Anee Marie-Slaughter's list is missing some of my favorite virtues like ambition, creativity, iconoclasm, rebelliousness and irony.

thosethingswesay.blogspot.com

Thank you for that breathtaking response to the wicked "left" prognosticaters of cyberspace. If America, and Americans, pay lipservice to and beleive in fantastically lofty goals we obviously must reflect them. I find this sort of trite self aggrandizement troubling. You say that liberals, or people of the left, are to quick to point out our inability to live up to are ideals, while you simultaneously gloss over some key points. America only reflects these ideals in some respects. They often get trumped by the exigencies of capatalism. Thus, while we may like to have freedom, liberty, and "big boy scout" leaders or some such nonsense, those goals are only observed in terms of how well they square with global capatalism.

The Democrats voted for the Iraqi war because the Dems held that Dems were part of a crucial dialogue between the neo-cons and the Dems. The Dems tried to keep the conversation going and voted for the Iraqi war. For example, Kerry thought the debate was about the UN and the surface debate was about the UN but to George Bush the debate was no debate and just a step towards war. I do think a dialogue with a a lot of rank and file Republicans is doable but assuming all are conversational partners leads to compromises that are in effect surrenders. The disturbed are among us - witness George Bush. Such people have to be treated with decency, be kept from violent actions and there may be 'islands of sanity' upon which such people can be reached but as a general rule seriously consulting with with such people on decisions that affect the fate of nations is a no go. These universal values have only captured a substantial minority or a slim majority of Americans. The percentage is much smaller outside the US and Europe. Maybe 10% of Iraqis hold to these values. One has to have a sense of what can be achieved via these values. Small success are much to be preferred to ambitious plans which are complete disasters. One last point is important. The neo-cons espouse universal values for war. Recently those who have talked the talk of universal values have done great damage to the US. The debate best be limited to those who 'talk the talk and walk the walk'.

But thank God someone is actually less interested in being part of the in-crowd snickering cynically across Oxford high table, than in winning back the American people to a more humble view of ourselves, and a better set of policies that can guide this ship of state.

Apparently there is nothing humble about it. If you youself are to be believed, the book is not even intended as a frank expression of Dean Slaughter's actual unvarnished opinions, but as a sort of language lesson for the left, and a calculated grilling of a platitudinous platter of rhetorical vittles to whet the appetite of Joe BurgerMaster, and promote an alliance between the Ivory Tower and the Propane Paradise:

Slaughter does a frankly brilliant job of stating an ideal that any American out grilling hamburgers on Father's Day would nod with in agreement--and then rebuilding that ideal to show how far we must go to actually realize it, and how we must change our current policies to do so--without giving up the ideal itself, or sounding cynical about the American project!

Now maybe this is my problem. You see, I missed Father's Day this year because I was dispatched by my company on a fairly meaningless business trip to Minneapolis and didn't get home until just after midnight, early Monday morning, after filling out the by-now-customary lost luggage forms. I had to return so late, you see, because when I tried to book an earlier, slightly more expensive flight on my company's travel site, I was informed by the booking software that the earlier flight was "out of policy." This necessitated an after-hours airport pickup by a sleepy, grumpy and - not unreasonably - resentful wife who reminded me that she "did not work for my company."

The same business trip forced me to miss my 21st anniversary and my son's 17th birthday, which happen to fall on the same day, June 14th. So, I didn't get to grill any burgers on Father's Day or on Annibirthseryday, which probably explains the defficiencies in my diet of patio patriotism.

However, my son did buy me a pretty cool Father's Day present while I was gone: a slab of ribs! These were promptly rubbed, basted and barbecued yesterday for the benefit of the kinfolk, and munched down late in the day as we all discoursed cynically about Liberty, Equality and Tolerance. I sniggered away at the High Table with my wife, my dog Rico and several other Oxford Don buddies in attendance. Rico is noted among this in-crowd for his Johnsonian, rapier wit, and is unsparing in his spearing of the addled ideals of the petit booboisie.

Sorry princess, but frankly I don't think you know diddly about fathers and their grills, or what the former do or do not think about when they are hovering over the latter, setting burger to leap. For you "liberty" is some sort of high-sounding term inscribed on hoary old documents, denoting an abstruse concept to be contemplated sub specie aeternitatis in an American Studies seminar. Or else it's just an item on the creed you recite on your knees, fellingly and mechanically, just between putting on your jammies and getting tucked into bed. For me, the word "liberty" calls up fond, idle fantasies of being liberated from my job so that I can spend more time with my son - whose remaining time at home, as you can calculate yourself, is fast disappearing. Are you and Dean Slaughter working at the Princeton High Thoughts Thinkery on any formulas for my liberation? Somehow, I suspect not.

