Reason’s Jesse Walker on Democrats desperately seeking values voters:
In the real world, instead of a GOP desperately trying to be hip, we see Democrats desperately trying to be square. Half a year after the election, they’re still looking for the magic bullet that will win those “values voters” who purportedly cost them the presidency. Mother Jones ran a cover story in March—March!—declaring that what’s “worse than conservatives’ pretense of moral superiority is liberals’ pretense of superiority to morals.” The New York Times Magazine published an essay in April—April!—on how “any meaningful re-evaluation of their approach to moral values…will require more intellectual rigor.” Hillary Clinton is reframing herself as Joe Lieberman; Joe Lieberman is reframing himself as Jeremiah. The result is a sort of reverse Poochie effect: If there’s anything more painful than watching a politician or pundit pretending to be 17, it’s watching him pretend he believes in a force greater than himself.
That’s not to say the project is doomed. There are two ways I can imagine the Democrats reaching the values demographic without much pandering condescension: the way I’d like them to do it, and the way they’ve always done it in the past and show every indication of doing again.
The first option is to embrace the ethic of live and let live, in either libertarian or federalist form, and to take the populist side each time a neighborhood church runs into trouble with the zoning board or a homeschooler faces ridiculously restrictive regulations.
The second option is pious lecturing of the sort that doesn’t speak to people’s faith so much as it speaks to their anxieties. Conservatives are only just learning to mau mau the media and government with tactics and language on loan from political correctness. Liberals, by contrast, have a century’s experience of acting as moral scolds. Progressive Era reformers drew heavily on pietist Protestantism, and their successors have merely continued the secularization of self-righteousness.
It’s a good point; I mean, do politicians really need more excuses to wield arbitrary power over people’s lives? Also, Mr. Walker’s invocation of federalism suggests an alternative to much of the recent liberal flirtation with some kind of communitarianism.
The problem with communitarianism, if I may be so bold, is that it often seems to want to avoid returning meaningful power to actual communities. Rather, it ends up looking like the same old bureaucratic liberalism clothed in a new language. The “community” is the nation, and the federal government, as the community’s instrument, should enforce “community standards.”
This view, however, fails to take pluralism seriously – there is no “national community” as such – and doesn’t reckon with the fact that government regulation is a clumsy and heavy-handed way to enforce community standards. In genuine communities standards or norms tend to be enforced in much more informal and organic ways.
Obviously communities sometimes go wrong and there are cases where most of us think federal intervention is justified (e.g. Jim Crow). Nevertheless, a genuine commitment to community would require a devoluiton of power allowing communities to develop their own standards and make their own decisions (and their own mistakes). As sociologist Robert Nisbet spent his career arguing, communities only flourish when they have something to do. Once the state starts doing everything for people, communities atrophy from lack of purpose.
A Thinking Reed 
Leave a comment