Political Thoughts from One of Those Journal People

My friend Travis isn't a blogger and hates the word "blog," but he keeps a public diary over on LiveJournal. I read only one or two personal journals, those kept by very dear friends of mine, mostly to keep track of their lives. My "recreational blog reading" is pretty much predictably political in nature.  I like to argue and get pissed off and that's just the way I am.

But today Travis posted something that contained a paragraph in which he tried to define himself politically, and I was quite struck with what he said:

I'm a registered Democrat. I really hate this label because it really does limit what other people think they know about my "politics." Ultimately, I call myself socially liberal. What does that mean? Well, to me it means that I believe that the individual has a right to certain liberties, freedoms and responsibilities. It also means that I believe as a society, we have a certain responsibility to the poor, the sick, and the huddled masses. I also believe there are limits to how much people should be taken care of. I'm really not interested in the government (and my tax dollars) taking care of people who just don't wanna get off their asses and get a job. I believe in taking care of myself, and that looking to the government to take care of me is not something that I want to do unless there are extreme circumstances. Extreme illness being an example. I believe that our elderly and our children should be supported, listened to, and treated well. I do not believe that they should be able to falsely ruin another's life. I believe that we can all get so much farther working together, and that we need to look beyond our differences and our party lines and see what we have in common. I also know that's easier said than done.

I think that one of the big problems with being a liberal or Democrat or progressive or whatever the hell I am is that we've let too much of the definition of what we are be stolen by people whose goal is to destroy us. (Never let it be said I'm not capable of big, dramatic statements.) We're constantly letting the right use outdated and inaccurate definitions of what being from the left means, and allowing  many people who actually have genuine progressive values think they don't have a party or a natural affinity with anyone in politics today.

Of course, I realize that I didn't come up with this idea - in addition to the blogging I've done about it before, so have, oh, forty or fifty million OTHER bloggers, political writers (most notably George Lakoff, of course), candidates, consultants, and no doubt even other people on LiveJournal.  But Travis' post really threw it into sharp relief for me, because he is not a member of the wonkocracy. He doesn't read Daily Kos with his morning coffee and probably couldn't pick Howard Dean out of a lineup.  And yet he hit the nail on the head by defining this new breed of progressive that I have such incredibly high hopes for - the ones like him and like me who "believe that the individual has a right to certain liberties, freedoms and responsibilities... (and that) as a society, we have a certain responsibility to the poor, the sick, and the huddled masses."

There's a lot more good stuff in there, political and otherwise. Go read.

Comments

[Travis]

I'm SO blushing here. :)

Travis

[Cate]

Have you taken the test at www.politicalcompass.org? It addresses these very issues. I also thought their quiz on the Iconochasm page was interesting (I got about half right).
And on the compass, I am -5.0 & -4.10. That seems pretty accurate to me.
Cate

[Christie]

That was a good one, Cate. I'm a smidge more libertarian and a tiny bit to the right of the Dalai Lama, but solidly down in the "Left/Libertarian" quadrant. Right where I'd want to be. I forgot to write down my numbers, though. Might have to go again!

[Christie]

Here it is:

Economic Left/Right: -2.38
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -6.72

Seems I'm really different than yours, Cate. Where were you on the grid?

[Cate]

Well, my Economic Left/Right is -5.0 and my Social Libertarian is -4.10 so I am in the same quadrant as you. (and my sister, one of my brothers & Sid T. - DH person in Scotland) I didn't send the quiz to my other brother because he only has a work email address and they keep an eye out for personal use. It would be interesting considering his profession (very high level investment banking), politics (liberal democrat) & sexuality (gay).

[denisdekat]

A lot of what is going on is due to the fact that the Republicans are unified no matter how much it hurts (look at McCain for example). They also have rich backers with tools such as newspapers and TV networks. It is very hard to compete against that, as they get to frame all the conversations adn topics.

The Democrats (apparently our only choice left) always enter doing damage control. I am waitng for a Democratic candidate to chalklenge reporters and say, who told you to ask me that? The CEO of GE?