from "left, right, & wrong" by Garret Keizer

I read a surprisingly fresh article in March/April 2005 Mother Jones and I'm going to record some of the insights here:

Some time after election day, I receive a call from a woman in my community...the woman is speaking of what she sees with her own two eyes on her own dirt road. Most of all, she is speaking of her struggle to protect what she values, which is partly her community and partly its youth and absolutely her teenage son.

If there is anything the left fails to appreciate, and that politicians on the right exploit with unerring tact, it is the nature of that woman's struggle. I mean the class nature no less than the moral nature. You may call it universal if you wish, because it is common to parents everywhere and, in fact, to anyone who loves anything at all, but the struggle to preserve what you cherish becomes especially acute when you live in poverty, or close to poverty, when your well-kept prefab sits on its half-acre a quarter mile up the road from the shack with all the dogs. Or, tougher still, when you live in the shack with all the dogs and try to teach your kids not to treat animals like the little sadists up in the prefab house. Sophisticated people of independent means can afford to be disdainful of lower-class attempts at "respectability," chalking it up to religious prejudice or provincial narrowness, but when their own kids come anywhere within the smell of social dysfunction, they have the private-school applications in the mail...

...To be honest, I have begun to lose patience with "compassion," be it the conservative version that sees poverty as a moral disease to be cured with a benevolent dose of 19th-century rectitude, or the liberal version that views poverty as an exotic culture to be scrutinized through the kindly lens of tolerance. Poverty is not a culture to be understood; it is a condition to be eradicated. The only people who think otherwise have never sat down in the places where I've sat down, including the house with all the dogs (and the mold and the burns and the bruises and the blank-eyed toddlers and the interminable cough.)

But "compassionate conservatism" is now the ascendant and thus the more insidious form. Like other kinds of demagoguery, it is based on a partial truth: the idea that individuals and civic groups can meet needs that no government can. This is a claim guaranteed to resonate in any place where the fire department is staffed by volunteers.

But none of us lives entirely in a small town (no more than a city dweller lives exclusively in Chicago or New York.) We live as beneficiaries of a society that is complex, affluent, centralized, and-when it operates as intended--democratic. This is the level on which compassionate consercatism becomes completely disingenuous...

...Revolutionary politics...have always been tied to a dogged willingness to teach...

...Democrats seem prepared to subordinate every value to that of winning, failing to realize that they can never win--especially in a time of international terror and domestic disarray--until they subordinate winning to conviction. This is where jabs at George W. Bush's intellect prove to be every bit as lame as their target. Nobody thinks Bush has a brain. They think he has a backbone.

...The main point, which is always the main point, is this: What do you) know for sure?

..The right is right when it says that certain social problems cannot be addressed by what we on the left like to call "systemic change." The right is right when it says that certain social problems can be addressed only by a change in our cultural values.

Where the right is wrong is in trying to impose a single set of cultural values on a pluralistic society. Whre the right is also wrong is in failing to keep faith with its own professed values...

The one thing more insufferable than a pretense of moral superiority is a pretense of superiority to morals, as if the task of an "evolving" woman or man is to stand above the struggle instead of on the right side.

...So what am I saying?...