t it time we started acting like them?
Very nice piece.
I think many of us have to admit we are afraid. However, courage is not acting without fear. It is not fearlessness.
Courage is acting even though we are afraid to act. That’s what we have to do now.
Take action, in spite of the fear, in the face of our fears, and keep on pushing in the direction we want to go until fear no longer holds ascendancy.
Thank you Kidspeak. Liberals can no longer be “onassers,” always complaining, but doing little. It’s time to get off our asses and get the job done,
Frank — Am I missing something here? Are you perhaps seeing throngs of millions, demonstrating in streets that I can’t see, waving signs saying, “Repeal MCA-2006 — Bush is not my Dictator”? Are you seeing the “L” badge on the uniforms of duty-bound fire-team members doing street sweeps in Falujah? Do you have some sort of secret document that enumerates the first few waves of US troops to hit the D-Day beaches as the all-liberal team?
Political courage, Frank, is not something that automatically attaches to a political label. It, like political cowardice, is something that is individually earned.
The politically courageous, Frank, have a lot to lose. There are jobs with fascist corporations that pay the rent and clothe the kids. There are mortagages held by local banks where fascists swarm every day. There are small business clientel of the fascist stripe ready to blackball any small business owner who critices the regime. Many churches are not safe once it’s known that you favor treating raghead kids like real children anywhere.
Such anti-liberal nuances have raged through my day-to-day life since 9/11. Am I in some sort of tiny, nonrepresentative backwater of reality? And do you see some huge, safe reality that I don’t?
In the face of the reality that I see, Frank, I am not surprised that I see little else on the Liberal bench than political cowardice. I’m not surprised to see tens of millions sitting on their hands saying, let those few neybie Democrats do it. I am embarrassed to be an American, surrounded by a hundred million or more political cowards. I look back at the Progessives of the early 1900s, line up the comparisons with today’s cowards, and want to puke. I am infuriated at it. But I am not surprised.
Predator elitism’s corruption machines have been steadily working toward this manufactured cowardice since the end of the FDR administrations. They have us divided against ourselves in a hundred ways — defeating any unity. They have us sucking the corporate tits faster and faster from 2-6 jobs per family until we don’t know which way is up. They have inculcated a culture of abject consumerism that overwhelmed citizenship decades ago. They have us buying into a two-hundred-year-old sophistry that says that the failures of govt are all our fault, because we can’t elect better representatives. They’ve polished up that hoary sophistry to read “All you have to do it elect better Democrats and the govt will save you AND give you back your constitutional republic/democracy”.
I’m infuriated that a hundred million or more refuse to see those realities.
Of course, there’s the possibility that I’m seeing a bad sample — a tiny, nonrepresentative slice of reality — while you might be seeing the big real picture.
Are you seeing something that I’m not, Frank?
Yes Stephen, you are missing something here; something that was the whole point of the piece: I was talking about the state of American leadership, specifically, Liberal leadership.
My intent was never to say that everyone who lived from 1932 through 1968 were all Liberals; far from it. But I did establish that this was the last Golden Age of American Liberalism for a very good reason. Unlike many Liberals of today, they knew how to speak about courage and more importantly, how to summon it from Americans of all stripes no matter their individual political philosophy. Too many of today’s Liberals sadly see this most American of all attributes as hokey. And you know what,that hurts our cause.
But more than that, Americans of that time and place–as imperfect as they were–knew that rights just don’t arise from themselves, but result from a reciprocal relationship with duty and self-discipline, two traits that just about everyone in “…the first few waves of US troops to hit the D-Day beaches…” all had.Just as in the Liberalism of 40-60 years ago, contribution will be a critical ingredient to a new, revitalized Liberalism.
You have completely misread my message and I believe that you commented not on what I actually meant, but more by what you wished I meant to say.
Do you want to be an effective Liberal? Then learn some self-discipline and channel your anger in righteous indignation. And furthermore, a Liberal as astute as RFK or MLK, Jr. would never use the term (even sarcastically) “raghead” to describe another American, nor would they use the term “fascist” so recklessly.
