To say that Todd Gitlin is a controversial, polarizing figure is, well, clearly within the realm of understatement. His opinions on media and society stretch from his tenure as President of the Students for a Democratic Society through his most recent book on activism. And while I don’t always agree with him, his piece in the most recent issue of Dissent magazine is a way of looking a politics that I’d yet to consider.
Of American politics Gitlin writes:
A crucial asymmetry has opened up in the relationship between parties, focused on interests and power, and movements, focused on ideals. In the early 1960s, the conservative movement set out to take over the Republican Party, warts and all, to convert it into a conservative party. Over the next decades—with the decisive enthusiasm of the Christian right—the movement succeeded.
In considering “the Left” he writes:
Liberal idealists and movement activists do not control the Democratic Party. Many disdain it as fatally corrupted by corporate financing. The movements have gone their own ways for decades, fighting their own issue campaigns. “The left establishment,” as the peerless political reporter Thomas B. Edsall puts it in his new book, Building Red America, “has placed a far higher priority on specific, narrow legislative and policy goals, on grassroots demonstration projects, on ad hoc victories, and on culturally inflammatory initiatives that expend moral capital, than on building political power through Democratic Party victories.” This is not the mentality of an army, but of an assortment of militant interest groups.
The question arises for me: at what point do you give up ideals to achieve the goal?
Virginians go to the polls tomorrow to vote on a measure that will amend the Commonwealth’s constitution to ban same sex couples from procuring any of the privileges according married heterosexuals. It would define marriage as being between one man and one woman and would go even further preventing Virginia from legally recognizing any relationship that seeks to “approximate the…effects of marriage.”
Supporters of said amendment say they are concerned about “activist judges” but when put with questions about how this amendment would affect the rights of unmarried heterosexual couples these same supporters are confident that those same judges will be able to correctly interpret the laws.
Intractable stupidity demonstrated for your pleasure.
Yet, groups like HRC and NGLTF insist on continuing to force the word marriage when polls have consistently shown that upwards of 50% of those surveyed were in favor of civil unions (which, by the way, would confer under the law to homosexuals all the privileges that marriage confers on heterosexuals).
So what’s more important: the ideal of acceptance (um…because being able the ride in the front of the bus completely wiped out racist attitudes about Black Americans) or the rights themselves?
Personally, I probably won’t vote tomorrow. DC is so heavily Democrat that most of our elections are decided in the Democratic primary. I’m also not entirely convinced that the system is worth saving.
Cross posted in abbreviated form at Amphetameme