It's reassuring to see that during your long absence from TPM Cafe you haven't lost your flair for self-satisfied, "my 9/11 generation", pablum-patrotism. Alas, the world is not entirely analogous to college essay contest. So while you and Dean Slaughter indulge in your weepy maunderings on the Seven Cardinal Virtues, or the Seven American Wonderfulnesses, or whatever they are, Rico and I will reserve the right to snigger. It's some consolation for us at least. Despite your imaginings to the contrary, I suspect a larger portion than you guess of that army of backyard warriors you purport to admire share in my somewhat jaundiced and skeptical view of the mental clarity of the self-appointed promulgators of the American Virtues.

But I promise to try harder to believe in Liberty, Democracy, Equality, Justice, Tolerance, Humility, and Faith; and I'll also keep praying to Grumpy, Sleepy, Sneezy, Bashful, Dopey, Doc, and Happy for my deliverance. Who knows where this childlike faith comes from? I guess I can't shake it because, like all true Americans, I'm just so damn spunky and optimistic!

I keep reading the comments, reading the original post, reading the comments, reading the original post, and now I'm wondering if I read the same thing everyone else seems to have.

Crooked cops, crooked lawyers, crooked judges, crooked politicians, crooked doctors, crooked scientists, crooked clergymen -- but no crooked journalists. An amazing record for an amazing class of people.

See, THIS comment is brilliant. Dan K manages to subtly introduce a reformulation of the idea of "liberty" to involve a defense of the individual's liberty to pursue family life, against the unfreedom propagated by corporations and the market. That is a vision of "liberty" which more and more Americans are coming to share, something like FDR's old formulation of the Four Freedoms.

That's what I would call "brilliant". Anne-Marie Slaughter's pompous formulation of seven rather obvious "values", and her presumption in claiming these ideals for America, seems like tired bombasticism; and your praise of this bombasticism as "brilliant" comes across as not very smart and weirdly acolytish.

Accumulating Peripherals

I can't talk about a book I haven't read.  Well, I could, but I won't.  But this evening I heard Roger Wilkins accept a lifetime achievement award at the Banquet at the Take Back America 2007 Conference.  He spoke about American Ideals and a life of trying to bring the country into living up to them.  At the same Conference, Digby accepted an award on behalf of the progressive Blogosphere, and she spoke of the same thing.  Nathan Newman was on the stage, along with 40 others.  None seemed to have trouble with appealing to the ideals represented in the Declaration of Independence as a corrective to the blatant cynicism of the right.  It strikes me as difficult to rage against the betraying of the ideals without simultaneously reaffirming them as ideals...not as achievements but as beacons of things worth dedicating one's life toward achieving.

aMike

As I said, I haven't read the book, so in my best Emily Litella voice, "Oh... never mind" <smile></smile>

aMike

And don't forget arrogance and moral complacency!

Thanks for your vote Bluebell, but I've always tended to think an elected official is just the last tiny link in the causal chain leading to change. The attitudes of these officials generally drift with the spirit of the times. So to create significant social change, it is necessary to create a broad revolution in what people think, both about what is desirable and what is possible. Those changes are produced primarily by people writing and talking for and with each other, and making compelling art or preaching captivating gospels - less often by those running for office, and vying to manage the decrepit machinary of government. We can be fairly confident that if news of great change comes in our country, Washington will be the very last corner of the world to get the message.

There is a famous line, spoken by the Duke of Albany, at the very end of King Lear:

The weight of this sad time we must obey;
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.

In my view, far too many people are overwhelmed these days with hyperreflexive concerns and anxieties about what they "ought to say". They don't even know anymore what they truly think and feel, because they are so busy fussing about what political lines they should memorize, what frames they should construct and what lies and frauds they should perpetrate in order to win the next election. This bad faith was in evidence back 2002, when some ambivalent Democrats convinced themselves that what they "ought to say" is that they supported an invasion of Iraq, even though they weren't really convinced of the wisdom or morality of the plan. They convinced themselves that they should say these things, because they were obsessively fearful about what people would think of them and say about them: that they were weak. But the real weakness was in the lack of willingness to give witness to their consciences.