If you want to make this country a better place, start with yourself. Teach yourself to communicate in way that reaches the mainstream instead of doing so in a manner that marginalizes our common cause.
First, I’ll handle a few of your emotional spewings, and then we’ll get down to the historical business of 1932-1968 leadership — and that leadership’s use of the unconstitutional, felonious, and treasonous Federal Reserve to finance whatever the hell that leadership wanted to do. Our $8.5 trillion national debt today is a direct consequence.
God forbid that I ever want to be a good Liberal. Good liberals are lost in the fuzz-think of labels. They have no earthly idea that the conflict is not liberal vs. conservative, or left vs. right. Those are just window dressings, pointing good liberals away from the real conflict. The real conflict is the class-race superrich, their corporate predators, the predator politicians and all the unchecked corruption machines vs. ordinary people. It is Hamiltonian elites vs. Jefferson democrats. It is the butchery of ordinary people for profits and power vs. the direct democracy wielded by the sovereign people that could limit and minimize the corruption and butchery.
The real conflict is the murderous elites who baited 1770s American rabble with the implied promises of extraordinary American rights in the Declaration of Independence vs. the rabble who fought, bled, and died so that the American elites could be free of British suppression and free to bury those DOI promises out of reach with the unconstitutional ratification of the Constitution in 1789. It’s the murderous elites who won the decade-long national debate, 1776-1787, between their assertion of representative sovereignty and the people’s true sovereignty, by hustling up the constitutional convention at Philadelphia in the spring and summer of 1787 to write up an elitist half-republic in which representatives became the nation’s sovereign — vs. — the ordinary people who knew all along that they were the only sovereign that the new nation could ever have. (They had to wait until a 1912 SCOTUS decision in one of the many court fights between the murderous elites and the ordinary people’s installation of citizen lawmaking in 19 state constitutions before they could be legally and formally recognized as the nation’s only legitimate sovereign.)
I could march us through most of the elites vs. commoners conflicts over the last two hundred years, but it you haven’t got it yet, you’re not going to get it anytime soon.
Next, you don’t know my righteous indignation well enough to insult it. My blog, DD Revival, is full of righteous indignation. You have samples of it right here on BooMan. Some were published by me, some by the Populist Party chief (“populist”) for whom I’m a columnist.
Next, I was not referring to American children with the term “raghead”. I was referring to innocent Palestinian, Afghani, and Iraqi children — all of whom, according to many crusading church people in my community, are so corrupted by Islam that if we don’t kill them now, we’ll just have to kill them when they grow up.
Next, I have personal motivation that led me to study Hitler Germany in depth as one of the three emphasis areas in my history major at Univ Calif Santa Barbara back in the stone age. Fascism has been a major topic of my life for the 35-plus years since. I do not use the term, ‘fascist’, recklessly. Here are two sequential paragraphs from my essay, “Homegrown American Fasicism”, 05 September 2006, on my blog, DD Revival —
“No waffling. As with German and Italian fascism in the early 20th Century, the Bush-Cheney Usurpation is pure fascism. It demonstrates a strong-man leader, extreme secrecy, controlled media, fraudulent elections, judicial rulings clearly violating the Constitution, negation of the rule of law by all three branches of government, obstruction of justice for political and corporate leaders, the making of ex post facto law to immunize political and corporate leaders from past crimes, redefinition of established law for corruption and ideological purposes, redefinition of commonly understood language terms to avoid legal retribution (e.g., ‘torture’ to mean only treatment resulting in severe organ damage or death, and ‘terrorist surveillance’ to mean the interception of any communication or bank activity done by US citizens), the making of unconstitutional law to limit rights, suppression of Constitutional rights for profits and power, misuse of policy and law for unstated intentions, cronyism and corruption, sham national security obsessions, warmaking for profits and power, supremacy of the military, sham nationalism for the masses while leadership creates policy to benefit the transnational and stateless superrich, hard science made politically relative, anti-intellectualism outside the political and corporate elites, suppression of critical thinking in public education, intermixing of government and religion, enemies and scapegoats obsessions, destruction of undesirable minority population and cultural centers (e.g., Warsaw ghetto and New Orleans), male chauvinism and suppression of women’s rights, and corporation protection extremes including lassez faire economic policy and suppression of labor’s rights and power.
