The Trouble With Privilege Is That Everybody Doesn't Have It

I don't remember where I first heard the title of this post, but it seems to me that someone ascribed it to Virginia Woolf. Whoever said it, I think it's right.

One day about a week ago Homo Superior posted on same-sex marriage, attacking an article by the English writer and provocateur Mark Simpson. The article, which turns out to be two years old, argues that marriage is basically a religious institution and that same-sex couples don't need it if they can get marriage-equivalent civil unions, as they can in England. This displeased HS, who argued that

there is no progressive case against gay marriage as an issue of social justice, not unless progressive politics has stopped meaning the struggle for maximum freedom and full equality. One might make radical critiques against the institution of marriage — and please do so in the privacy of your own seminars — but all social justice movements of the past have sought to change access to existing institutions, not attempted to create new ones out of air, because that’s what equality requires.

Does it? And why should "radical critiques" of marriage take place only "in the privacy of your own seminars"? (And who's "you"?) Such critiques have been around for some time, and they don't have anything to do with same-sex marriage per se. The early Christian churches weren't big on marriage or on sex of any kind, and a radical critique of marriage was advanced by nineteenth-century feminists. It should also be remembered that heterosexual marriage is rather on the skids in the US, with many heterosexuals preferring to avoid legal bonds in favor or more informal arrangements. Domestic partnerships were first registered in the US by cohabiting heterosexuals. Simpson didn't claim in his article that new institutions should be created "out of air" -- he pointed out that different sexual and domestic arrangements already exist. He also argued that most British queerfolk were satisfied with civil partnerships, which would be one of those "new institutions."

It's also false that "all social justice movements of the past have sought to change access to existing institutions", though I must thank Homo Superior for giving me such an opening. The anti-slavery movement didn't seek to change access to an existing institution, it sought to abolish it. Slavery was very old and had a religious dimension as well: in the New Testament the Christian is a slave of Christ, and abolitionists have always had difficulty finding biblical support for their position because there really isn't any. (This counts against the Bible, of course, not in favor of slavery.) "Changing access" to the institution of slavery would have entailed something like subsidies to enable the less wealthy to have slaves of their own, and eventually to allow black people to own slaves too, including white ones. That would be "equality" in exactly the sense HS is talking about, but I don't think many people would see it as desirable.

The reason a radical critique of marriage is in order is that marriage has traditionally had nothing to do with equality. First, it existed, and still exists, to privilege some couples over others. If you're married, your sexual relations are licit; if not, they are fornication or adultery. Laws against fornication largely fell by the wayside in the United States in the late twentieth century, but some states still have laws against adultery. The children of married couples are also licit, or legitimate, and the aim has always been to privilege some children over others. The stigma of illegitimacy has diminished greatly in the past few decades, but it's not totally gone yet. Many "marriage equality" advocates talk about the "rights" that follow from marriage, but they are privileges and benefits, not rights -- if they were rights, it's a violation of the principle of equality to reserve them for married couples.

The gap has narrowed somewhat in the past century, but marriage also enshrines inequality between the partners, with the wife losing much of her legal personhood when she marries. And those are just the legal disabilities. Until fairly recently, married women were less happy than unmarried women -- or married men. The change has been explained as a result of married women's increased autonomy, especially the freedom to earn their own money. But whatever the reason, women have been voting with their feet against heterosexual marriage, around the world. The real question ought to be why marriage still has so much prestige.

The legal and social disability of single people -- including unmarried couples -- compared to married ones isn't exactly a secret: "marriage equality" campaigners harp on the point constantly. But they aren't campaigning to increase access to marriage's privileges and benefits by single people -- only by same-sex couples. As IOZ asked once, "If they are, in fact, human rights, then why must you be married to acquire them?" To invoke equality in connection with an intentionally and functionally unequal institution such as marriage is dishonest.

