Advice for Democrats and Liberals

Anthropologist Grant McCracken has some:

Democrats must understand several things about Republicans to beat them in 2008. (I am your devoted anthropological servant, without regard to party.)

First, Republicans (and the people who vote for them) must be understood to hold a moral and intellectual position. They are not, as some Democrats insist, “asleep,” “ignorant,” or developmentally challenged (as noted in yesterday’s post). They are not selfish. They are not mistaken. They are not 4 years away from “seeing the light.”

Republicans and TPWVFT have an idea of what the body politic is. That this is not the Liberal Left and the Democratic Party idea does not mean it is not an idea. It may not be dismissed as cavalier, craven, or some species of false consciousness. Ad hominem attacks feel good, but… they don’t get the political job done.

More here.

UPDATE: More sharp analysis from McCracken here:

What’s scary from an anthropological point of view is how completely counter paradigmatic these [Republican and Democrat] assumptions are. What you believe I can’t imagine thinking. What I declaim you find virtually unintellligable. Surely, its time to start the debate again with a careful eye to what the deeper differences are. They may not be any negotiating them, but the terrible din of mutual incomprehension has surely run its course.

One thought on the difference. If you stand way back, squint your eyes, and look for the forest, here’s one thing that leaps out. The Republicans dislike the Democrats’ presumption that “they know best.” And the Democrats, when they examines the argument of the Republicans, content that “they just don’t care.”

These are two notions of morality. The Democrats say morality means caring, sharing, and making an effort. From their point of point of view, the Republicans’ notion of less government and more marketplace looks like a refusal of morality, a declaration of indifference, a Darwinian brutality. They cannot see that this represents a moral position. They believe that it indexes an absense of morality.

The Republicans say morality means staying out of the way, letting individuals do, risk, engage as they will and collectivities to shape themselves accordingly. From their point of view, the Democrats’ notion of intervention looks like a bleeding hearted presumption that the Liberal Left must know better than the world. They cannot see that this represents a moral position. The believe it represents a self flattery, an addled refusal to respect the emergent will of the world.

This is bullshit, I’m sure. But you see what I am trying to get at. The fundamental terms of the disagreement to which Matt [Welch] refers. How is it that the two parties are now so utterly mutually exclusive in their assumptions? We need to get to the bottom of this. We need one set of terms that can encompass both points of view. How very pre post modern of me.

This is not that different from what I was trying to get at the other day. It’s not just that we come to different moral conclusions, it’s that we seem increasingly to speak different moral languages. This is postmodernism with a vengance (but I think postmodernism may just be the inevitable outcome of modernism).