John Edwards, Inconvenient Truths, and the So-called “Culture Wars”

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Sun Jan-27-08 08:25 PM
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John Edwards, Inconvenient Truths, and the So-called “Culture Wars”

Under 7 years of George W. Bush’s presidency, our nation has regressed to the highest level of inequality seen since what Paul Krugman refers to as “The Long Gilded Age”. This chart explains the situation in graphic terms:

To summarize the situation in a nutshell: The original “Gilded Age” began with the onset of industrialization in our country in the late 1860s. The term was coined by Mark Twain, and it serves as a metaphor for corporate greed and corruption and associated income inequality. Paul Krugman suggests that we use the term “Long Gilded Age” to refer to the approximate period from the late 1860s to the 1930s because, though good statistics didn’t exist prior to the time period denoted in the above graph, the evidence suggests that massive income inequality existed during that whole time period.

President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal contained numerous statutes that served to greatly reduce income inequality, which is denoted in the above chart as the percent of income made by the richest 10% of Americans. Beginning in the late 1930s, after several decades of the least amount of income inequality in American history, coinciding with the greatest sustained economic boom in U.S. history, the situation began to reverse itself with the onset of the “Reagan Revolution” in 1981. Under George Bush II, income inequality has now again attained Gilded Age proportions.

And not coincidentally, along with this rise in income inequality, we have seen a large increase in poverty under Bush the 2nd, with 5 million more Americans descending into poverty by 2004, to reach a total of 37 million, reflecting the increasing poverty rate in our country under Bush, as depicted in this graph:

Huge income inequality with its associated poverty not only leads to political inequality and numerous tragic human consequences, but it results in a vicious cycle that is unjust and makes a mockery of the American ideal of equal opportunity.

Fighting poverty is the cornerstone of John Edwards’ campaign for President in 2008. In a previous post I discussed the fact that his plans to address this issue are far superior to those of any other presidential candidate. A recent editorial in The Nation, titled “Time to Act on Inequality”, dealt with this issue, recognizing Edwards’ leadership:

Might we hear the candidates address this national scandal and say concretely what they intend to do about it? Republicans, we know, will duck and dodge. But Democratic hopefuls are not exactly speaking out on inequality either. John Edwards is an admirable exception; he has declared unilaterally that income inequality is no longer a taboo subject.

Not only are Edwards’ plans to combat poverty superior to those of the other candidates, but he is superior on a large range of issues that have historically defined the best of the Democratic Party since the onset of FDR’s New Deal. So why then is he buried so far down in third place in the race for the Democratic nomination? This question demands an explanation, and it demands one soon – before the hopes of an Edwards Presidency are buried on “Super-duper Tuesday” on February 5th.

A brief summary of reasons to choose Edwards as the 2008 Democratic nominee

In a recent post I described several reasons for choosing Edwards as the 2008 Democratic nominee, emphasizing issues that have historically defined the best of the Democratic Party. I will summarize those reasons here in order to provide background for the rest of this post:

In addition to his leading on the poverty issue, Edwards: led his rivals on a plan for universal health care, as Paul Krugman concludes in an op-ed titled “Edwards gets it right”; is the only one of the three leading candidates to have a plan for removing all combat troops and U.S. military bases from Iraq; has “outlined the most comprehensive global warming plan of any presidential candidate to date”, according to the League of Conservation Voters; on economics has been “driving his party’s policy agenda” as noted by Paul Krugman, and advocates policies that “used to make Democrats the party of working people”, as noted by William Greider; is the most electable of the Democratic candidates according to head-to-head polls against the Republican candidates; is out front on the issue of campaign finance reform, especially compared to Senator Clinton; and speaks generally of the need to fight for the American people, in contrast with the “non-partisan” rhetoric of Barrack Obama, which serves to give credence to numerous Republican talking points which are antithetical to the welfare of the American people.

All of this is neatly summed up in a recent op-ed in The Nation, which says:

Edwards has displayed a smart, necessary partisanship – denouncing corporate power and its crippling influence on government. He has argued with conviction that government does best when it does more for its citizens… His policy proposals are not always perfect, but they are uncommonly detailed and crafted in conjunction with progressive organizations. Most important, his programs were announced first, and they clearly pushed Clinton and Obama in a progressive direction.

Accusations that Edwards is angry, aggressive, and confrontational

One of Edwards’ biggest problems has been a relative blackout by our corporate news media. When the media is forced to acknowledge him, as during the 3-way debate in South Carolina last week, his popularity surges. But when our corporate news media isn’t blacking him out they generally have nothing but criticism for him. These criticisms, when they don’t deal with trivia such as the price of his haircuts, generally deal with his confrontational stance towards corporate greed. One example is the Des Moines Register, which recently explained why they decided not to endorse his candidacy this year:

But Edwards is more combative this time around. He is no longer content to talk about economic inequity – he prescribes an aggressive effort to root out special interests in Washington, D.C.

