by JW

It seems obvious to me that "liberal" and "conservative" are starting to verge on the meaningless. The presidency of George W. Bush can only have accelerated slippage here. What can be salvaged post-Bush from the Goldwater conservatives, or even from Reagan? And are liberals, left (we hope) to clean up after the Bush blunders, damned to more undoing than progressing ahead? In answering any of these questions I think what we're doing battle with may actually be our own slippery terminology. Who conserves and who are the free thinkers?

We have a heck of a time pointing to objective criteria that sets us apart on the left and the right, and this has resulted from a failure to define ourselves clearly. If the parties can't describe themselves then we certainly can't describe each other; and this muddying effect results in a failure to communicate in a way that goes very far beyond accusation, verbal attacks and name calling. In fact, if we don't know our own, let alone each other's true positions, how can we possibly do anything but implicitly or explicitly attack each other, especially as our positions move away from the center? For this reason, I would propose that we opt for some clearer terms as we reason our way to the right candidate this election cycle.

Conservatives today are defined by their interest in an overall appearance of strength, the blunt assurance of easily repeated values, slogans, and previously tested ideas. Whether it be the social conservatives who deride unconventional lifestyles at home or the hawks of an aggressive foreign policy, the conservative style is particularly tied to a readiness to judge intent (of individuals or groups, public or private) as good or bad; this is why the term absolutist seems apt for Republicans today more than "conservative." (I'm getting this from Dr. John Alford of Rice University, who noted the slipperiness of our more conventional terms.)

Good and evil (Axis of Evil; Evil Empire)--these are the chief tools of the political absolutist. Absolutism is based on the assumption that we know... that we already know what we need to know in terms of who we are and where we wanna be. We just need to know if you're with us or against us. Outside the family of American politics, those against us are evil, simply put. Within the family of American politics, the ultimate absolutist diss is "flip flopper" as we heard in 2004 against Candidate Kerry and as we have heard Republicans foist on each other this campaign season. An effective absolutist doesn't need to understand the context of someone's actions; in fact, events themselves, choices, decisions, character are far more important than the history that led to that event. Character, identity, values--these are the buzzwords of the absolutist. And the ultimate sign of weakness is changing your mind or admitting you were wrong.

What today's liberals, for their part, consistently do better than conservatives is look at things, events, people, cultures in their own context. Conservatives do it too, but it is not a key part of their narrative right now, and this is possibly the result of the right's Reagan-worship. This has a range of implications. Before making a broad statement that cannot be proven true or false, liberals--better than conservatives--weigh circumstantial considerations, we look at history, we measure an item against the true principles of democracy; we see things in their proper context. This is why I like the term contextualist as an update for liberal, which I also first heard used by Dr. Alford.

It should be noted that both absolutism and contextualism have their place in American politics and always will; and both have a more benign and a more sinister manifestation. Absolutism at its best sees things simply as they are and can call a bad thing bad, an undesirable thing undesirable. Bluntness can contrast powerfully with an endless qualifying contextualizing yammerer. This brand of politics (which prizes straight talk) plays well to the American public but often at the expense of nuance, of understanding the other or the outsider's point of view. Often it is an act of violence against the very expertise we find ourselves so desperately needing in such times as these.

At its worst, absolutism seeks to hide the truth by oversimplifying, scapegoating and falsifying. Since the Monica Lewinsky scandal, absolutism has shown its remarkable dark side, which got even worse with the presidency of George W. Bush. The Clintons certainly have been beat up by absolutism--usually by the most awful kind, what Richard Hofstadter called the paranoid style in American politics (and what others have called the witch hunt). Absolutism-on-the-attack yields its greatest political dividends when the victim of this scapegoating and falsifying participates in his own effigizing. When Bill Clinton was bullied into saying that his being in a relationship with Monica Lewinsky depended on what your meaning of is was, he found himself pushed and persecuted into participating in the absolutists' mockery of contextualism, provoking it into sounding a lot like moral relativism. Likewise, when Senator John Kerry was nudged into a convoluted, serpentine justification of his Iraq war vote (I voted against it before I voted for it?), this was another example.

This absurdist contextualism is mainly a right-wing creation, and liberals fall for it when they go on the defensive and try to yap their way out of it. Absolutists of the right have chosen continuously to lampoon the ideas of contextualism, liberalism, progressivism as akin to moral relativism, the idea that anything is ok in its proper context. Anything that can be explained may. Language is often a way of disguising reality.

