Taibbi has a post up about Palin’s recent dive into the shallow end of the Birther pool. But, what caught my attention was his discussion of what “The Left” meant in today’s politics; in particular, the labeling of Howard Dean as “too far left.” I was (and am) a huge Dean supporter. I never could figure out what it was about his policies which were supposed to be all that “left.” As a Governor, he had more or less centrist policies. He opposed the War in Iraq, to be sure; but that was (and is) good policy. But it’s not about policies. It’s never about policies. It’s about Villager cultural norms.
In the modern United States, “left” doesn’t have any concrete meaning that I can see, but that doesn’t mean we don’t know what it means – it’s like pornography, people know it when they see it.
In 2004, on the Dean campaign plane, after seeing reporters throw the words “left” and “liberal” with Dean in a way that I didn’t really understand given the governor’s history, I polled the press corps on what its definition of “left” was. I got very few answers. While it was well understood that Howard Dean was “left” (and not just “left” but “too left” to win the White House, according to many reporters) no one could really say which of his policy ideas qualified him for that title.
In the end it was pretty clear to me anyway that “left” was basically a shorthand term for “pointy-headed weenie dissident.” Except for his stance on the war, Dean’s policies were much less traditionally “liberal” than, say, those of John Kerry — but Kerry made up for it by being much more full of shit than Dean.
Kerry was willing to say anything to get elected; he was willing to toe the Democratic Party’s absurdly vacillating non-stance on the war (We like war in general, we’re not wimps, but Bush should have invaded on a Tuesday, not a Thursday!), he nearly killed himself trying to give the press goofy photo-ops of the candidate playing manly sports like football and baseball, and was even willing to pose in a duck-hunting costume carrying a rifle.
Kerry’s willingness to jump through all the usual idiotic hoops set out for him by the political media made him less “left” among those in the press corps than an economic centrist governor from Vermont who was openly critical of the media’s war coverage and did not even have a Nerf ball on his plane. Which is normal and somehow made sense to all of us. If you scratch the surface of “left” you’ll find that it has a lot more to do with attitudes and cultural markers relative to the bourgeois norm than it does to do with political beliefs, ideas about the role of government, taxes, and so on.
It’s much easier to figure out who’s “left” and who isn’t using cultural litmus tests than it is using position papers. What’s the left position on monetary policy? I have no idea. What’s the left’s position on American Idol? Easy: it rolls its eyes.
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