A New Era for the Center-Left

What to do for Social Liberalism

Part One is here.

Part Two is here.

Part Three is here.

Part Four is here.

Part Five is here.

We can now turn back to the voters for social liberalism. As we can see from the last chapter there are many things to do before we can claim the upper hand on social and economic liberation because the old Democratic party has left us with deficiencies in the terms that elections are fought over.

This is not news. When we get to the basics of income inequality we will talk about how the extremely wealthy receive no benefit from the additional wealth that they accumulate. But we first need to speak about social liberalism because these people are us.

What do I mean by this?

While racial, homosexuals, and transgendered people are the signature poster children of this movement it is really anyone who stands out as different. Even now various state legislatures have tried to roll back marriage rights for homosexuals just as a generation ago they tried to make “miscegenation” something that would not be allowed. There is a bill in Idaho that would do exactly that: make it illegal for members of the same sex to be wedded in Idaho.

This means that we owe it to our base to ensure that certain rights are recognized throughout the United States. But this means taking a look at the differences in the way state governments operate. Many states are effectively single-party states with the possibility of electing a governor of the opposite party to stem the worst excesses. While other states are more two-party politics and to get anything done requires at least some give and take between two sides.

This means that in Democratic states we can protect voters from those Republican states where Democratic votes are needed to pass certain things because certain hot-button issues will not work. However, many solidly Republican states that do not need Democratic votes, or at least not very often, are a different story. It is in these states where social liberalism is most in jeopardy, especially when it comes to women’s right to choose and children’s ability to get protection if their parents do not wish it. There are exceptions even in solidly Republican states where the hardcore goes too far, for example, there was. A Democrat from Alabama who managed to slip in for two years because the Republican who ran against him was very far to the right even by Alabama standards.

This often means going micro in one’s politics. A person who is transgendered will have little problems in Boston, Massachusetts, but may have problems in Casper, Wyoming. The ability to offer a safe space is one of the primary roles of the Democratic Party. This is one aspect of having a “large tent.” This does not align with Democratic or Republican, but a deeper look at the races and sexism that pervades the culture of different levels. This means that some aspects line closely with Democratic and Republican-leaning states, for example, this research by Georgetown, but others clearly not, such as this map by Newsweek. There are often places where racism is acceptable and the Democratic party can be a bulwark against this from happening. This means that even in safe states there still needs to be outreach.

This means that the national message is that the Democratic party will push as far as possible on the state level. It is not the best message but it is the message that will work for some time. The strongest weapon that we have is time, very often the national Republican strategy is to use unfamiliarity as a weapon to sew fear and doubt. The worst states for racism are those with very few citizens who are not white: once people see that there is very little difference between a person who they know there is a willingness to “live and let live.” Sometimes the National Democratic Party must follow rather than lead. Oftentimes times the best road is to set up an alternative place for people to go and feel safe. For example, in Omaha, there are enough people who are Democrats that the Democratic party becomes a “brand” that people can flock to. This allows us to normalize people: people of different races, people of different attractions, and people who need to come out in whatever way to feel assured and safe.

This is only the continuation of the old party, however, it has been very clear that this agenda has two other dimensions. The substitution of climate change as the number one threat to our nation rather than global thermal nuclear war. This does not mean that Global Thermonuclear War is not a threat, and it must continue to be one of the things that the Democratic Party must stand at the forefront of the developed world and its guardianship of not allowing a war to go to global thermonuclear status.

No, a larger change is taking place at this time and that is signaled by the electrification of the power grid the electrification of how we transport, and several other programs that will consume a great deal of our time. That transition is from the postmodern view of the world, where global thermonuclear war was the primary threat and the gas and oil economy was the center of our concern, to a new way of thinking that is more digital in nature. That is the digitality has become the dominant mode of reasoning whereas before it was the analog mode of thinking. This has reached our politics and it demands a change to how we conduct political discourse.

This is because the Postmodern has played itself out, originally it was a response to the new environment in the Post World War II economy, and it came out of be practical nature of the atomic bomb, and later the nuclear bomb changed the way we thought about warfare as a whole. It became solidified in two ways one is Game Theory, and the other one is the Postmodernist ideas of Derrida, Foucault, and their successors. However, now it is permeated through the entire discourse even to the conservatives and reactionaries, who dislike the names but want the practicality that it gives them. They want to situate the grounding of any form of discourse completely without regard to a unified theory, which comes out of Foucault. The reality is that the conservative and reactionary forces want the words of postmodernism without the names of postmodernism. We are now confronted with the change from a Postmodern view of discourse to a Digitalty view of discourse. Now it has erupted because the state of politics does not work in a Postmodern view. It strays too far from the truth. That is Climate Change is real regardless of what anyone with a Postmodern view says about it.

That will be in the next section of this article: the change from Postmodernism to Digitality and the tremendous earthquake that comes with it in politics. Of what be call “theory” but it establishes the groundwork for the past Democratic Party must accomplish.