A glimpse into the mind of Mr. Noah

Excerpted from a recent email exchange, some rants of mine about where the liberal movement needs to go:

In the last few years I've heard lots and lots of proposals to "fix" the American political system. They've all come from liberals - not one conservative has suggested proportional representation, legislative reform, or constitutional overhaul. And something tells me that, no offense, this is because liberals have been losing a lot of elections in the past three decades that "common sense" says they should have won - 1984, 1994 congressional, 2000, 2002 congressional, and 2004 (for example, if 2000 had been in a proportional system, Nader would have joined a Gore coalition). But I'm thinking, what if it isn't our electoral system that's been broken, but the liberal movement?

Because I've been thinking, maybe conservatives won those elections because they offered voting Americans a platform that those voters liked better than the ones the liberals were offering up. In the 80s, I think lots of Americans were concerned about sex culture pulling apart their families (have I regaled you with this theory yet? if so, skip the next sentence or two), and conservatives said "Jesus will save your family from sex," and liberals said "Come on, who cares?"...so voters went with an iffy solution instead of no solution. Or crime, which was huge in the 80s and early 90s - conservatives said "We're gonna throw all the [African-Americans] in jail where they can't hurt your kids," and liberals said "Come on, who cares?" until Clinton came along, implemented a workable plan, and delivered the biggest crime drop in our history (which I still hear ZERO Democrats taking credit for)...conservatives told people "Your country is innately awesome, so anything we do is OK," while liberals FAILED to say what always trumped that, namely "Your country CAN be awesome if we do this and this awesome thing," and instead said "Your country really isn't that awesome, so take that stupid flag off your stupid pickup truck"...

So America elected conservatives, and the conservatives' ham-handed approaches worked OK for a while...divorce and drugs and teen pregnancy decreased, crime went down (mostly because of Clinton), national pride was restored, plus the economy did pretty well and the USSR luckily vanished. But now, of course, the fundamental weakness and brittleness of the conservative approach has been exposed, and as McCain shows, they're still pushing the same crap like a broken record, so the people are looking at liberals and saying "Well, what have YOU got to offer?"

We don't need to change the rules, we need to up our game!

What's liberalism's basic philosophy? Is it that economic inequality should be drastically reduced? If so, I think that's weak weak sauce...inequality only makes people mad if it highlights that they themselves are getting poorer...otherwise they pretty much never care...

I think liberalism has to be basically a nationalistic philosophy. Rebuild our nation-state. Pluralism is part of that, since we need immigrants to power our growth. Civil liberties and equal opportunity are part of that, since that's the centerpiece of our "national narrative," it's why we tend to think our country is the best. Multilateralism is part of that, since getting other countries to willingly recognize us as The Best is a lot easier and more effective than scaring them into thinking it. Taxing the rich to fund investment in infrastructure and other growth-oriented policies (including education and debt reduction) is part of it, since we expect people to contribute in accordance with the benefit they've received from being part of the nation. And environmentalism is obviously a part of that, since no proud country would trash itself.

So basically, all the main liberal initiatives fit in with nationalism. And it's worked well in the past, again and again. We need to go back to being the nation-building movement.

I know I've said a lot of this stuff before, but never pass up an opportunity to overstate in a rambling rant what you've previously laid out in a careful logical progression. That's the reason blogs exist! :-)