“Fascism is not only a form of absurd, predator elitism governance, it is a national trait. Just as there was something inherently fascist about significant numbers of early 20th Century Germans and Italians, so there is something inherently fascist about significant numbers of late 20th and early 21st Century Americans. History will damn the American people for their fascism and fascist war crimes just as it damns the German and Italian peoples for theirs.”
The first of the two paragraphs identifies 26 features of fascist governenance intensely practiced by Bush-Cheney. And there are many more less obvius fascisms incorporated into our national govt that I did not mention so that I would not have to go into lengthy arguments. Those 26 items named are bell-clear and nose-obvious.
Next, it is absurd that I might teach myself to communicate with the mainstream of American society. The mainstream’s lack of responsibility-taking for its govt’s evils is THE problem. And the mainstream doesn’t need any help from me to marginalize its common cause. It does that all by itself — in spades.
When the mainstream has elected some few Democrat newbies and taken back the House and the Senate, do you expect the Federal Reserve to just close its doors and forgive the $8.5 trillion national debt? Do you expect globalized fascist corporatism to suddenly send back the premium American jobs that it has been hatcheting away from us for decades? Do you expect the outsourcing industry to suddenly throw up its hands and say, oh, hell, yes, you were right all along? Do you even expect the two major political parties to suddenly say, oh, right, you need a nonpartisan primaries system so that you can select your own candidates for president, vice president, an independent attorney general, and all these federal bench judges that we’ve had in our pocket for two hundred years?
Just how many corruption machines out of the global corruption engine do you expect to automatically shut down with the election of some few newbie Democrats?
Don’t get me wrong. I want the Republican party diselected to the point that it ceases to exist. And I want all of the House and Senate races to go to the Democrats. But that’s just a stop-gap. It has nothing — nothing — to do with the 3-branch fascist despotism that has ruled us since Bush v. Gore and that is secretly setting up our national neutering in the North American Union as we speak. The Democratic party has been proving, in spades, that it is the co-fascist wing of the Republifascist party ever since January 2001. With the Democrats in charge we get nothing more than a watered-down, 3-branch, fascist despotism. Same old corruption machines all over the political landscape going a hundred miles an hour — and the real work still to be done.
I’m not angry about you neo-progs wanting to elect Democrats. I’m angry that you think there’s nothing else that we need to do.
Now, I’ve gone on for too long already. We’ll do 1932-1968 some other time — along with comparisons with what I think was the last great era of American political sophistication, 1877 to 1918. You should read up on the rural populists, muckrakers, and urban progessives. That’s what’s coming at you.
Stephen, the real issue isn’t wealth or “elites” versus “commoners.” The real issues are corruption and self-restraint. There are good rich people and evil poor people and vice a’ versa. Socialist bureaucracies as well as a Fortune 500 companies are both susceptible to acting in a recklessly self-interest fashion.
It is you, not I who is seduced by “fuzzy labels.” Unfortunately you are so transfixed by your static beliefs that you have lost sight of the fact that what unites as us an American People is notion of common dreams–environmental, financial and personal security.
There’s nothing static about my beliefs, Frank. And where did you get that gibberish about the American people being unified? For the past two decades, minimum, we’ve been one of the most rigidly divided people on the planet — in spades. We’re about 100 million politically withdraw (who have not shown one iota of interest in the Bush-Cheney wreckage of our Constitution), and a gridlock of 50 percent liberals and 50 percent conservatives — with the Rove/Diebold election-fraud corruption machine tipping the win to the conservatives for — what? — the superrich?
Of course, I know what you mean through all that gibberish. You mean that the liberals are connected by their common dreams and that the conservatives are connected by their common dreams and that the withdrawn are connected by their common joke about irrelevant govt.
