Losers and Underdogs
Paul Krugman's column today captures what's really wrong with today's conservatives, none of which should be news to us, but I thought this stood out:
Mark Crispin Miller, the author of "The Bush Dyslexicon," once made a striking observation: all of the famous Bush malapropisms -- "I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family," and so on -- have involved occasions when Mr. Bush was trying to sound caring and compassionate.By contrast, Mr. Bush is articulate and even grammatical when he talks about punishing people; that's when he's speaking from the heart. The only animation Mr. Bush showed during the flooding of New Orleans was when he declared "zero tolerance of people breaking the law," even those breaking into abandoned stores in search of the food and water they weren't getting from his administration.
I think there's a certain amount of truth to this observation. But what it underscores is an observation I made a couple years ago that suggested a shift in the way in which we talk about the poor, the downtrodden, the unfortunate. In the era of liberal dominance that stretched from the New Deal to the Great Society, political elites referred to the lower classes as underdogs, and thus someone you (the better off in society) could root for. This was simply part of the effective populist message crafted by that era's liberal Democrats. Now, ultimately that strategy ended up failing; there were limits, after all, to what the federal government could do to help these people and those failures were seized upon by politically ascendant conservatives who argued that, no, these weren't underdogs, they were losers. And no one roots for a loser.
That's an effective strategy too, even though I can't prove here that it was consciously planned. And admittedly it was achieved by focusing the message on the white, working and lower classes. Reaganism created an artificially universalist message by targeting one of the largest segments of society. The liberal version, despite its faults, tried to capture a bigger piece of American society, which ultimately resulted in a schism in the coalition (Southern whites and northern blacks). Today, with the heartless and all too obvious phoniness of conservatism and the GOP's domestic policy agenda (the foreign policy is yet another story), we are at a point where perhaps the underdog can be rooted for again. That depends on how far the libertarian message of unbridled individualism has penetrated those of us who feel secure and somewhat middle class, even though we maintain that gilded prosperity on credit and live paycheck to paycheck. And once we're all underdogs, the successor to the New Deal and Great Society ought to--I pray--become apparent.