Friends, it's time we talked. You've wondered for a while now why I abandoned the barricades of staunch liberalism and became a centrist. After all those years close to the civil rights movement, the anti-Vietnam war movement -- a lifetime spent trying to save America from what we considered its worst instincts -- I had quit the field in favor of something practical called Clintonism. "You're not a pragmatist, are you?" one of you asked, aghast, over good wine at a Washington dinner party.
You were especially shocked last year when, contrary to everything you'd come to expect of me, I supported the Iraq war. I was part of a group known in the commentariat as liberal hawks -- except that I was no longer a full-fledged liberal. Domestically, I had become a moderate more interested in winning elections than arguments. I'd come to appreciate the efficiency of free markets, and became an adherent of Clinton's blindingly obvious dictum, "The best social program is a booming economy."
Internationally, the first Gulf War had turned me from a near-pacifist into one who believed that force had to be used to do urgent good. In a second Iraq war, I said, of course people would get hurt; but far more will get hurt if we do nothing. Tony Blair's words were my thoughts. I may yet come to regret my support of the war; we'll have to talk about that again soon, too. But better now to talk about the last election.
We were all crushed by the loss -- our seventh in the last 10 presidential elections -- but nobody felt the pain more than liberals. Because Bush hatred ran so high, and convictions about where he was taking the country were so passionately held, this defeat was nearly unbearable. "We're pretty devastated," wrote a professor friend from New Hampshire. "The day after the election I was in bed all day with a migraine made worse by a celebration the night before after a 14-hour get-out-the-vote effort."
Even more despair was in the email from a San Francisco liberal who voted for Nader in 2000 and Kerry in 2004. "Why get up this morning?" he wrote. "The Bush administration will entrench so many bad policies in the next four years that will require so much effort to push back that we won't have any energy to promote a more humane Democratic agenda. Should we just move to Zanzibar and raise our young son on the beach?"
Then there was the anger and, in some cases, just plain arrogance. "I want a divorce from the American people!" thundered a liberal friend in Bethesda, Md. "The zombies all went to the polls," blogged a writer I know.
Friends, the election wasn't stolen, and the American people weren't stupid. We just got our proverbial left-leaning butts whipped. So what's the lesson, and why should it matter to liberals? I think those of us who came up in the glory days of post-Roosevelt liberalism have lost sight of the fact that we are minority members of a coalition party that has to include a lot of those people being called zombies today. Because we won big in the
1960s and 1970s -- civil rights, Vietnam, Watergate -- we came to believe there is a permanent liberal majority in America, if only it would wake up! But that's not so. Liberals are a minority (21 percent of this year's voters) like blacks, Hispanics, environmental activists, and -- think of this! -- evangelical Christians. Liberals have to learn to reach out to people who are different from them, but just as important, to our coalition. Yet because liberals are often well read and well spoken, and much given to counting pinhead angels, they have a hard time making common cause with, say, gun owners -- though they may have much in common on many issues, like family values, not just economic concerns.
That's what I found so uplifting, finally, in the email from the San Francisco liberal. He's a card-carrying, cappuccino-drinking, gay rights-protecting, New York Times-reading West Coast environmentalist. But he's taken from this exhausting election the lesson that purism, of the right or of the left, is the enemy of progress. He, too, is becoming a moderate. "I can no longer live in a situation where political and social ideas are so polarized, where both sides think the other is crazy, corrupt, immoral, or evil, and where 'winning' is simplified to mean beating down the opposition rather than moving forward together. That's why I have resolved to search for solutions that take into account both ends of the spectrum. I resolve to support ideas that respond to the needs and beliefs of all. I want to find solutions to conflict, not just reinforce my position.
"This may seem like pie-in-the-sky idealism from a wounded political loser trying to keep a toehold of belief in the political system. But for me, it is the only way not to fall into a black hole of cynicism. Otherwise, all I see is endless partisan conflict where winning is always an empty victory because half of the electorate, people who are my fellow Americans, have lost. This is my moderate manifesto. " There's the lesson.