Liberals (contextualists) know we aren't moral relativists. We know this when we defend the Constitution against the onslaught of foreign dictators, stateless terrorists, and power-hungry and craven right wingers alike, when we seek one universal definition of terrorism and seek to avoid committing it, when we choose to favor human rights and human lives over corporate greed or military aggression, which the right consistently fails to do. But the chief failure of the left has been to let the right corrupt how we talk and think about ourselves, to let absolutists define us as moral relativists, and put us on the defensive, when what we're seeing now is an absolute failure of the ideas of the right, for no one can know intent, and it is proven that us/them doesn't work as a way to understand the world and perfect our relation to it. It may, however, work during elections.

Hillary Clinton has learned a lot at the hands of right-wing absolutists. Big picture, she is far better than any Republican candidate. Ultimately, though, her career has flirted with capitulation to the absolutist ideas of the right. Clinton seems to think ends justify means, and that it is only AFTER she is elected that she will begin her program to make America a modern democracy defined by fairness, reason and compassion for others. But it is in the campaign itself, as much as in the electoral choice made by the public, that we define ourselves together: would-be politician and would-be constituency. This is why the Clintons' campaign behavior is a bit troubling.

Clinton's distortions of Barack Obama's statements prove among other things that she can be an effective absolutist--but only of the more awful kind. Statements like, "Yes, Reagan had a lot of ideas and they were bad ideas" deliberately distorted what Senator Obama had said about President Reagan and his legacy, and did so in a way that Reagan would have probably favored. It should seem obvious, too, that Senator Clinton's vote in favor of extending power to President Bush to invade, and subsequently occupy Iraq, was made in a highly calculated way. There was a context considered, but the disastrous potential effects on Iraqis and Americans alike didn't seem to play into it so much as her own career. When asked bluntly (by Wolf Blitzer of CNN) whether she regretted voting for the Iraq war resolution, her response was so convoluted she might as well have said: it depends on what your meaning of regret is. She proved yet again that the Clintons think they're smart enough not to have to admit mistakes. Moreover, they take the worst from both traditions.

Senator Obama, for his part, may verge on the naive when he talks about changing the rules of the game. He may have been put on the defensive far too easily by Clinton in a way that should worry us Democrats, since Republican attacks will be tougher than Clinton's—far more distorted and vicious. The fact that Obama has not been "tested" as Senator Clinton has by Republican absolutists can easily be turned into a weakness from an electability perspective, and given the attacks leading up to and following the South Carolina Democratic debates, and Obama's squeamish reaction to them, on some occasions they clearly will. At his worst Obama stutters, he seems naive, agitated, irritable, irascible, unsure-footed, or reduced to nasty counter-attacks that seem to defile his idealism. But he remains a contextualist, and this is what is inspiring.

He might even be a contextualist in all the best ways (weighing things thoughtfully, an openness to others' points of view) while ALSO being the best kind of absolutist (one who says: these are my principles and you can't make me equivocate or back away from them).

This contest, to my thinking, is not between a man of mixed heritage and a woman, or between one set of weaknesses versus another, but of a liberal-contextualist versus a part-time absolutist. Absolutism is pre-modern and pre-democratic; it plays on our tribal instincts, on our monarchical past; it plays well especially in the age of soundbite journalism. Contextualism, on the other hand, is modern, democratic; however it may be maligned by its enemies, it is a far better representation of who we are in the world not of Americans and others, but of human beings and human beings all craving the same success for ourselves and our loved ones. It is the product of those throughout history who have truly sought a sustainable and fair way to govern. It is broad enough to be sustained despite what alarmists say, alarmists of the right who tell us it is our openness, the very thing that defines us as a democracy, that makes us weak. Senator Obama is the better contextualist, which is why I'm voting for him tomorrow.

Obama knows his multicultural background, his diversity of heritage, are strengths far more than they are weaknesses, and they are only weaknesses when we liberals let the right-wing distorters use the media to make them so. Obama is also the better contextualist because of his choices: he made the right vote on the most decisive matter of Bush's tenure: against the Iraq war resolution. (Though he wasn't yet a Senator, he remarkably went on record against the resolution—a "vote" he need not have risked.) He has distinguished himself from Clinton by setting a specific timetable for withdrawal from the erroneous adventure in Iraq; his motto (to be "as careful coming out as we were careless going in") eloquently captures what must be done to correct the aberrant, disastrous and illegitimate reign of George W. Bush.

As his ultimate contextualist stance, Obama has signaled that he will reach across the aisle to Republicans and will do abroad even with our worst so-called enemies as John F. Kennedy challenged Americans to do decades back: "Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate."

Between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, Obama is the better candidate by a lot. The two have diverged infrequently, but when they have the choice was telling. To rebuild a nation that is modern rather than antiquarian and hubristic, pragmatic rather than tribal, idealistic rather than "experienced" or battle-tested, my vote will go to Obama.

--Joel Whitney