Whatever happened to the American Left?

Just listened to an NPR “Talk of the Nation” piece entitled “Whatever Happened to the American Left?”

The premise was that the right has, over a period of decades, come to dominate the political discourse through greater message discipline, building better “movement” infrastructure and the development of bully pulpits including talk radio, the Internet and niche magazines. It was all interesting and the analysis was fine — as far as it went.

But it missed what I consider to be the biggest reason that the left is on its heels, despite putting Barack Obama in the White House in a landslide in 2008. That reason is cultural: the left has allowed itself to be perceived as effete, elitist and anti-patriotic. That’s a caricature, of course, but many on the left seem unable to stop sharpening the pencil that draws it.

Two local cases in point:

Back in 2004, I was having a conversation with a local Democratic Party activist who must have assumed we were of like mind because we both disliked George W. Bush and opposed the Iraq war. This woman fulminated against all the “flag wavers,” essentially depicting patriotic Americans as dupes and rubes. I said, “I hate to tell you this, but I have a flag pole in my front yard and I fly the American flag every day.”

“But… but…” she spluttered, “You read books!”

No kidding. She really said that.

More recently, my friend Jack McGowan gave a beautiful, heartfelt invocation during the Sisters Folk Festival’s community show on Sunday, September 11, remembering the attacks of 10 years before and his experience as a member of Oregon’s Flight for Freedom, which went to New York City to show solidarity with that wounded metropolis. He closed with the third stanza of “America the Beautiful”: Thine alabaster cities gleam/Undimmed by human tears.

Later, someone expressed to me some mild discomfort at the patriotic tenor of Jack’s words. Huh?

The American Left has alienated itself from its natural work-for-a-living constituency because it has allowed itself to be portrayed as anti-American. And that, I’m afraid, is because some on the left are anti-American. Too bad, because America needs a genuine progressive voice to continue to ensure that the blessings of liberty are extended to all its citizens, to promote the access to opportunity and the principle of the common weal that are essential to making the pursuit of happiness more than a chimera for the vast bulk of our population.

Back in ’04, Howard Dean said his party needed to be talking to the guy with the Confederate flag on his pickup truck bumper. He was right. Of course he got so much crap for it that he climbed down. By 2008, candidate Obama was talking to a San Francisco fundraising crowd about folks bitterly clinging to guns and religion.

Well, if you’re trying to come across as an elitist snob, that’s a pretty good job of it. That’s how the left has ceded the field to the likes of W — a blueblood born-on-third-base aristocrat posing as some kind of regular guy. It’s pathetic and ridiculous.

I’ve seen this before. I went to college in Santa Cruz and my girlfriend at the time went to Berkeley, so I was exposed to plenty of idiots who claimed to speak for “the people” yet obviously despised them. Until those kinds of voices are marginalized, until the American Left embraces the “American” part of that moniker, there will never again be a successful progressive movement in this country. Who wants to work with people who look down on them?

And until there are real countervailing sources of power, the looters will continue to pillage a once-great nation.

Jim Cornelius, Editor