Let's not forget divorce. Marriage makes it harder and messier for couples to separate, even when there are no children involved. It looks to me as though many couples stay together longer than they should, from a misplaced fear of being judged wanting -- selfish, lazy, immature -- because they didn't live happily ever after. I've succumbed to it myself, but I've also seen enough other people make the same mistake, at great emotional cost, that it bears stressing here.

I have a few bones to pick with Simpson, though. He begins his diatribe by objecting to religious opponents of same-sex marriage being called bigots.

It’s faintly absurd to have to even say this, but it isn’t bigoted to believe that marriage is between a man and a woman. It’s just being conventional.

We have a false antithesis here: a goodly proportion of bigotry is conventional, often obligatory. Like many people, Simpson mistakes bigotry for an individual pathology, not a social structure.

Nor is marriage a fundamentally religious institution (though see above, on the religious dimension of slavery). In un-secular societies, just about every aspect of life is sacralized, from birth to death. If marriage were basically religious, though, that would be an argument against government involvement in it -- in the United States, that is. Simpson seems to overlook the formal separation of religion and government in America, while England has a state Church. In European countries, even those with established churches, the distinction between civil marriage and religious marriage is often even more sharply drawn.

Besides, as I've pointed out before, the American separation of religion and government means that same-sex couples who want religious ceremonies can roll their own, as it were, and there's no legal barrier to their doing so; the legal barriers here are to same-sex civil marriage. The supposed non-bigots Simpson defended can wail and gnash their teeth, but they can't stop same-sex couples from redefining religious marriage to suit themselves.

I'd point again to Nancy Polikoff's book Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage (Beacon, 2008), which argues that all families should be valued, whether they involve married or quasi-married couples. Children need support and protection whether their parents are married to each other nor not. American and European society were already moving in that direction until the 1980s, when a pro-marriage backlash pushed by the religious Right tried to reverse the trend. The depressing thing is that so many gay people went along with it.

A common misunderstanding of second-wave feminism and gay liberation was that, because they made radical critiques of marriage, they were therefore against any coupling or relationships at all. It's important to recognize the validity of single life (and celibacy, for that matter), and of erotic life that doesn't involve exclusive couples, but many people have formed successful long-term couples that weren't formalized in marriage. (One researcher recently pointed out that non-marital couples don't last as long as married ones; but that may be not be a bad thing -- from what I've seen, a good many couples stay together a lot longer than is good for them.) The importance of friendship, whether or not it includes erotic relations, needs a lot more attention too. What matters is enabling and encouraging people to discover and choose what they really want from their relationships, and I believe one way to move in that direction is by decentering marriage, and making it one possibility among others for people who are getting intimate with each other.

The Trouble With Privilege Is That Everybody Doesn't Have It

I don't remember where I first heard the title of this post, but it seems to me that someone ascribed it to Virginia Woolf. Whoever said it, I think it's right.

One day about a week ago Homo Superior posted on same-sex marriage, attacking an article by the English writer and provocateur Mark Simpson. The article, which turns out to be two years old, argues that marriage is basically a religious institution and that same-sex couples don't need it if they can get marriage-equivalent civil unions, as they can in England. This displeased HS, who argued that

there is no progressive case against gay marriage as an issue of social justice, not unless progressive politics has stopped meaning the struggle for maximum freedom and full equality. One might make radical critiques against the institution of marriage — and please do so in the privacy of your own seminars — but all social justice movements of the past have sought to change access to existing institutions, not attempted to create new ones out of air, because that’s what equality requires.

Does it? And why should "radical critiques" of marriage take place only "in the privacy of your own seminars"? (And who's "you"?) Such critiques have been around for some time, and they don't have anything to do with same-sex marriage per se. The early Christian churches weren't big on marriage or on sex of any kind, and a radical critique of marriage was advanced by nineteenth-century feminists. It should also be remembered that heterosexual marriage is rather on the skids in the US, with many heterosexuals preferring to avoid legal bonds in favor or more informal arrangements. Domestic partnerships were first registered in the US by cohabiting heterosexuals. Simpson didn't claim in his article that new institutions should be created "out of air" -- he pointed out that different sexual and domestic arrangements already exist. He also argued that most British queerfolk were satisfied with civil partnerships, which would be one of those "new institutions."