"It is time to give these entrenched interests, that are standing against America, hell," Edwards told thousands of Iowa Democrats this month at the state party's fall fundraiser in Des Moines. "That's the only way we're going to win this fight."

Oh my! Not only does he talk about economic inequality, but he prescribes aggressive measures to combat it!

And here is some more aggressive criticism of Edwards’ campaign, by Stuart Rothenberg:

If Iowa Democrats choose Edwards, they are choosing anger, confrontation and class warfare…Edwards portrays himself as a fighter for the middle class, but his message is decidedly working class and left….

Given the North Carolina Democrat’s rhetoric and agenda, an Edwards Presidency would likely rip the nation apart – even further apart than Bush has torn it. For while Edwards bashes corporate America and “them,” this nation’s economy depends on the success of both small business and big business. Scare the stuffing out of Corporate America and watch the stock market tumble.

So, apparently it’s inconsistent to fight for both the working class and the middle class? And railing against George Bush’s corporate agenda is going to tear our nation apart? Give me a break! Rothenberg’s claim that criticizing corporate America will hurt our economy is reminiscent of Ronald Reagan’s trickle down economic theories.

Edwards’ answer to those accusations – an inconvenient truth

Yes, corporate America fears an Edwards presidency. And yes, as Dan Balz explains:

The enemy he sees is corporate America and corporate greed. His message seeks not to unite America but to finish what he describes as "an epic struggle" against forces that are, literally, killing America – destroying jobs, holding down wages, putting ordinary Americans out of work or denying them medical care. "You need somebody in the arena who will never back down," he says.

I find the thought that “unity” or “bipartisanship” will be more important in solving our nations problems than standing up to corporate greed to be almost laughable. The unfortunate and inconvenient truth of the matter is that those who currently hold power in our country, especially the conservative elite right wing ideologues, care much more about their own wealth and power than they do about the well being of ordinary Americans. As Paul Krugman explains in “The Conscience of a Liberal”:

The central fact of modern American political life is the control of the Republican Party by movement conservatives, whose vision of what America should be is completely antithetical to that of the progressive movement…

The radical right wing ideologues who currently control the Republican Party will not agree to legislation that reinstates the New Deal principles that they have spent the past three decades dismantling. They will never agree to measures that fight poverty or income inequality no matter how much a Democratic President tries to make nice-nice with them. Nor will they agree to meaningful campaign finance reform that reduces their political power. Our health insurance corporations will never agree to health care plans like that put forth by John Edwards, for the simple reason that it will greatly cut into their profits. Many of our most powerful corporations will never accede to any plan for getting out of Iraq, because our presence there has been so profitable for them. And contrary to what George W. Bush thinks, American corporations will never voluntarily take measures to reduce climate change, since that too will cut into their profits. It is simply not a priority for them. Hell, Exxon-Mobile for example has spent tons of money over the past several years to disseminate propaganda claiming that global warming doesn’t even exist.

The core issue – and casualty – of the so-called “culture wars”: Truth

Much has been written about the so-called “culture wars” between liberals and conservatives. There are several components to these culture wars. But it recently occurred to me that their main purpose is the fight over truth. Liberals believe in shining a light on issues in order to expose lies and uncover the truth. In marked contrast, the conservative elite want to hide the truth, in order to maintain the status quo. This is a major reason why they find John Edwards so threatening.

One example of this is George Bush’s war against science. Another example is the Bush administration’s extreme secrecy, as manifested in its great hostility to the Presidential Records Act of 1978 and its excessive use of executive privilege to avoid having to make its activities known to Congress or the American public. These things are not merely characteristic of the Bush administration. Their conservative Republican supporters support them every step of the way in their efforts to prevent the truth from coming to light.

American history as a prime example of truth as a casualty of the “culture wars”

Perhaps the best example of how politicians reject truth in favor of the status quo was the U.S. Senate’s rejection, in 1995, of the proposed National Standards for United States History, by a vote of 99-1 (The one vote against the resolution was cast because the Senator felt that the resolution wasn’t strong enough.)

Creation of the standards
The standards were produced by a policy-setting body called the National Council for History Standards (NCHS), consisting of the presidents of nine major organizations and twenty-two other nationally recognized administrators, historians, and teachers, and two taskforces of teachers in World and United States history, with substantial input from thirty-one national organizations. The document was created through an unprecedented process of open debate, multiple reviews, and the active participation of the largest organizations of history educators in the nation.

In November 1994, NCHS released its document, which was meant to provide purely voluntary guidelines for national curricula in history for grades 5-12. As explained by Gary Nash, who led the effort, these standards were meant to have one thing in common: “to provide students with a more comprehensive, challenging, and thought-provoking education in the nation's public schools.” Their signature features were said to include “a new framework for critical thinking and active learning” and “repeated references to primary documents that would allow students to read and hear authentic voices from the past”. The following excerpts from the document give a sense of the general purpose of the standards:

The study of history involves much more than the passive absorption of facts…. History is in its essence a process of reasoning based on evidence from the past.…Real historical understanding requires students to think through cause-and-effect relationships… Properly taught, history develops capacities for analysis and judgment…. and it promotes wariness about quick, facile solutions which have so often brought human suffering in their wake.

