Two items that caught my eye in the last few days at The New Republic:
1. In his comment on why former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner decided not to run for President, Ryan Lizza drops this nugget: “One night in New Hampshire, after a few drinks at a pool hall in a college town, the conversation turned to the political troubles of another potential ‘08 contender. I told a story that had been making the rounds about how this politician once spit on his wife.” Well, now my gossipy curiosity is piqued. Any ideas who that charming politico might be? Note: I’m not inviting rank speculation, and since I don’t want to be sued for libel, I hereby disclaim any guesses you make.
2. In this piece, Amy Sullivan discusses David Kuo’s book about how the White House has manipulated and lied to evangelicals. According to Sullivan, liberals have not capitalized on the book’s revelations because they don’t believe them: liberals’ cognitive dissonance prevents them from accepting anything that is contrary to their assumption that the Bush administration is working all-out towards installing a theocracy. Interestingly, Sullivan doesn’t really suggest that liberals should court evangelicals, but says that liberals “could at least depress turnout by stoking evangelical anger at the Bushies.” Ah, the noble “None of the Above” message!
It’s sad that liberals seem to have so little chance at getting many votes from disgruntled evangelicals. Of course, that’s due in part to some of the positions liberals take; I won’t deny that. But wouldn’t it be better for Democratic candidates to at least try to get a few of those votes, instead of just hoping those folks don’t vote at all? One way would be to take a stand on human rights, especially in Darfur, which has become a major cause for many evangelicals. Another is to portray a campaign for social justice, economic opportunity, and the welfare state safety net as following statements like this from many liberals is that there is a cognitive dissonance on the part of the evangelicals, too. By and large, they probably won’t believe liberals who talk in religious terms, even those who used to teach Sunday School in Arkansas. I think a lot of evangelicals believe that most liberals are simply anti-religion. They probably make exceptions for African American Democrats like Illinois Senator Barack Obama or Tennessee Congressman/Senate candidate Harold Ford, Jr. (who shot one of his Senate ads in a church). But I think liberals can and should talk about the values they have in common with evangelicals, whether they ascribe those values to the explicit teachings of Jesus or some more ambiguous belief system. Sure, for some evangelicals, the bad will outweigh the good. But there is a way to talk in a language evangelicals understand, without looking like apostates to fellow-liberals, and it might even win a few votes. (Or, as Sullivan’s realpolitik posits, it might dissuade evangelicals from holding their nose, swallowing their pride, and voting for the GOP.) So why not try?
UPDATE: PG had a thoughtful comment to this post, and my response to her ran long enough that I just decided to run it here.
I guess I was speaking more specifically about “values issues,” and hoping that liberals don’t cede what common ground on those issues they could find with evangelicals. I agree that for most other issues, liberals don’t need to ask, How Would Jesus Spin? But on the other hand, my impression is that many evangelicals are single-issue voters (or, “values voters” voting based on a set of values issues), and that those issues are at least the door liberals have to go through to be able to win on some other issue. That is, liberals (and perhaps Romney and Guliani) would have to convince evangelicals they’re not godless heathens before convincing evangelicals to vote for them based on non-religious issues.
I think your comparison to feminists is apt, but my impression is that evangelicals are more likely to see in religious terms issues that folks like me might not perceive as religious. To take your example, some evangelicals are strong enviromentalists because of the Biblical command to take care of God’s creation. Of course, many others have no problem extracting as much as they can of the world’s resources thanks to the line in Genesis about God giving Man “dominion” over the earth and animals. That’s a spiritual debate, but it underscores how many of the issues are, for the evangelicals, spoken in “the language of the belief set.”
Now, maybe I’m overstating it, and these concerns aren’t foremost in the mids of evangelicals when they make their decisions, and might only be post hoc rationalizations of, say, why they bought an SUV. But my sense is that evangelicals can talk about most issues in that language, whereas (again to use your example), I don’t know if many feminists could talk about environmentalism in feminist terms (without getting into new agey “Mother Earth” stuff).
Falling back on a sports example, it reminds me of Alabama football fans I know. They have a big rivalry with Tennessee, so many of them drink Kentucky bourbon instead of Tennessee bourbon, to avoid any interaction with the Volunteer State. Likewise, evangelicals can cast in religious terms issues that liberals might think are fairly mundane. So my suggestion is that liberals should at least understand that tendency/ability, and at a minimum, be able to make an argument that their course is the more moral one, even if they don’t paint it in explicitly religious terms.
Thanks to PG for giving me a chance to flesh this out a little more.