Why I’m a Democrat: Book Review

David Brock, CEO of Media Matters for America, writes in the Foreword to Why I’m a Democrat, “Politics is a journey for all of us.” In this book, editor Susan Mulcahy has collected the brief thoughts of fifty-five political travelers whose journeys all brought them, in one way or another, to the Democratic Party. If you are a Democrat, you will probably find your own story in someone’s story here. If you are not a Democrat, you will gain some insight into why other people choose to be one.

Mulcahy’s book consists of short essays, written by Democrats both famous and not famous, as well as interviews she has conducted with Democrats, and several drawings people used to describe why they are Democrats. If you can make sense of the drawings, please contact me, because I certainly cannot!

This is a little book, not meant to define the Democratic Party or give its history. The Democrats who share their thoughts here are sometimes quite specific about what the party means to them. At other times, they are attempting to describe the intangible feeling that they get from being a Democrat. One of my favorite descriptions comes from the clever and funny writer/director Nora Ephron, who declares, “I am deeply in love with some abstract concept called FDR.”

There are some statements that could be construed as Republican-bashing, but that is certainly not the purpose of the book. Mulcahy divides her participants into groups, such as lifelong Democrats, ex-Republican Democrats, and people who are Democrats because of the party’s stand on particular issues. Therefore, some anti-Republican sentiments are present in some responses, but many people answer the question “Why are you a Democrat?” with nothing but positivity and pride.

They talk about the Democratic Party as the one that helps people, that tries to do good things for humankind, that supports the American dream, that believes we all do better when we’re all taken care of. They call it the party of kindness, humility, selflessness, negotiation, and dedication to the Constitution.

Craig Lesley, a novelist, sums it up beautifully in his essay, when he claims that the policies of the Democratic Party hold “the best hopes for the working class, the minority, the marginalized, the sick, the mentally ill.”

Why I’m a Democrat is easy to read, and you can open it to any page if you care to read just an essay at a time. It is the kind of book that leaves you feeling uplifted, if you agree with what the political travelers are saying. If you do not agree, it is the kind of book that will introduce you to a set of people who think a little differently than you do.

One last good reason to buy this book: a portion of the sales go to Operation Assist, which provides medical help to Hurricane Katrina families. That sounds like something a Democrat would think was a good idea.

YourMorals.Org: Web Site Review

What do you get when you put a bunch of social psychologists together? You get a fascinating web site called YourMorals.Org. Developed by a group of psychologists interested in how individual morality affects people’s political identity, YourMorals.Org is both insightful and fun.

It’s fun because you get to take online quizzes about yourself. And it’s insightful because your answers are compared to those of self-identified liberals and conservatives who have also taken the quizzes. Colorful bar charts show you exactly where you rank politically as related to how you react morally.

The cornerstone of the site is the Moral Foundations Questionnaire. This asks questions that rank you on five different areas associated with morality. The areas are: Fairness, Harm, Loyalty, Authority, and Purity. The site explains what each of these means, but, to be brief, liberals tend to rank high only on Fairness and Harm (i.e., they find actions that hurt people or treat people unfairly to be immoral actions), while conservatives tend to also rank high on Authority, Loyalty, and Purity (i.e., they also find actions that go against the leader, the group, or engender feelings of disgust to be immoral actions).

Of course, we all have our own unique gut-level tipping points for each of the five areas, but the site’s creators have found their generalizations about liberals and conservatives to be true. Their purpose in maintaining the site is to make those of us who take the quizzes more aware of our own “home morality,” as Jonathan Haidt, one of the site’s developers, calls it. By knowing where you stand, the creators hope that you can then step out of your home morality and try to imagine where the other guy stands. The hoped-for result of that is greater civility in politics.

For example, if I do not consider morality, or if I assume that everyone else’s moral foundations are the same as mine, I may view someone who opposes homosexuality as a narrow-minded bigot. If I realize that the other person opposes homosexuality because it goes against his morality — that his morality is defined as adherence to a code that does not allow homosexuality — I can better understand that person and think of him in more civil terms.