It's also false that "all social justice movements of the past have sought to change access to existing institutions", though I must thank Homo Superior for giving me such an opening. The anti-slavery movement didn't seek to change access to an existing institution, it sought to abolish it. Slavery was very old and had a religious dimension as well: in the New Testament the Christian is a slave of Christ, and abolitionists have always had difficulty finding biblical support for their position because there really isn't any. (This counts against the Bible, of course, not in favor of slavery.) "Changing access" to the institution of slavery would have entailed something like subsidies to enable the less wealthy to have slaves of their own, and eventually to allow black people to own slaves too, including white ones. That would be "equality" in exactly the sense HS is talking about, but I don't think many people would see it as desirable.

The reason a radical critique of marriage is in order is that marriage has traditionally had nothing to do with equality. First, it existed, and still exists, to privilege some couples over others. If you're married, your sexual relations are licit; if not, they are fornication or adultery. Laws against fornication largely fell by the wayside in the United States in the late twentieth century, but some states still have laws against adultery. The children of married couples are also licit, or legitimate, and the aim has always been to privilege some children over others. The stigma of illegitimacy has diminished greatly in the past few decades, but it's not totally gone yet. Many "marriage equality" advocates talk about the "rights" that follow from marriage, but they are privileges and benefits, not rights -- if they were rights, it's a violation of the principle of equality to reserve them for married couples.

The gap has narrowed somewhat in the past century, but marriage also enshrines inequality between the partners, with the wife losing much of her legal personhood when she marries. And those are just the legal disabilities. Until fairly recently, married women were less happy than unmarried women -- or married men. The change has been explained as a result of married women's increased autonomy, especially the freedom to earn their own money. But whatever the reason, women have been voting with their feet against heterosexual marriage, around the world. The real question ought to be why marriage still has so much prestige.

The legal and social disability of single people -- including unmarried couples -- compared to married ones isn't exactly a secret: "marriage equality" campaigners harp on the point constantly. But they aren't campaigning to increase access to marriage's privileges and benefits by single people -- only by same-sex couples. As IOZ asked once, "If they are, in fact, human rights, then why must you be married to acquire them?" To invoke equality in connection with an intentionally and functionally unequal institution such as marriage is dishonest.

Let's not forget divorce. Marriage makes it harder and messier for couples to separate, even when there are no children involved. It looks to me as though many couples stay together longer than they should, from a misplaced fear of being judged wanting -- selfish, lazy, immature -- because they didn't live happily ever after. I've succumbed to it myself, but I've also seen enough other people make the same mistake, at great emotional cost, that it bears stressing here.

I have a few bones to pick with Simpson, though. He begins his diatribe by objecting to religious opponents of same-sex marriage being called bigots.

It’s faintly absurd to have to even say this, but it isn’t bigoted to believe that marriage is between a man and a woman. It’s just being conventional.

We have a false antithesis here: a goodly proportion of bigotry is conventional, often obligatory. Like many people, Simpson mistakes bigotry for an individual pathology, not a social structure.

Nor is marriage a fundamentally religious institution (though see above, on the religious dimension of slavery). In un-secular societies, just about every aspect of life is sacralized, from birth to death. If marriage were basically religious, though, that would be an argument against government involvement in it -- in the United States, that is. Simpson seems to overlook the formal separation of religion and government in America, while England has a state Church. In European countries, even those with established churches, the distinction between civil marriage and religious marriage is often even more sharply drawn.

Besides, as I've pointed out before, the American separation of religion and government means that same-sex couples who want religious ceremonies can roll their own, as it were, and there's no legal barrier to their doing so; the legal barriers here are to same-sex civil marriage. The supposed non-bigots Simpson defended can wail and gnash their teeth, but they can't stop same-sex couples from redefining religious marriage to suit themselves.

