What a Liberal Wants

Kevin Drum and Matt Yglesias are engaging in a bit of, as Kevin puts it "navel gazing," trying to at least define the parameters to define a liberal counter pitch to the conservative pitch "low taxes, traditional family values, and a strong military."

Kevin defines the problem as coming up with a pitch that with broad appeal that still manages to be defining of liberals as opposed to conservatives:

Laundry lists don't inspire anyone, and slogans are just....slogans. As Matt points out, "we're for the middle class" is useless as a guiding principle since everyone says they're for the middle class.

I don't have any kind of comprehensive answer to this problem of modern liberalism, but I'd like to toss out a few thoughts. The first one is this: conservatives have done a great job of building intellectual superstructures that support their actual policy goals. These superstructures all share two features: (a) they are intuitively appealing to ordinary people and (b) they very definitely aren't ideas shared by liberals.

Supply side economics is a good example of this. Basically, conservatives have made the case that low taxes on capital spur economic growth and therefore benefit everyone. This is both intuitively believable and personally appealing, since everyone likes low taxes. Whether it's correct or not is beside the point. What matters is that it's (a) understandable and (b) can act as a backstop for a whole raft of specific tax cutting measures favored by conservatives.

Basically, I think he's right. As I've seen written in other places, liberals need to brand themselves better.  So, taking Kevin's principles I'll take stab at advocating at least one pitch I think most people left of center can embrace. 

To me, on the list presented for the conservative side, the second entry, "traditional family values," cries out to be countered.  We are for "social tolerance." Some may say the word social isn't the best seller, but then again Social Security is doing OK in the polls these. And the idea that Democrats stand for tolerance, should be a bedrock principle and is the jumping off point for a number of specific Democratic ideas and rallying point against the legislated morality coming out of the other side these days.

I'll throw in one to counter the third conservative pitch, "a strong military."  On the face of it, I think most Democrats would argue that this isn't a point of differentiation, however, be that as it may, my counter pitch would be that liberals are for, "prudent strategic use of military force."  This test may not have prevented our current troubles in Iraq, but it would have given people more pause than was taken before we got in to them.