Site co-creator Ravi Iyer confirms that liberals are more inclined to take the quizzes on the site than are conservatives, but he says that the analysis of the quizzes adjust for that. The number of quizzes available on the site is quite impressive, and Mr. Iyer states that he and his colleagues are always looking for new ways to use the data they collect, with the ultimate goal of increased understanding.

Mr. Iyer also notes that President Obama is unique among recent presidents and presidential candidates in that he regularly touches on all five moral foundations in his speeches. I call that a testament to Obama’s desire to promote increased understanding among Americans.

So, please visit YourMorals.Org and find out where you stand. Then, take a look around and see if it’s easier to put yourself in somebody else’s shoes.

We Need a New Myth

The Philip Morris Company knew what it was doing when it created the Marlboro Man; Americans like cowboys. They like to think of the real American as a cowpoke riding the range, going it alone, and spitting in the eye of any man who tries to make him dress up and settle down.

We romanticize the frontiersman, breaking the sod and planting his crops. We glamorize the ranchers and forty-niners of the Westward Expansion, who gave up the comforts of civilization to seek out prosperity. We adore John Wayne.

The cowboy image has had many representations in modern society, and Americans have responded positively to all of them: the astronauts who tamed the frontier of space; Ronald Reagan on his horse; and George W. Bush, who talked about going after Al Qaeda as if he were a cowboy getting ready to fight the “Injuns”: “Bring ‘em back dead or alive.”

There are adherents to the cowboy myth among us today who oppose changing our health care system. When President Obama stood before the nation on September 9, 2009 and outlined a reform plan that any reasonable person could come to accept, all they saw was an “Injun” who had no right to be on their land, much less tell them what to do. One of them even shouted “You lie!” as if he and the president were a couple of ranch hands getting ready for a barroom brawl.

I met a “cowboy” recently who said to me, “You want to know how to get heath care reform? Everybody should stop paying their insurance. Just stop paying it. Then those companies will go down the tubes, and we can go back to the way it was in the ’50s, when you paid out of pocket. You just paid out of pocket.”

He went on to express his anger at President Obama, saying Obama wants everybody to get insurance or he’ll put them in jail. “A man,” he said, “should be able to go in the woods and die, if he wants to.”

And then the “cowboy” walked away from me. Here is what I would have said if he had stayed: “That sounds very romantic and heroic. But what if a truck hits you tomorrow and leaves you with a shattered leg, a punctured stomach, and a head wound? Do you have enough in your pocket to pay for the operations you’ll need in order to survive? And if you don’t, should the ambulance crew just leave you on a stretcher and let you die of your wounds?”

That’s what would have happened to a frontiersman who got mauled by a bear, or a pioneer woman who had a difficult birth on a straw bed in her sod house; they would have just stayed put and died of their wounds. People during the Great Depression paid for their doctor visits with chickens or firewood, but that wouldn’t be feasible today.

The cowboy myth, with its “bring it on” swagger, is outdated. Even the pioneers didn’t stay pioneers. They formed towns and cities and states and a country that must keep advancing in the way it treats people. Therefore, little boys must grow up and stop playing “cowboys and Indians.”

We need a new myth. The cowboy is a man of the past, and the Marlboro Man died of lung cancer.

Who I Am

I have been a liberal Democrat all my life. I come from a long line of Democrats because I come from a long line of poor people.

Since 2004, I have been very active in presidential campaigns, finally experiencing the thrill of victory in 2008.

I was a Regional Coordinator with MoveOn.org throughout most of 2008 and learned a great deal about community organizing. In a nutshell, many people are out there, just waiting to be asked to do something for a good cause. Ask, and you shall receive.

I was the Democratic Party site editor for BellaOnline.com throughout most of 2009.

Now I am here — not primarily as a Democrat, but as a writer with a passion for progressive policy and social equality. I don’t want to live in a country where the playing field is at a 45-degree angle.

I hope you will visit me here and read my thoughts and add your comments.

In addition to this blog, I write about unschooling at The Expanding Life.

Capitalism: A Love Story: Film Review

Michael Moore’s documentary, Capitalism: A Love Story, is his most sophisticated and cohesive work yet. The subject matter is broad and impressive, and yet the scene choices are never gratuitous, and the film sticks solidly to its theme from beginning to end. But is it really a love story? Yes, it is.