I'm not saying all of the war's supporters fell into this group - some sincerely believed war was the best option. And a person who honestly opts for war I can respect. But a person whose conscience counsels peace, but is bullied into speaking for war, is a dishonorable coward.

We don't need more books about the "language we must learn to speak" to curry favor with the imaginary Common Man - especially not books that offer a vacuous froth of abstract and contentless idealism as the answer. There is an authentic and heartfelt language of the left that has been largely absent from mainstream American discourse for several decades now. It is not shrill and snide and snobbish, but inspiring, transformative and compassionate. There is nothing wrong with that language. This discourse does not shy away from noting that some rather prominent American ideals are ugly and destructive, and in need of change, and refuses to flatter people with the comforting thought that their ideological traditions are all perfect in theory, but merely fall short in practice.

This is brilliant. (It's also mildly annoying that you siphoned so much acute observational skill and ironic genius from the gene pool, but what the heck.)

For me, the issue I continuously struggle with regarding this Princeton crew is captured in this sentence:

"While the book sits a little uneasily in the ground between policy wonks and mass audience, it is accessible for speechwriters and politicians..."

Here's my point. Are they policy wonks (in which case they should not give a damn about what is mass-audience friendly)? Or are they aspiring political consultants (in which case they should not hold themselves out as policy wonks)?

Or are they living out the futility captured by Keynes when he said:"We have reached the third degree, where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what the average opinion expects the average opinion to be."

Rachel Kleinfeld, not for the first time, has however given the clearest indicator what the real game is. To wit:

"we don't have the luxury of making policies for non-Americans until we have won a Presidential election, and we are not going to win such an election until we can embrace the commonsense American ideals--and language"

Okay, so the game here is to design a marketing strategy that will put someone like Obama in power. There is no suggestion of what Obama, say, would do if he became president, but no, this isn't the game. The game is dog-whistle politics, and that ringing sound you hear in your ears is the shrill sloganeering that in an attempt to win you over has ended up either confusing you or pissing you off. Or both.

You see, I try to read these ideas seriously. And I get confused because the ideas are so evidently problematic, and then I get pissed off because I remember the people presenting the ideas care mainly about how the ideas sound to the great unwashed burger-griller, not that the ideas are intellectually coherent. And then, to cap it all, I get charged with sitting around the "Oxford high table" (Huh? WTF is this?), seemingly some kind irony-rich pre-emptive strike by the intelligensia against a charge of ivory-tower elitism.

The reason people - here anyway - might respond cynically when they read about the seven wonders of American excellence is that they find the idea a bit, what's the word, crap. Or more prosaically, they cannot relate to it. Either conceptually, or in their day-to-day lives.

I will however, as is my wont, try to be constructive. And here's how I see it: for better or worse, the American electorate does to a point respond to motherhood and apple-pie platitudes. What you are however trying to sell is a a child-rearing manual and a pastry recipe. And those of us who have looked at the detail haven't been impressed by what we've seen.

So my suggestion is concentrate on the recipe, and come back to sell it to us. Or work on the marketing and go sell it to Obama. Trying to do both is clearly not working.

Ps. Rachel Kleinfeld says they can't make policy when Dems aren't in power. So what exactly is it that they do when Dems aren't in power? Grill burgers?

deleted

Ms. Kleinfeld, you wrote about Anne-Marie's book:

"it explains our liberal values in language that the majority of Americans would support. This is the language that has mobilized Obama's constituency, and that could unite our country. And I firmly believe that this is the language the left must learn to speak if we are to persuade Americans rather than preach to our own choir."

Ok, so I get that you believe in "language lessons for the left", in DanK's apt phrase. Or ASL (American as a Second Language) instruction for the left, if you prefer.

What are the policies you believe are supported by "the left" with which you disagree? Pick three of greatest concern.

or, if you prefer

What are three policy tendencies or orientations of "the left" (not including leftists like you, that is) that are ill-advised for our country if acted upon once Democrats are back in power?

I have to say that the notion that humility is one of the patriotic virtues we Americans evidently need to celebrate more (or at least talk about as one of our virtues) goes beyond ironic for me. Are you referring to public attitudes in the US? Or the rhetoric and policies of, say, the Polk, McKinley, T Roosevelt, Wilson, Kennedy, Reagan, or Bush II Administrations, to take a few examples?

