Pandagon has had some good back and forth this week (here, later here) about Gov. Howard Dean's recent 700 Club appearance, at which he mistakenly asserted that the Democratic Party platform asserts that marriage is and ought to be defined as a one man, one woman institution. Although he's since corrected the record, his comments in that ultra-socially conservative venue have understandably been regarded as a disgraceful and pointless act of pandering.

So where is the figure who in 2003 fired up the grassroots of his party by saying the way to win is not by being Republican lite, who shouted that he's tired of listening to "the fundamentalist preachers"? In my opinion, the answer relates to an assumption Dean shares with so many of the same establishment Democrats who disdain his reform project: the idea that economic and good-government appeals will be adequate to win over the mainstream, and that the Democratic pitch must at all costs obscure and soft-pedal cultural issues rather than incorporate them into the party's message. The Democratic Party needs to learn that a focus on economic needs and against corruption are necessary but not sufficient for becoming a heavyweight in America's political conversation.

We will be on the defensive about culture in the news media, in red states and counties and neighborhoods, and even in aspects of the relatively liberal popular culture for just as long as we let our party's leadership get away with portryaing social equality and lifestyle decisional freedom as an albatross of interest group commitments and an example of moral relativism. In fact progressive social values are fundamentally neither of these things, but a passionate and well-reasoned moral commitment to core American ideals and to moral intuitions that run deeper still, all the way, in fact, into common sense that only a deeply alienated culture would regard differently. Only the unnecessary habit of collapsing into panic rather than thinking strategically about <b>how </b> to stick up for our convictions allows us to scurry into the corner to avoid cultural debate when we anticipate conservatives' deployment of pungent but vapid slogans (like 1972's famous invocation of acid, amnesty, and abortion) or one or another Karl Rove dirty trick about "God, guns, and gays", or abortion or contraception or sex education and family planning.

One of the secrets of President Clinton's political genius, and I draw this point from his own account of his electoral success, was his willingness to talk to anyone. How, he said, can we appeal to a broad cross-section of people if we won't talk to people who disagree with us? So Gov. Dean is right to be impatient with the polarization that automatically keeps us out of right-wing venues. (Many people ask, Why would anyone voluntarily go on Fox News?) And although I'm thankful the netroots are keeping the pressure on the DNC Chair to make him more responsive to the moral demands of gay civil rights and similar issues, I'm a little unimpressed with some of the progressive bloggers who merely write, Why would you go on a show in which the audience feel they wouldn't vote for you if hell froze over? My answer to this question is that opening avenues of communication begins the long process of humanizing Democrats and getting us a more thoughtful hearing. Of course this effort won't bear fruit right away. That's all the more reason we need to begin. An apt analogy is to progressive complaints about media consolidation. Why, after all, do we complain about the narrowing of news and culture sources in the mass media? Surely one reason is that our opponents and potential opponents in political matters will receive poorer information on bland corporate soundbite-dominated airwaves, just as we will, and with loss of communication and real discourse comes loss of the potential for serious political and cultural change. The same principle obtains when we refuse to participate in media opportunities because the audience is ill-disposed to agree with us. As long as the right-wing media remains an echo chamber by our default, in a sense we'll have no right to complain about the results.

To be fair, I don't think the Pat Robertson vehicle is necessarily the best place to begin a bridge-building project, although I'm sure it's not the only place Dean has or will seek to bring the Democratic message. On the other hand, as I've argued, I can see the case for wanting to partake of this enormously popular show and mix up its poor viewers' usual diet of God knows what. Whatever the merits of his appearance in that venue, his selling out on a matter of civil rights is of a piece with a timidity about cultural politics that he shares with so many Democrats, including liberals. We must challenge two disastrous premises: first, that what we believe to be good in matters of cultural contention, namely freedom and equality, are necessarily a political liability; and second, its flip side, a cavalier advocacy of social libertarianism that is shocked and helpless when some measure of conservative demagogy finds an audience, because culture is not an academic exercise and it never was, even though some of our views are rooted in reasoning about what's fair. Culture evokes passion because it is where we live and where we formulate our most intimate hopes. Until both premises, each in its way an evasion of mature politics, are transcended, we will have a hard time sticking by our convictions when the spotlight is on us, or else we will only do so weakly. In that failure, we create a self-fulfilling prophecy, discrediting the notion of a richly embodied liberal vision rather than a mere call for income redistribution, which has its place. but only inspires up to a point. As someone said, we do not live by bread alone.

When Dr. Dean realizes this point, and I don't think it's beneath his intellectual capacity to do so if we in the netroots think out the case and make an argument, I have little doubt he will get his fire back, which in its best manifestations, I submit, we sorely need. I'm fairly disgusted by his behavior in this episode, and now we all can learn from it. I think we need to learn that finding our voice for freedom is a worthy and urgent goal, more useful in the short run than people think.