Controversy over the standards
Critics focused largely on two main issues: Multiculturalism and so-called “political correctness”. As an example, here is one article which derogatorily refers to the “multi-cultis” who it is claimed wrote the document to advance their “politically correct” and radically left point of view. Lynn Cheney aggressively criticized the document as containing “multicultural excess”, a “grim and gloomy portrayal of American history”, “a politicized history”, and a disparaging of the West. Other major critics of the document included Newt Gingrich and Republican presidential candidates Pat Buchanan and Bob Dole. Dole blamed the document on “the embarrassed to be American crowd” of “intellectual elites” and said that it was “undermining the foundations of American unity”. He had this to say about the group of eminent historians who developed the standards:

What we see as an opportunity they see as oppression. Where we see a proud past, they see a legacy of shame. What we hold as mortal truth, they see as intolerance. They have false theories, long dissertations, and endless studies to back them up. But they know so much that they have somehow missed the fact that the United States of America is the greatest force for good that the world has ever known.

The importance of defending truth – inconvenient or not – against attacks from the conservative elites

With regard to the criticisms of “grimness and gloominess” of the national standards for United States History, Gary Nash has this to say:

To be sure, it is not possible to recover the history of women, African Americans, religious minorities, Native Americans, laboring Americans, Latino Americans, and Asian Americans without addressing issues of conflict, exploitation, and the compromising of the national ideals set forth by the Revolutionary generation… To this extent, the standards counseled a less self-congratulatory history of the United States and a less triumphalist Western Civilization orientation toward world history…

Reduced to its core, the controversy thus turned on how history can be used to train up the nation's youth. Almost all of the critics of the history standards argued that young Americans would be better served if they study the history presented before the 1960s, when allegedly liberal and radical historians "politicized" the discipline and abandoned an "objective" history in favor of pursuing their personal political agendas.

Nash then discusses the historians’ point of view:

On the other side of the cultural divide stands a large majority of historians. For many generations, even when the profession was a guild of white Protestant males of the upper class, historians have never regarded themselves as anti-patriots because they revise history or examine sordid chapters of it. Indeed, they expose and critique the past in order to improve American society and to protect dearly won gains… This is not a new argument. Historians have periodically been at sword's point with vociferous segments of the public, especially those of deeply conservative bent.

My personal views on the culture wars – and what that has to do with John Edwards’ candidacy

So, when it comes to American history, what we see as oppression Bob Dole (and all conservative elites for that matter) sees as opportunity. What specifically is he talking about? Was our genocide against Native Americans an opportunity? Was slavery an opportunity? Were our many overthrows (See section on “Immorality of U.S. military and covert actions”) of democratically elected governments during the Cold War and our support for oppressive dictators such as Augusto Pinochet opportunities? Were the Vietnam War and the Iraq War opportunities?

To me, probably the most important aspect of the National Standards is, as the NCHS says, the need to promote “wariness about quick, facile solutions which have so often brought human suffering in their wake” – which is precisely what the conservative elites are so intent on having us ignore. This is why I say that:

Like probably all human beings, I have made many mistakes in my life – and many of those mistakes have caused people to be hurt. Like most normal people, when I make a mistake I feel bad about it, and I try to think about how I can avoid making similar mistakes in the future. That is why I am a better person today than I otherwise would have been. The same principle applies to all people who have enough humility to admit when they’ve made a mistake and try to avoid making future mistakes.

And the same principle applies to nations as well as to individuals. It’s more comfortable for a person to believe that s/he is close enough to perfect that s/he doesn’t really have to worry about making mistakes. By the same token, it’s more comfortable for a nation to take as a matter of faith that, as Bob Dole says, “The United States of America is the greatest force for good that the world has ever known”. If you take that as a matter of faith then you can feel comfortable about not having to do much to make things better. If, as Rudy Giuliani has said, the United States has the best health care in the world – even though it’s rated 37th by the World Health organization – then you can feel comfortable about not having to change much.

But when an American Presidential candidate such as John Edwards repeatedly emphasizes all that it wrong with our country, that makes a lot of people who have been raised on a steady diet of American exceptionalism feel very uncomfortable. It especially makes the conservative elites who control our news media feel very uncomfortable. And that poses a whole lot of problems for his Presidential campaign.

As I noted above, the three person debate format has allowed Edwards to get his message out in a way that he previously has not been able to do, and there are some signs that this is beginning to change the dynamics of the presidential race. Barack Obama may use the word “change” a lot more than Edwards does, but when the American people get to see for themselves what the candidates have to say, it becomes evident that John Edwards advocates far more progressive change than Obama does. Let’s hope that Edwards is able to further clarify his differences with his rivals during what may be his final chance next Thursday, in a way that substantially changes the dynamics of the Democratic race.