I'd point again to Nancy Polikoff's book Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage (Beacon, 2008), which argues that all families should be valued, whether they involve married or quasi-married couples. Children need support and protection whether their parents are married to each other nor not. American and European society were already moving in that direction until the 1980s, when a pro-marriage backlash pushed by the religious Right tried to reverse the trend. The depressing thing is that so many gay people went along with it.

A common misunderstanding of second-wave feminism and gay liberation was that, because they made radical critiques of marriage, they were therefore against any coupling or relationships at all. It's important to recognize the validity of single life (and celibacy, for that matter), and of erotic life that doesn't involve exclusive couples, but many people have formed successful long-term couples that weren't formalized in marriage. (One researcher recently pointed out that non-marital couples don't last as long as married ones; but that may be not be a bad thing -- from what I've seen, a good many couples stay together a lot longer than is good for them.) The importance of friendship, whether or not it includes erotic relations, needs a lot more attention too. What matters is enabling and encouraging people to discover and choose what they really want from their relationships, and I believe one way to move in that direction is by decentering marriage, and making it one possibility among others for people who are getting intimate with each other.

For All the Intellectual Snobs I've Known Before

(Image by the Great and Powerful IOZ.)

Salon ran a piece by Michael Lind the other day that left me ambivalent. (My normal state, of course.) Mostly it was an exercise in concern trolling, with Lind admonishing liberals and "center-left" media to spend less time mocking Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck and more time on our comatose economy and the "revolution [that] is rocking in the Middle East." I suppose I agree, but I don't pay much attention to Rachel Maddow, so I don't know how much time she actually spends on the crazy sayings and doings of Beck, Palin, O'Reilly, Coulter, Limbaugh, and the rest. The left media I do follow don't spend a lot of time on them, though of course such clowns do make entertaining copy, and heaven knows we can all use a laugh now and then. Maybe Lind thinks that any time spent mocking them is too much, but would he write an equivalent piece for Fox News or National Review Online, urging them to spend less time mocking liberals?

Some of Lind's arguments make sense to me, though I'm not sure what to do about them.

Since the '60s, conservatives have managed to recruit populist voters by claiming that the intellectual elites look down their noses at them. By theatrically sneering at less-educated politicians and media loudmouths, progressive pundits seem to prove that the left consists only of snobbish members of the college-educated professional class making fun of the errors of people who did not attend prestigious schools.

Good point, and one I've written about myself, but what to do? Should I pretend that Limbaugh, Beck, Palin, et al. are deep thinkers who should be engaged and debated seriously? The trouble with that idea is that their fans aren't interested in engagement and debate. The right-wingers I've talked to can't cope with disagreement, though they are like liberals in that respect. For most of the past two or three decades, though, I've mostly argued with educated people from a range of political positions, who tend to think they're a cut above Joe Sixpack, rather than on Joe Sixpack himself. When it comes time to talk to Fox News fans, though, I think I have to do the same thing: disagree with them forthrightly and challenge them to defend their position. I'm in an awkward position, though, since I'm a kitchen worker and a dropout from a decent but not exactly "prestigious" university on one hand, but an intellectual and a bookworm on the other. Even if I'm not Joe Sixpack, though, I'm a working-class taxpayer, which does distance me from many of my fellow leftist writers. And where does Michael Lind fall in this spectrum?

I also agree with Lind's argument that "If you're going to be an intellectual snob, at least get your facts right", but I'm not so sure about the example he gives.

A few weeks ago Chris Matthews mocked [Michelle] Bachmann for suggesting that most of the Founders were against slavery and that the three-fifths clause in the Constitution was intended to insult black people by calling each one "three-fifths of a human being." As conservatives gleefully pointed out, before it was endorsed by Bachmann, the theory that the Constitution, despite its concessions to the practice, embodies disapproval of slavery was shared by Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. The same viewpoint was held by Alexander Stephens, the vice-president of the Confederacy, who declared in his "corner-stone" speech of March 21, 1861:

The prevailing ideas entertained by [Jefferson] and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the constitution, was the prevailing idea at that time. The constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly urged against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the "storm came and the wind blew."