Folks:

There seems to be an assumption here that Anne-Marie Slaughter doesn't mean the ideals she speaks of--or that I don't--or that this is just a language game.

It is not. When Slaughter recently gave a book talk on this topic, her authentic feeling for the importance of these values, and the depth of America's current failure to reach them, caused more than one audience member to start crying. A rare occurrence in a Washington, D.C. conference of serious policy thinkers.

Certainly, I do not hold these values cynically either--I hold them deeply. There is a long tradition, from Dubois to Jerome Robinson to Langston Hughes, of loving America and criticizing it in order to help it live up to its own ideals. Slaughter's book fits into that tradition.

Simply because something is good langauge politically does not mean it is being spoken cynically. In fact, most Americans are smart enough to see the difference between cynical manipulation of language, and real depth of feeling. What I am trying to say is not that we need to learn to SPEAK like this, but that we need to be open to FEELING like this. When we feel the way Slaughter writes, the words follow naturally. When we feel only anger and cynicism towards our country and its project, we express anger, cynicism, and dismay. Not only do those emotions seem to me unrepresentative of progressives, but they seem rather corrosive to the person holding them.

Director, Truman National Security Project
www.trumanproject.org

What I am trying to say is not that we need to learn to SPEAK like this, but that we need to be open to FEELING like this. When we feel the way Slaughter writes, the words follow naturally. When we feel only anger and cynicism towards our country and its project, we express anger, cynicism, and dismay. Not only do those emotions seem to me unrepresentative of progressives, but they seem rather corrosive to the person holding them.

You seem to assume that the only ideals worth pursuing and capable of inspiring rousing feelings are patriotic ideals related to a country and its project, and that cynicism about or rejection of substantial aspects of the culture or project of one's country therefore amounts to a total and corrosive cynicism.

But this is simply not true. Some of us have ideals that push us in the direction of changing "the American way of life" is some fairly fundamental ways. If some of those changes were to come about, in the fulness of time, some rather large components of the American "project", as it is currently understood, would be altered. Some ideals that almost everyone in the world would characterize as American ideals - such as self-reliant and highly competitive individualism, operating within a very weakly regulated system of free economic enterprise - would be deemphasized, and some contrasting ideals which very few people in the world associate with America - such as communal harmony and cooperation, and an economy governed and regulated to produce socially desirable outcomes - would be elevated.

You and Dean Slaughter seem determined to convince people like me that every truly progressive idea is already an "American ideal", and that wherever these ideas are not already in practice, that is merely a case in which our practice does not yet live up to our ideals. This, in my opinion, is sentimental bunk. Not only is it sentimental bunk, but it is dangerous and progress-thwarting bunk which prevents people from listening to the voices of their pre-tribal, pre-national, pre-patriotic consciences, and encourages them to wallow in empty national platitudes and credal bombast, and to place loyalty to national tradition and the alleged wisdom of the Glorious Ancestors ahead of reason and direct moral intuition of the causes of human suffering and human happiness. To believe that the keys to human perfectability are already fully embodied in the ideals of one's national community is superstitious idolatry.

Rachel, you don't see a problem with telling people how they're supposed to feel?

These ideals that Anne-Marie Slaughter writes about fall short for a lot of people, both intellectually and emotionally.

And don't try to shrug that off as cynicism. For some people, these ideals just aren't enough.

Also, quit using the phrase "cynicism" as a pejorative. Mark Twain, HL Mencken, F. Scott Fitzgeral, Ernest Hemingway, Lenny Bruce, Kurt Vonnegut... cynics all, who made great contrbutions to American art and thought.

thosethingswesay.blogspot.com

Its not the *scope* of the American project people disagree with, its our problem in executing toward those goals. (I agree with the poster of the comment above--in and out of America, such "American" ideals are universal). People suggest our ideals make us a shining beacon on the hill, and we aren't. We arent simply failing sometimes, we have a solid consistent history of failing, and whoring those ideals whenever the going gets tough.

We can't/won't admit that, and people who can't admit they have a problem cant be helped.

We are very Christian in that regard... we set goals, consistently fail to meet them, and then pretend like we have forgiveness and dont need to own and learn from our mistakes. Because we seem content to define ourselves by our goals not our actual actions. Reality be damned.

nope

aMike

Thank you! We really need to point out the sanctimony in these posts. I fear that Kleinfeld and Slaughter really believe that they should be telling us HOW to think and feel.

thosethingswesay.blogspot.com