But really, Frank, how do you see us united across any of the hundred dividing lines so carefully engineered by the superrich and predator politicians of both parties? Abortion rights advocates can’t even talk with anti-abortion purists. 19 Democratic senators voted with the Republifascists to close down the Alito filibuster before it could start to show that his anti-14th-Amendment convictions will help kill Roe v. Wade. Compromise between the owners of coal-fired power plants and the commoners who want to be able to eat fish without fear of mercury poisoning? Oh, hell no. The mad-cow disease issue widened to all brain-wasting disease sources extant in the US, showing a fearsome lack of safety in our food supply? Just becuase some medical scientists make a little noise on behalf of the people? Oh hell, no. Anti-war protesters given fair hearings by the govt, who then examines the evidence and admits, right, we lied you into a war of aggression and we’ll send this list of international criminals starting with Bush and Cheney to the Hague to stand trial? Dream on. Do you see the Halliburton board of directors saying, oh, my god, your citizen action groups are right — we defrauded the American people on these no-bid, multi-million-dollar contracts and here is your money back? Do you expect the major oil companies to get a round-table together to produce documents showing how much Iraqi oil they robbed away while Medal of Freedom winner L. Paul Bremer III had the oil-flow meters turned off in the Iraqi pipe lines all during his watch? Just because some citizens coalition demands answers?
Right. You have common dreams with other liberals. Cheney has common dreamss with other PNAC fascists. And I have common dreams with other direct democracy advocates. Yep, common dreams are a biggee.
Reality bites, Frank. While you fuzz-think about the American people being united, the 3-branch fascist despotism is talking to Canadian and Mexican fascist leadership to railroad the NAU — with all the EU Constitution’s fascisms that were lost to the French referendum last year — over the top of us for max profits into the fascists’ bank accounts.
Have a nice fuzz-think, Frank. See you in some Halliburton concentration camp. Rest assured that the profits from our slave labor will keep us alive.
Joke, Frank, that was a joke. They’re going to kill me and promote you.
Stephen, to understand what I was trying to say, just go to Crooks and Liars and watch Keith Olberman’s Special Comment from last night.
I sense a bit of elitism in your own words. And it is the same sort of elitism I sense when the neocons speak. Perhaps it is because their founding members all started out at the very far Left, out of the mainstream.
I really feel bad for you. Your anger reminds me too much of Bill O’Reilly and Ann Coulter. And with such a condescending, self-righteous attitude, your message will never get through to the common folk you claim to love so much.
I already understand what you’ve tried to say, Frank, and if you don’t understand how insufficient what you’ve tried to say truly is, then I’ve wasted my time here.
It’s very bad form, Frank, for you to attack my person after you have ignored or deflected so many of my specific arguments. In debate/discussion, another’s arguments and counter-arguments are addressed directly, not ignored, and not deflected into some other topic. At the risk of seeming even more elitist to you than I do now, the sort of personal attacks you’ve hit me with here are called ‘ad hominen’ attacks. They’re cheap-shot lawyer tricks — attacking the person when the lawyer would lose in any attack on the person’s truth. Very bad form in any debate/discussion. You should stop doing that to people right away.
There are all sorts of elites, Frank, including useful, non-predator types who’ve just paid attention through long, high-mileage lives, and who, consequently, can express themselves well enough to be usefully instructive. For you to equate me with neocons — and especially the lying and mega-stupid Bill O’Reilly and Ann Coulter — is easily the most stupid, fuzz-thinky, label-hanging that you’ve done in this thread. It’s you being more childishly defensive than you’ve been anywhere else in this thread. And that, Frank, is sure saying something.
Game over.
Whatever.
But I leave you with this simple thought: try inspiring people with a message of hope instead of resorting to the tired old rhetoric thay hasn’t worked for decades.
Bush behaves exactly like the historical figures who tried to wrest and hold supreme power from their subjects, using a cabal of co-conspirators to spread dark whispers, evil rumors, and shabby lies in order to inculcate fear and obedience among the population.
Their ilk spent more time agonizing over, suppressing, and persecuting the imagined enemy within, while engaging in ineffective wasteful posturing when faced with a true enemy without.