I would like to reframe, reclaim, and better utilize the word conservative. I would like for it to actually include the idea of conservation. How could we go about that? We must confront this ideology head-on: not by temporizing about the riskiness or instability of the free market or by demonstrating that it (or its Republican stewards) cannot deliver growth but by mobilizing the most potent resource of the American vernacular against it. We must develop an argument that the market is a source of constraint and government an instrument of freedom. Without a strong government hand in the economy, men and women are at the mercy of their employer, who has the power to determine not only their wages, benefits and hours but also their lives and those of their families, on and off the job. [...] Mounting this kind of argument requires more than a strategic shift of frames; it calls for deep immersion in a wellspring of American political thought: the language of opposition to personal dominion and rule. Americans are notoriously uninterested in systemic notions of domination, but the struggle against slavery has left them with an abiding appreciation of—and visceral hostility to—individual forms of domination. And that is what the businessman, uncurbed and unchecked, portends: personal domination. We must also change the argument about government. Government need not be a source of constraint, as conservatives claim. Nor is it designed to protect citizens from the vagaries of the market, as many liberals claim—a formulation that depicts citizens as needy and passive and opens liberals to the charge of paternalism and condescension. When government is aligned with democratic movements on the ground, as Walter Reuther and Martin Luther King Jr. understood, it becomes the individual’s instrument for liberating herself from her rulers in the private sphere, a way to break the back of private autocracy. thenation/article/159748/reclaiming-politics-freedom#
Posted on: Thu, 06 Nov 2014 16:38:51 +0000
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