Call it “Fatal Attraction: The Wall Street Version.” Country meets economic system, country falls in love with economic system, economic system cheats on country, and country gets hurt.

Mr. Moore deftly introduces the traditional definition of capitalism, the one we associate with democracy and with America: capitalism is a system of free enterprise under which all Americans can choose whatever job they want and then climb as high as they wish on the economic ladder to happiness.

After describing his own childhood as being quite close to that fairy tale existence, he goes on to explain what happened to change old-time capitalism into the warped system we have today.

Moore takes us back to July 15, 1979 for Jimmy Carter’s “Crisis of Confidence” Speech–also known as the “malaise” speech–in which then-President Carter stated that “Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns.” These words are, sadly, even truer now than they were in 1979.

Next, Moore dumps us into the Reagan years, where the latest wave of the corruption of capitalism began. We experience the 1980s Savings and Loan debacle, the rise of Henry Paulson, and the influence of Alan Greenspan before arriving at the bailout of 2008. Moore spends time with the sincere protesters at the Republic Windows and Doors Company sit-in. And he gives us many stories of common people: bereaved family members who find out their dead loved ones’ company cheated them, and families suffering the indignities of home foreclosure.

The pathos in the foreclosure scenes comes from the undeniable certainty that the people losing their homes are not “bums” but people who want to work and just happened to fall on hard times. In one encounter, a bank employee coming to evict a family tells them something to the effect of “pay your bills and this won’t happen.” It is entirely obvious that these people would love to pay their bills, if someone would just tell them how to make that possible.

Moore’s inclusion of the Jesus angle–would Jesus be a capitalist?–adds to his already rich presentation of the immorality of capitalism. So often, we see and hear people using Christ as a shill for Republican “family values;” it is good to see and hear Michael Moore correct those people and remind us that Jesus espoused a different set of values–the ones in the Beatitudes (e.g., “Blessed are the meek,/for they will inherit the earth.”).

Dr. Jonas Salk, FDR, Moore’s own father–these figures and many more, including the feisty and admirable Ohio Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur, add to the depth and clarity of the film’s overall message.

And what is that message? Well, like people who fall in love with a pretty face and then learn that it masks an evil personality, many people who fell in love with the “I can have a slice of the pie” version of capitalism are falling out of love with the greedy monster it has become.

People are realizing that, within the present-day corruption of capitalism, not everyone is free to take any job and climb the ladder of success. People are becoming aware that the super-wealthy at the top of the ladder are removing rungs and watching the rest of us tumble to the ground. And people are learning that the super-wealthy do not care whether the rest of us ever get a chance to climb the ladder again.

As Michael Moore says at the end of the film, join him in denouncing what capitalism has become, in whatever way you can. This love story needs all of us to give it a happy ending.

What’s the Matter With Kansas? Film Review

Filmmakers Joe Winston and Laura Cohen have made a documentary based on Thomas Frank’s classic book, What’s the Matter With Kansas?. The film has the same title, although its focus differs from that of the book. While Frank makes a measured political argument based on facts and statistics, the filmmakers rely on real Kansans to depict the “Kansas” Zeitgeist.

The film is remarkable in that it has no voice-over narration or commentary of any kind. From the first scene to the last, you are watching actual Kansans go about their daily lives. Their activities, as well as their own comments, create the theme and viewpoint of the film.

Those activities and comments support Thomas Frank’s thesis — that Kansans are conservative because they value their position on such social issues as abortion more than they value their economic situation. Angel Dillard, one of the religious conservatives featured in the film, is a staunch pro-lifer who works hard for the cause. She and her family seem to be comfortable financially, but they endure a great financial loss in the course of the film — one that would be sizable regardless of their income. Yet, they accept the loss gracefully, as part of God’s will.

Economic issues play a large part in the life of another character, Donn Teske, who is struggling to hold onto his family farm. One of the film’s most poignant scenes shows him at the grave sites of his ancestors, simultaneously proud of them and sad for his own circumstances; they had been able to work this land successfully — why couldn’t he?

