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God & the Inauguration: a Battle Not Worth Fighting

Worth fighting?

A founding premise of this blog is the idea that political symbols have value – “myth, power, value,” as a professor of mine used to say – both as campaign tools and as methods of molding the national consciousness. As a result, political symbols are worth fighting over, not just as a battle in the culture war, but as a means of political expression. However, sometimes a symbol is just a symbol – or, fighting over it just isn’t worth the price.

This is a lesson that Michael Newdow hasn’t learned. Newdow, perennial atheist litigant, filed late last year (ha!), demanding that the White House & the Obama transition team purge any reference to God from the official, state-sanctioned elements of the inaugural ceremonies:

According to the complaint, the plaintiffs “have no objection at this time” if President-elect Barack Obama chooses to add the words himself. “The president, like all other individuals, has Free Exercise rights, which might permit such an alteration.” But, the complaint adds, “no such free exercise rights come into play on the part of the individual administering the oath to the President.”

Newdow – who is likely to lose his case, just like he did in 2001 and 2005 – needs to pick his battles. Certainly there are times when jousting over political symbols is worthwhile, but expunging God wholesale from the political discourse is neither a tenable goal, nor desirable. Where God enters the public discourse simply because that’s the way it’s always been, rather than out of an attempt to proselytize or increase public religiosity, we should balk at fighting history, and save our resources for the fights that matter. Even if Newdow could hope to secure a victory, it would be less than Pyrrhic, inviting a public backlash that would drown Establishment Clause litigation for years to come. I don’t like those odds, and I don’t know why Newdow does.

What’s in a Name: Why “the Confluence” is NOT a Liberal Blog

What’s in a name? For the judges of the 2008 Weblog Awards, who saw fit to designate “The Confluence” as one of 2008′s “best liberal blogs,” apparently not much. Confluence is part and parcel of that pernicious mind-virus known as PUMA-ism, a pseudo-political ideology group of angry people and hangers-on whose only goal, since June 21, 2008, has been to slander Barack Obama at any price – even to the point of backing John McCain, embracing theo-conservative Sarah Palin as a feminist based on nothing but her genitalia, and attempting to stage a last-minute palace revolt at the DNC. What really takes the cake, though, is that all of these deliberate attempts to “divide and conquer” the Democratic Party occurred against the express wishes of Hillary Clinton – the PUMAs’ putative inspiration and beneficiary – but, curiously, fit neatly in with Republican symbology throughout the election. No, dear friends – Confluence is not a liberal blog, because PUMA-ism is not liberal. I’ll explain.

Liberalism is a philosophy premised on the idea that, absent some objective indicator to the contrary, more inclusion and greater liberty is always best. At its core, liberalism requires appeal to reason – stripped bare of emotion, bias, or empty appeals to tradition – as the foundation of public policy. Liberalism’s converse, then, is not conservatism but dogmatism. If certain political positions are “liberal,” they are only so because a rational, liberal approach to politics tends to generate these positions.

Because liberalism relies upon reason, it follows that a “liberal” will recognize that politics is antecedent to policy. The dogmatic, bleeding-heart, no-compromise left-winger is no liberal if she does not pursue her goals rationally. To refuse to acknowledge that policy requires politics, and politics requires compromise, is irrational – and therefore illiberal. In short, liberalism imports the flexibility to implement its agenda – in parts, if necessary.

The point is this: if liberalism is a philosophy built on a rational approach to policymaking, it must also require a similarly rational approach to politics. Confluence fails this test. By pursuing an intellectually vacuous approach to politics, and embracing instead dogmatic inflexibility and hero-worship, Confluence has long-since abandoned any thought process that could remotely be described as “liberal.” Devoting one’s entire internet career to duping women into casting protest ballots against their political interest is not rational, and it is not liberal.

It may be that in the paragraphs above I described progressivism, or pragmatism, or pragmatic liberalism, or something else entirely. Maybe – as Riverdaughter, their founder, argues – liberalism requires nothing more than the embrace of enumerated policy goals, like equal rights for gay men and women, and reproductive justice. But even by this embarrassingly shallow rubric, Confluence falls far short. If liberalism is to mean anything at all, it must mean the active pursuit of these policy goals, in words or deeds. But Confluence has spilled comparatively little ink on actual substantive liberal issues. The lion’s share of their content, instead, is best equated to a series of playground taunts against Barack Obama and his supporters. And Confluence’s entire existence amounts to only one deed: the active opposition of the first viable liberal candidate in eight years, and the short-sighted embrace, instead, of a candidate and a party that has systematically opposed minority interests for the past decade. That Confluence’s claimed eventual goal was the election of the perfect, idyllic liberal candidate is no defense: the blog’s all-encompassing, baseless hatred of Barack Obama long-since squeezed that goal out of the picture.

A liberal is known not by her words, but by her deeds. By subordinating reason to an obsession with a single candidate, and letting the goal of a freer America disappear under a tide of borderline racist, exclusively anti Obama rhetoric, the Confluence and indeed all PUMAs ceased being liberals and became narrow anti-Obama partisans long ago. To conclude otherwise would be to reduce the word “liberal” to a pleading requirement.

On January 5th, VOTE AGAINST “The Confluence”
Don’t let the PUMAs split the vote! May we suggest “Crooks & Liars”?