Sarah Palin and the primary contradiction

David Seaton's News Links
Jim Sleeper, over at TPM, has written a very fine post on the Palin effect.

In it he touches on some points that have interested me for some time and which I often write about. In this post I would like to quote Mr. Sleeper and riff on some of his themes.

To begin with he says:

(...) if you didn't sense last night how deeply Sarah Palin channeled some of the country's deepest, most powerful currents of pent-up indignation and yearning, you don't sense the trouble we Democrats are in. (...) Rhetorically, she was the anti-Obama,. She was stirring precisely because she was so artless, matter-of fact, and "American" -- with no cadences or grand, historic resonances, but with plenty of mother wit and shrewdness. Credit her as much as the speechwriters.. The two currents she tapped (...) were riptides of deeply wounded pride and groping loyalty, a yearning for vindication of something that is not to be disparaged at all.

The first such riptide was unleashed by Palin's and Giuliani's accounts of John McCain's career-threatening commitment, a year ago, when his campaign was hopeless, to an American military victory in Iraq, Right or wrong -- and I think it was wrong -- it was a commitment grounded in an uncommon courage that will be dismissed as stupidity only by smart-asses who really want to lose this election.

The second current was tapped by Palin's own grounded, calm confidence that "ordinary people's" common sense - her kind, and a lot of other people's - is what it takes to pull this country through its converging crises.

(...) For some reason, courage and generosity never showed McCain what they showed Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s -- the true dangers of our military-industrial juggernaut in a world where corporations are more powerful and corrupting than states and where the biggest threats to liberty are no longer taxes-taxes-taxes, and the strongest defense of liberty is no longer what now passes for "national security."

Trapped into making war for laissez faire, conservatives such as McCain and Palin can't reconcile their yearning for a sacred, ordered liberty with their obeisance to every whim of global capital, which is abandoning Palin's small-town America and Obama's urban America, a capital whose injustices and consumer palliatives are subverting our republican institutions and character.

About all this, they haven't a clue. To find one, their folksy common-sense, defiant courage, and religious faith are more necessary than some of us acknowledge or even understand, and therefore we may lose the election.

I think Sleeper's mention of Eisenhower is especially fine. To underline that reference, let me quote from Eisenhower's well known speech before the American Society of Newspaper Editors on April 16, 1953:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

Today the situation is much worse, but can you imagine any major American political figure, either Republican or Democrat daring to use such language?

Let us have another look at this wonderful paragraph from Sleeper's post:

Trapped into making war for laissez faire, conservatives such as McCain and Palin can't reconcile their yearning for a sacred, ordered liberty with their obeisance to every whim of global capital, which is abandoning Palin's small-town America and Obama's urban America, a capital whose injustices and consumer palliatives are subverting our republican institutions and character.

This is the center of the whole question, but Sleeper fails to note that neither Obama or Biden or any other major American politician will confront this truth head on or even obliquely. The Democrats are as much a part of the problem, warp and woof, as the Republicans are or ever were.

If Sleeper's paragraph is a masterful summing up of America's central problem. The left should obviously ask "what to do?", which is the question that the left exists to ask.

Obviously the answer is that we should try to change the reality described in the paragraph. The devil, of course, is in the details. Where to begin?

When you organize your days activities, for example, you might make a "to do" list and put the items in order of importance.

One the most useful tools for a political strategist is Mao Tse-Tung's "On Contradiction". Before you laugh and turn away. I suggest you read this quotation from Professor Kishore Mahbubani, the dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy (National University of Singapore), writing about the errors of American foreign policy in the Financial Times:

Mao Zedong, for all his flaws, was a great strategic thinker. He said China always had to deal with its primary contradiction and compromise with its secondary contradiction. When the Soviet Union became the primary contradiction, Mao settled with the US, even though it involved the humiliation of dealing with a power that then recognised Chiang Kai-shek as the legitimate ruler. The west must emulate Mao’s pragmatism and focus on its primary contradiction.

Therefore, if America's domestic "primary contradiction" is what Sleeper calls:

obeisance to every whim of global capital, which is abandoning Palin's small-town America and Obama's urban America, a capital whose injustices and consumer palliatives are subverting our republican institutions and character.

And Eisenhower defines as:

this is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

Then it follows that following Mao's pragmatic logic, the American left much seek allies on the right in order to confront the primary contradiction. The issue of American jobs being outsourced abroad, for example, is something that could find a broad base of agreement among many Democrats and Republicans.

"Compromising on the secondary contradictions" is very painful, it involves leaving cherished principals waiting at the door while the primary contradiction is being attended to. If American militrism and the military industrial complex are seen as the primary contradiction, than something as dear to the hearts of Democrats as Roe Vs. Wade might have to be sacrificed in order to fight it. (Full disclosure: I personally am in favor of women's freedom to choose. As a man, however, I think my opinion is, in fact, irrelevant.

While we are at it, I would ask, why are so many working class and lower middle class Americans so fired up about abortion?

Some commentators in the press have criticized Governor Palin for carrying her youngest son to term when she had been informed that he would be born with Down's Syndrome and at the same time, giving birth to such a child is a strong selling point for Palin throughout much of that America that once voted Democratic. This is an issue where people feel deeply on both sides.

My own theory of this relatively recent impassioned interest in the "right ot life", in a country that approves of the death penalty, ties it directly to the new economy.

The argument for aborting a fetus with Down's Syndrome would be that he or she could not live a useful and productive existance and would thus be a burden on its parents and society.

Do you think that if you were a small town American with just a high school education or only a couple of years in a community college, that you might possibly have cause to identify with such a child? Could we say that great masses of what were America's most productive citizens today might be classed as having "special needs" or being a burden on society?

One of the most interesting things that Mike Huckabee said in his campaign, that showed that interesting things are moving under the surface of American Evangelicalism, was that many "right to life" people only seem interested in children before they are born, once they arrive than it's devil take the hindmost. I consider that one of the most important things any politician of the right has said in a long time. There is some important common ground here.

Let's close with another quote from Jim Sleeper's wonderful post:

their folksy common-sense, defiant courage, and religious faith are more necessary than some of us acknowledge or even understand.

Amen. DS