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery -- subordination to the superior race -- is his natural and normal condition. [Applause.]

I'll try, when I have time, to track down some of the arguments that Lincoln and Douglass thought that the Constitution opposes slavery. I'm skeptical, though, because Stephens doesn't quite seem to be saying that. He thinks that most of the framers thought that slavery was wrong and if left alone would wither away by itself, but he says explicitly that this belief was "not incorporated in the constitution" and that the Constitution "secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last". That doesn't sound to me like a claim that the Constitution "embodies disapproval of slavery." The three-fifths clause was a compromise with Southerners' desire to have their slaves count as full human beings in the census for apportionment purposes while counting as zero for every other purpose; I think someone could oppose that desire, regardless of one's opinion of the morality of slavery, simply because it constituted wanting to have their cake and eat it too. (Should cattle and other property also be counted in the census? The slaveowners claimed that their slaves were chattel, but they still wanted them to be represented in Congress.) If those "gleeful" conservatives' evidence for Lincoln and Douglass's positions is as good as this, then Chris Matthews (no center-leftist, he) should go on poking fun at Michelle Bachmann.

I'll speculate that Lincoln and Douglass might have claimed that the Constitution "embodies disapproval of slavery", if they did so, for the same reason that contemporary Christians assume that Jesus and the Bible, properly interpreted, also agrees with their values -- on slavery, to take an example off the top of my head: to get the support of a sacred authority for their position.

Lind even offers a constructive suggestion:

The center-left needs its own village explainers, with their own charts and their own blackboards. In the plain language used by FDR for his Fireside Chats, they could show how liberalism is rooted in American values and history, instead of being an alien transplant from socialist Europe. They could sketch the relations between today’s radical right, with its loony theories about a Muslim-leftist world revolution, and the similar conspiracy theories of the Liberty Lobby in the 1930s and the John Birch Society in the 1950s. They could put up diagrams on the screen to explain elementary Keynesian concepts and show the need for public spending, or exports, or both to make up for depressed private consumption in a near-depression like the present. They could ...

Oh, never mind. It’s easier to run a clip of Palin, Bachmann or Beck, and then roll your eyes and ask a fellow pundit to join you in snickering at those idiots.

The fault in his concern-trolling is that it's possible to do both. The Nation has a couple of good articles this week on public employees, and one of them argues:

Liberals and progressives don’t understand why, in poll after poll, Americans support Social Security, Medicare and money for their local parks and other services but oppose “big government.” If we want to close the gap in the often bimodal results of polling, we don’t need more polling: we need well-trained and highly skilled organizers who can help facilitate conversations among next-door neighbors and co-workers. We have good “framers.” We have smart policy wonks with big degrees who can write good policy. We have lawyers to defend the policy. And we have no one in any serious way out talking with Americans about this crisis. It’s organizers who help people in large numbers to come to the self-realization that things aren’t working and that it isn’t their fault. Good organizing is really the only way that workers, the unemployed and the poor can overcome the impulse to blame themselves for the crisis they face. Yet liberal foundations often balk at funding such efforts, believing that it won’t add up to policy change and channeling money instead to policy, legal and “communications” work.

Unions and progressives need to return to engaging large numbers of people in one-on-one conversations. Unions should kick-start the campaign by sponsoring and unleashing the biggest Union Summer program of all time and pay student interns, and unemployed rank-and-file workers, to work with union groups and nonunion allies in a mass education campaign that seeks to change the narrative from “We all go down together” to “It’s time to return to the American Dream we all deserve.” Unions must stop pretending to be engaging the base by setting up call centers or buying cellphones for their members. Foundations must stop pretending that unions don’t matter, and that messaging strategies can overcome America’s cultural norms of extreme individualism. Real conversations, where people have a chance to understand the war that is being waged against them and the power they must build, are the only thing that will save us.

