Stop obsessing over the next election

by Rob Schofield, NC Policy Watch, March 24, 2015.

What progressive North Carolinians should learn from Ted Cruz and Rand Paul

Political progressives tend to be an optimistic bunch when it comes to government, so it’s little surprise that many of them would also be optimistic about (and often fixated on) regaining some measure of political power in North Carolina in the near future. You yourself may have harbored such views or engaged in such conversations. You know how this goes:

“I hear they’re recruiting some promising legislative candidates for next year. If McCrory’s negatives stay high and Hillary puts some real money into the state and X and Y break in this direction and…blah, blah, blah.”

Indeed, it’s often rather surprising how obsessed with the details of the state’s electoral scene that many average progressive activists can become. After all, it wasn’t as if things were all peaches and cream when the Democrats held power in Raleigh. For all the conservative blather about the “liberal” Democrats having supposedly been in control for decades, the truth of the matter, of course, is that conservative, business-first politicians mostly ran the show.

This is not to say that people aren’t entitled to their hopes and dreams or that “in the trenches” electoral battles aren’t important – often vitally so.

It is, however to offer a reminder: Progressives will not take charge of North Carolina government anytime soon merely by recruiting more attractive candidates, holding more focus groups or tweaking their “message” with the right buzzwords and talking points. Those things can all be important at the appropriate moment for the appropriate people, but in the end, they are just tools to be used in a larger battle.

For most of us most of the time, that battle – the real fight for the heart and soul of our state – is not about winning the next election. Rather, it is about winning a battle of ideas by consistently, passionately and unabashedly championing a vision of a freer, happier, healthier and more equitable society.

Surprising role models

Anyone who has any doubts about the wisdom and efficacy of such an approach for progressives as they work to push the state ideological pendulum back from the wild swing to the right it has taken in recent years would do well to consider a pair of surprising role models: U.S. Senators Ted Cruz and Rand Paul.

No, the advice here is not for progressives to embrace demagoguery as their new guiding principle; it is to take a few moments and contemplate how it is that such radical right-wingers have come to prominence in 21st Century America.

Think about it: 35 years ago, both Cruz and Paul would have been pariahs in the Republican Party. Many of the ideas these fellows espouse make Ronald Reagan look like a lefty.

In 1987, when the Governor of Delaware, Pete DuPont attempted to attack then Vice President George H.W. Bush from the right, Bush laid him low during a debate and helped secure the 1988 nomination for himself by deriding DuPont’s idea of privatizing Social Security. “That’s a nutty idea, Pierre,” Bush snapped to great acclaim.

Now, of course, privatizing Social Security – what he refers to as a “Ponzi scheme” – is one of Cruz’s less radical ideas. According to Cruz: emergency contraception is akin to abortion, global warming is a fraud because there was a lot of snow in New Hampshire this winter, Sharia Law is a real threat in the United States and the United Nations and “Agenda 21” are both part and parcel of a monstrous global conspiracy to tear down the U.S. Constitution.

Meanwhile, Rand Paul has espoused numerous positions that go even further out on the extreme far right fringe. How else to characterize Paul’s militant, almost cultish version of libertarianism in which he questions mandatory vaccination laws and the Civil Rights Act’s guarantees against racial discrimination in public accommodations and alleges the existence of a secret plan to merge the U.S., Canada and Mexico?

Here’s Paul back in 2011 claiming that guarantees of a right to health care would effectively legalize slavery:

“With regard to the idea of whether you have a right to health care, you have to realize what that implies. It’s not an abstraction. I’m a physician. That means you have a right to come to my house and conscript me. It means you believe in slavery. It means that you’re going to enslave not only me, but the janitor at my hospital, the person who cleans my office, the assistants who work in my office, the nurses.”

So how did it get so far that men with such bizarre stances would both be taken seriously as Presidential candidates?

The answer is that it happened slowly and gradually. Sure, Cruz and Paul would have been dismissed as wackos by the 1980’s GOP just as Pierre Du Pont and Pat Robertson ultimately were. But the point is that mere defeats didn’t stop Du Pont and Robertson and their allies in the far right think tanks and advocacy groups from soldiering on (and spending gobs of money).

The hard line, conservative true believers of the 1980’s didn’t really think they would win the national ideological debate (or the presidency) anytime soon; they ran and kept pushing their far right agenda because they truly believed in it and knew they were blazing a trail. They gave voice to extreme ideas (complete gun deregulation, school privatization, the end of corporate taxes) over and over in enough different places and different ways over a long enough period of time that, gradually, the ideas didn’t seem so crazy anymore.

And so here we are today with major national politicians like Cruz and Paul being taken seriously as they espouse the same brand of “nutty” views. Moreover, wacky as they are, neither man can be assailed effectively as “traditional politician.” Both come off, more or less, as sincere true believers because, well, they are true believers.

Passion over pragmatism

The lessons in all of this for progressives ought to be fairly obvious.

First, political pragmatism is fine and extremely useful in many important situations. Sometimes, it’s important to compromise and get things done. Ultimately, however, those who make pragmatism their faith are sure, in time, to lose their way. When winning elections starts to become all there is for any party or ideological group, eventually voters will figure it out and look elsewhere. Ask some of the “mainstream” Democrats in North Carolina.

Lesson Number Two is the closely related one we started out with – namely, that progressives will never get to where they want to go in the long run in North Carolina by obsessing about the next election. To contest and ultimately win the battle of ideas, one must be committed to a long haul fight – a fight in which you’re even willing to lose an election (or two or three) on some important matters of principle.

That’s what the ideologues on the far right did. They toiled in the vineyards long enough and with enough doggedness that they succeeded in moving the hearts and minds of a lot of Americans – not a majority, enough to make it possible for people like Ted Cruz and Rand Paul to at least be taken seriously.

Indeed, in one small but happy countervailing trend, that’s what the champions of same sex marriage have done for a good cause in recent decades.

The bottom line: If progressives in North Carolina want to get to such a point someday on a broad and forward-looking agenda, now is the time to start thinking about and fighting for what they believe in and worrying a lot less about whom they believe in.

http://www.ncpolicywatch.com/2015/03/24/stop-obsessing-over-the-next-election/