In season five of “The West Wing” Leo McGarry brings in a replacement to pick up the slack when another staff member has to be “benched” due to a huge screw up. The new person is allowed to borrow the benched staffers assistant for help on a project and in the course of work the assistant is asked her opinion on the current administration that they both work for.
The assistant replies that she thinks their side (the liberal Democrat side) does a bad job of articulating what their goals are and what the overarching philosophy of liberalism actually is. This is an on-going problem with the liberal doctrine. Nobody, not even us, knows what we are talking about.
Our political agenda is being pulled in so many directions it is unintelligible: which, scarily enough, looks pretty good compared to the conflicts in our intellectual underpinnings. Between feminism, Marxism, critical race theory and environmentalism, we can’t figure out which problem is the most pressing (patriarchy, classism or racism) so that we can then build a clear and cohesive agenda to rally the troops around.
It’s not that we have to choose which problem to fight, they are all pressing issues that deserve an equal amount of urgent attention, but in many cases we haven’t even agreed that these are problems that we want to address.
We have a crucial election on our horizon and none of the candidates are particularly exciting; this is our fault. We scare away the radicals, the really smart people with vision and purpose because we cannot be trusted to remain on task, to fight the hard fights and show up at the ballot box having done our intellectual work and our practical research.
As much as I hate trite and overused sayings, Whitman, it is true that we “have to be the change we wish to see in the world.” If you want to save trees it’s not enough to simply cease bathing and carry a Nalgene, you have to get in the face of every single “earth raping” person you know. If you want to combat racism, well then maybe you will have to “ruin” a few parties. If you think male chauvinism is a problem, well, you might actually have to stop putting up with shit from specific males, just because its “easier than arguing.”
Radical change is never-ending and exhausting and requires a clear articulation of principles and goals. To some degree, conservatives have it far easier; their far right flank has delineated a very clear set of principles (read: the Bible) that all conservatives, no matter where they fall on the spectrum, must answer to. We have no such powerful fringe, our fringe is regarded as just that, fringe.
Lets change that. Let us the graduating seniors and the future classes of Whitman college stand together with our ideas, our plans and our day-to-day passion and be the powerful flank that our party has to answer to, that defines the discussion instead of remaining subject to it, that is unafraid of the term “radical,” “liberal” or even “tree-hugger.”
Let us stand up and take responsibility for our discourse, define our terms and unapologetically work every day to forward agendas we know to be noble and worthy. C’mon, you’ve got to do something with all those hours between episodes of “Lost” and “Grey’s Anatomy.”
