The Liberal Mission: To Smartify America

My dad spent over twenty-four years living in a medium-sized Texas town chock full of lower-middle-class Southern white people. With great regularity, he would decry those people's racist attitudes, their knee-jerk dislike of outsiders, their disdain for novelty, their violent tendencies, and especially their anti-intellectualism.

And with great regularity, this dyed-in-the-wool liberal told me why he votes Democratic - it was, he said, to "help the poor."

Help the poor? "But Dad," I said, "you don't even like the poor."

And here we are. The problem: In the 21st century, the American liberal enterprise is floundering. Liberals are faced with the stark reality that a vast number of the people that progressivism is supposed to help - the South and Middle American hordes of what Chris Rock calls "broke-ass white people" - really don't have any interest in being helped by liberals. While people below the poverty line continue to support the Democratic party (albeit by a small margin!), working-class people are increasingly part of the Republican base.

If you want to know why liberals have been losing the working class, don't listen to those who tell you that conservatives wooed it away with "God, guns, and gays." First of all, it isn't really true; "values" voters have been equally numerous in Republican and Democratic election victories, and Americans are getting more accepting of gays every day.

Instead, consider the Noah explanation: liberals just haven't had anything really enticing to offer the working class in recent decades. Liberals once were the patron saints of labor unions, but unions are a dying breed. Similarly, most working-class people make far enough above the minimum wage that minimum wage hikes won't do them any good. And good-ol-fashioned weath redistribution - taxing the rich to fund programs for the poor - just seems insulting to an American working class that prides itself on making money by...well...working (although you don't hear many complaints from working-class people when they receive their EITC checks, thanks to Bill Clinton). Progressive economic policies are, increasingly, not something American working people want.

As for values issues, liberals for decades have simply been silent on any values other than inclusion and equality - and with every group except gays now enjoying legal equality, people just aren't that concerned any more. Meanwhile, the mostly Christian poor sometimes get riled up at what many perceive to be liberal attempts to marginalize their traditional culture in the name of separation of church and state.

Thus, Republicans win.

So what are liberals going to offer the working class in terms of economic policies and social values? Here is my idea for the new liberal mission:

The solution: Liberals need to Smartify America.

Economic opportunity is about as red-meat of an American value as I can think of. The working class needs economic opportunity to pull itself up; but even more importantly, working-class people want to believe in opportunity, because they want to believe that they can better their lot in life despite their humble beginnings. So opportunity works for liberals as both a policy and as a basic value.

And in today's information society, when even the most menial jobs require smart, adaptable, creative workers (see this great article), opportunity is given by education. America's ossified public schools and its culture of anti-intellectualism (most prevalent among the working class!) are not only holding out country back, they're holding the working class back.

Thus, to change education, liberals need to do two things. The first is to reform the public school system. But the second is to make Americans want to be smart. Education shouldn't just be improved, it should be trumpeted as a basic value in and of itself. The legend of math nerds being stuffed in trashcans by football jocks needs to fall by the wayside. Liberals need to do what my high school principal did during our senior year, when she held a pep rally for the math team. Liberal politicians should be telling concerned parents that they need their kids to be smart, at every rally, at every speech, in every state.

By pushing education as a policy and as a core value, liberals score a triple victory:

1. We boost national competitiveness (thus building liberalism's reputation as a "national greatness" movement within America and without),

2. We help the poor and working-class (thus fulfilling one of liberalism's eternal goals), and

3. We begin to turn "the poor" into the kind of people we would actually want our kids to hang out with.

A political movement succeeds when it doesn't just propose policies, but actually creates a vision of a better society. We've left the "vision thing" to conservatives for too long, but we still know what our vision is: we want people to be smart, educated, and healthy. Imagine if we could turn all the Joe Sixpacks watching Monday Nigh Football, and the guys with Confederate flags on their pickups, and the Slayer fans (note: Slayer is good) into math nerds, poets, and computer wizards. Isn't that what liberalism should be all about?


Bonus Reading Guide:
Read this article, which basically agrees with my idea that Bush ad co. want to turn the U.S. into an elected dictatorship.