I agree: the author is describing the kind of tactics that worked against the antigay Proposition 6 in California in 1978, and might have worked (but weren't deployed) against the antigay Proposition 8 in 2008. The commoditization and professionalization of what should be progressive, even left, organizations appears to be a large part of what has hurt the American left in the past half century or so. Maybe one small step for humanity would be to give up on "foundations" for support of anti-corporate, pro-labor activism.

But never mind! It's so much easier to roll your eyes at the stupidity of the "center-left" than to recognize that they're not quite as out of touch as you'd like to think.

For All the Intellectual Snobs I've Known Before

(Image by the Great and Powerful IOZ.)

Salon ran a piece by Michael Lind the other day that left me ambivalent. (My normal state, of course.) Mostly it was an exercise in concern trolling, with Lind admonishing liberals and "center-left" media to spend less time mocking Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck and more time on our comatose economy and the "revolution [that] is rocking in the Middle East." I suppose I agree, but I don't pay much attention to Rachel Maddow, so I don't know how much time she actually spends on the crazy sayings and doings of Beck, Palin, O'Reilly, Coulter, Limbaugh, and the rest. The left media I do follow don't spend a lot of time on them, though of course such clowns do make entertaining copy, and heaven knows we can all use a laugh now and then. Maybe Lind thinks that any time spent mocking them is too much, but would he write an equivalent piece for Fox News or National Review Online, urging them to spend less time mocking liberals?

Some of Lind's arguments make sense to me, though I'm not sure what to do about them.

Since the '60s, conservatives have managed to recruit populist voters by claiming that the intellectual elites look down their noses at them. By theatrically sneering at less-educated politicians and media loudmouths, progressive pundits seem to prove that the left consists only of snobbish members of the college-educated professional class making fun of the errors of people who did not attend prestigious schools.

Good point, and one I've written about myself, but what to do? Should I pretend that Limbaugh, Beck, Palin, et al. are deep thinkers who should be engaged and debated seriously? The trouble with that idea is that their fans aren't interested in engagement and debate. The right-wingers I've talked to can't cope with disagreement, though they are like liberals in that respect. For most of the past two or three decades, though, I've mostly argued with educated people from a range of political positions, who tend to think they're a cut above Joe Sixpack, rather than on Joe Sixpack himself. When it comes time to talk to Fox News fans, though, I think I have to do the same thing: disagree with them forthrightly and challenge them to defend their position. I'm in an awkward position, though, since I'm a kitchen worker and a dropout from a decent but not exactly "prestigious" university on one hand, but an intellectual and a bookworm on the other. Even if I'm not Joe Sixpack, though, I'm a working-class taxpayer, which does distance me from many of my fellow leftist writers. And where does Michael Lind fall in this spectrum?

I also agree with Lind's argument that "If you're going to be an intellectual snob, at least get your facts right", but I'm not so sure about the example he gives.

A few weeks ago Chris Matthews mocked [Michelle] Bachmann for suggesting that most of the Founders were against slavery and that the three-fifths clause in the Constitution was intended to insult black people by calling each one "three-fifths of a human being." As conservatives gleefully pointed out, before it was endorsed by Bachmann, the theory that the Constitution, despite its concessions to the practice, embodies disapproval of slavery was shared by Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. The same viewpoint was held by Alexander Stephens, the vice-president of the Confederacy, who declared in his "corner-stone" speech of March 21, 1861:

The prevailing ideas entertained by [Jefferson] and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the constitution, was the prevailing idea at that time. The constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly urged against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the "storm came and the wind blew."

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery -- subordination to the superior race -- is his natural and normal condition. [Applause.]

