THE CASE FOR LIBERALISM – PART II
There’s a reason why ninety-five percent of people in the arts are Democrats. An artistic gift is dropped on you by God and if you attend to the gift and you are true to it, you will sometimes be in need of a helping hand. Art is an imperative, stronger than commerce. Republicans don’t understand this. Republicans cherish you if you are rich and famous; they can’t do enough for you if there’s nothing you need. But when you’re hard up, don’t go to the front door of the mansion. Go around to the back; the hired help will take you in. And art speaks for the powerless. A poor child in the street is a better choice for point of view than the tycoon in his study. Thus we know Ishmael rather than Ahab, Huckleberry Finn rather than Judge Thatcher. . . .
I count on a civil society to defend me. Defending the powerless against the powerful is the basic task of government, an article of faith in the America that I grew up in.
Equality is Democratic bedrock. . . . We Democrats are inclusive and integrationist to the core. We believe in crossing social lines and climbing up through strata. We’re fond of cities where people merge and life bubbles up from below, where high society hangs out with show folks. Bankers meet dancers. Lutherans consort with Catholics. Samaritans mill around with the Judeans.
In the Democratic Party you can be yourself. If George W. Bush had been a Democrat he wouldn’t have had to deny his interesting past. Cocaine? Tell us about it. Draft-dodging? We know about that too. . . .
Democrats believe in individualism. Social class does not tell the story, or religion, or political party, or race, or nationality. . . .
Democrats are diehard teachers. Education is a heroic task and it’s the answer to just about anything. The Peace Corps was pure Democratic idealism. . . . Education is an expensive proposition, but there’s no choice. Nobody is born smart and we need good schools. . . .
When you wage war on the public school, you’re attacking the mortar that holds the community together. You’re not a conservative; you’re a vandal! The sorehead vote is out there. All those guys who have a few beers and wonder why they should have to pay taxes for the schools when their kids have graduated. What’s the logic there? And you can rouse those people up and you can elect a school board to take revenge on the teachers and you do your community no favor. . . .
The sexual lives of our neighbors are not of profound interest to us. Republicans for some reason are troubled by homosexuality and they can’t figure out how not to think about it. Hunger and homelessness do not get their attention, but the sight of two women kissing gets them all buzzed, what a porch light does for moths. Democrats care more about healthcare and other staples of middle-class life. When you drive out of St. Paul to the Republican suburbs, you see what the New Deal and the Fair Deal and the Great Society accomplished. They enabled people of modest means to get a leg up in the world and eventually become right-wing reactionaries and pretend that they sprang fully formed from their own ambitions with no help from anybody and so they vote to deny to other people what they themselves were freely given. Bless their hearts. But they’re not Democrats!
The values of Democrats are rooted in courtesy and kindness. Liberalism is the politics of kindness. It’s all about opening up the castle, letting the air in. . . .
My father thought the baccalaureate service at the high school was silly on the face of it—mere religiosity; an attempt by the indifferent to play at religious ritual and thereby assuage their guilty conscience. And that’s the Republican Party. Its Christianity is about half fake because it scorns Jesus’ command to love thy neighbor as thyself and it abuses any who take the commandment seriously. Better to be a principled atheist than a Christian for show. A man who employs the Lord as a special effect and makes a public performance of piety deadens his own spiritual life and puts his own soul in danger. America is not a religious country. . . .
If God were looking for a nation to carry out his will on earth, it wouldn’t be this one. And it wasn’t leftist professors who led us into the sins of the flesh; it was Capitalist entrepreneurs. If the Pharisees really wanted to make this a God-fearing nation, they’d be taking their cudgels against their fellow Republicans!
--Excerpted from Garrison Keillor