The film touches on the Kansas economy mostly in passing. We see many decrepit buildings and follow the failure of a business, but mostly we see happy, vibrant conservative Christians living their faith. The effect of having their views presented without contrasting comments is powerful and unnerving.

Brittany Barden, who in the film is preparing to attend Patrick Henry College (whose web site adds “For Christ and Liberty” after the college’s name), matter-of-factly states that America is a Christian nation. Her mother sweetly explains to the camera that eighty percent of Christians who attend secular colleges abandon their faith by the time they graduate.

The documentary makes it clear that sticking to their faith is the ultimate goal of these families. The Bardens are clearly uplifted by their visit to the Creation Museum in Kentucky, where a guide gives a rapid-fire justification of creationism that a dissenter would find difficult to interrupt, much less debate. The Bardens simply nod and smile.

I saw the film at its Lincoln Center Film Society screening in New York. The filmmakers were there, and they reported that Thomas Frank and the people who appear in the film are all very pleased with the final result. I can see how they would be. The film expands on Frank’s ideas and makes his Kansas a vivid, undeniable true place. The film also presents conservatives as three-dimensional, flesh-and-blood people — not as caricatures to be laughed at derisively.

In a panel discussion after the film, France Fox Piven, Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Sociology at The Graduate Center, City University of New York, declared it to be an excellent ethnography, which it is. The other panelists debated about whether the film would engender understanding between liberals and conservatives, and the general consensus was that it would not.

As the quizzes at YourMorals.Org show us, our positions on issues such as abortion are deep-seated and gut-level. No matter how well I may know Angel Dillard from this film, and no matter how much I may empathize with her life story and admire her pluck and vivacity, I am not going to change my opinion about abortion and neither is she.

I highly recommend the What’s the Matter With Kansas? documentary as an unedited look into a particularly fascinating culture and mindset. Whether you find its characters to be heroes, misguided victims of the Christian conservative movement, or just one of the many varieties of Americans in this great big country of ours, the film most certainly leaves that decision up to you.

Jesus Camp: Film Review

The documentary Jesus Camp was made in 2006, but I didn’t see it until a few weeks ago, when a friend recommended it, saying it would “scare me to death.”

I’m still alive, but I did get the heebie-jeebies a few times.

As a piece of filmmaking, Jesus Camp is adequate–nothing more and nothing less. If the subject matter were not so electric, it would be a dismissible documentary. But the characters who people Jesus Camp, and the things they believe, and the things they do because of the things they believe make the film almost impossible to turn away from.

First of all, there is the evangelical minister, Becky Fischer, who follows the tried-and-true rule: get them while they’re young. She is a very talented woman–an excellent communicator and a ball of energy, winning kids over with her humor and her passion. Her passion involves the belief that the end times are coming, and that the faithful–especially the young–must work as hard as they can, immediately and unceasingly, to be soldiers for God. Many, many children share her belief.

The film focuses on several of those children, and I was moved by their devotion and saddened by the extremeness of their faith. Watching them pray, proselytize, and speak in tongues made me feel the awesome burden their parents and Becky Fischer were placing on them; they were being trained to take responsibility for God’s final plan, and they knew it, and they were okay with it.

Jesus Camp deserves credit for presenting its evangelical Christians straight up, without any snide jokes or belittlement. And Becky Fischer deserves credit for keeping her eye on the prize. She has no interest in bad-mouthing nonbelievers; she is consumed with what she is doing for the cause of populating society with faithful, God-filled citizens.

From where I stand, such citizens are a potential threat to my civil liberties and human rights as I perceive them. So it was a good thing to see where they stand, and to see that they are not standing still. They are moving toward our colleges, our courthouses, and our Capitol. They are determined to make this world what they believe it should be.

I think I just felt a little shiver run down my spine.

Welcome to My Worldview

This is my new blog, where I will write about politics and American history as the mood strikes me.  Visit here if you like:

• a progressive attitude
• an unabashedly liberal heart
• a fair mind
• passionate book and film reviews

Thanks for stopping by. I’ll be back soon.