I'll try, when I have time, to track down some of the arguments that Lincoln and Douglass thought that the Constitution opposes slavery. I'm skeptical, though, because Stephens doesn't quite seem to be saying that. He thinks that most of the framers thought that slavery was wrong and if left alone would wither away by itself, but he says explicitly that this belief was "not incorporated in the constitution" and that the Constitution "secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last". That doesn't sound to me like a claim that the Constitution "embodies disapproval of slavery." The three-fifths clause was a compromise with Southerners' desire to have their slaves count as full human beings in the census for apportionment purposes while counting as zero for every other purpose; I think someone could oppose that desire, regardless of one's opinion of the morality of slavery, simply because it constituted wanting to have their cake and eat it too. (Should cattle and other property also be counted in the census? The slaveowners claimed that their slaves were chattel, but they still wanted them to be represented in Congress.) If those "gleeful" conservatives' evidence for Lincoln and Douglass's positions is as good as this, then Chris Matthews (no center-leftist, he) should go on poking fun at Michelle Bachmann.

I'll speculate that Lincoln and Douglass might have claimed that the Constitution "embodies disapproval of slavery", if they did so, for the same reason that contemporary Christians assume that Jesus and the Bible, properly interpreted, also agrees with their values -- on slavery, to take an example off the top of my head: to get the support of a sacred authority for their position.

Lind even offers a constructive suggestion:

The center-left needs its own village explainers, with their own charts and their own blackboards. In the plain language used by FDR for his Fireside Chats, they could show how liberalism is rooted in American values and history, instead of being an alien transplant from socialist Europe. They could sketch the relations between today’s radical right, with its loony theories about a Muslim-leftist world revolution, and the similar conspiracy theories of the Liberty Lobby in the 1930s and the John Birch Society in the 1950s. They could put up diagrams on the screen to explain elementary Keynesian concepts and show the need for public spending, or exports, or both to make up for depressed private consumption in a near-depression like the present. They could ...

Oh, never mind. It’s easier to run a clip of Palin, Bachmann or Beck, and then roll your eyes and ask a fellow pundit to join you in snickering at those idiots.

The fault in his concern-trolling is that it's possible to do both. The Nation has a couple of good articles this week on public employees, and one of them argues:

Liberals and progressives don’t understand why, in poll after poll, Americans support Social Security, Medicare and money for their local parks and other services but oppose “big government.” If we want to close the gap in the often bimodal results of polling, we don’t need more polling: we need well-trained and highly skilled organizers who can help facilitate conversations among next-door neighbors and co-workers. We have good “framers.” We have smart policy wonks with big degrees who can write good policy. We have lawyers to defend the policy. And we have no one in any serious way out talking with Americans about this crisis. It’s organizers who help people in large numbers to come to the self-realization that things aren’t working and that it isn’t their fault. Good organizing is really the only way that workers, the unemployed and the poor can overcome the impulse to blame themselves for the crisis they face. Yet liberal foundations often balk at funding such efforts, believing that it won’t add up to policy change and channeling money instead to policy, legal and “communications” work.

Unions and progressives need to return to engaging large numbers of people in one-on-one conversations. Unions should kick-start the campaign by sponsoring and unleashing the biggest Union Summer program of all time and pay student interns, and unemployed rank-and-file workers, to work with union groups and nonunion allies in a mass education campaign that seeks to change the narrative from “We all go down together” to “It’s time to return to the American Dream we all deserve.” Unions must stop pretending to be engaging the base by setting up call centers or buying cellphones for their members. Foundations must stop pretending that unions don’t matter, and that messaging strategies can overcome America’s cultural norms of extreme individualism. Real conversations, where people have a chance to understand the war that is being waged against them and the power they must build, are the only thing that will save us.

I agree: the author is describing the kind of tactics that worked against the antigay Proposition 6 in California in 1978, and might have worked (but weren't deployed) against the antigay Proposition 8 in 2008. The commoditization and professionalization of what should be progressive, even left, organizations appears to be a large part of what has hurt the American left in the past half century or so. Maybe one small step for humanity would be to give up on "foundations" for support of anti-corporate, pro-labor activism.

But never mind! It's so much easier to roll your eyes at the stupidity of the "center-left" than to recognize that they're not quite as out of touch as you'd like to think.