Another question lost in the dust...

I know that there has already been lots of blogging about this all week long, especially at Kos. I'm thinking of Dean's statement about "not winning the war" in Iraq and the debate that statement sparked throughout the blogosphere. I don't want to discuss the validity of the statement itself, although it is interesting to see how little discussion has focused on the claim itself (i.e. are we winning the war in Iraq, or are we not? And by the way, since the war in Iraq has been so artfully equated with the war against "terror" by the Bush cabal, one could ask at the same time whether we are loosing that war too or not). And I don't really want to talk about how the mainstream media handled the whole thing either, even though that added much oil to the blogging fire.

What I find amazing, after reading some of threads Dean's statement provoked in the last week is how divided we progressives are when it comes to how we should behave in relation to our own beliefs.

Because at the end of the day, there are few people out there on the left of the blogosphere who argued that the statement was erroneous. What was being debated was the political soundness of making such statement. So on the one side, you had people with whom Dean's statement resonated deeply: "Oh my God, am I dreaming or is someone saying out loud what I have been thinking for who knows how long?"

And on the other side were those who chastised Dean for not thinking about the political consequences of making such claim: "Oh, no, there goes Howie again, telling the world what we actually believe in! That's it! We're cooked!"

That debate has been going on for a long time now: the "idealists" on the one side, and the "pragmatists" on the other. On the one hand are those who believe that the problem with the Democrats is that they don't stand firmly for what they believe in; on the other hand are those who believe that the problem rests in finding a way to "frame" these beliefs to make them "acceptable" to "mainstream America".

Lost in that broader debate is just what it is that we really believe in, and whether or not we progressives actually agree on a core set of beliefs or not.

All week long, all I could think of was what would each individual Democrat and progressive's answer be to that simple question: "Do I believe that the US is losing the war in Iraq?" Maybe there would be lots of "yes" to that question. Maybe there would be lots of "no". Maybe it would be fifty-fifty. Do I know? No, and neither do you. We don't know because we were too busy debating the political value of saying something, rather than thinking about whether "we" believe in that something or whether that something is true or not.

Of course, politics are politics, but I sometimes wonder whether the main problem with "us progressives" is that we fail to answer the more basic questions, the kind of questions that everyone in America is rightfully asking his/ herself in the silence of their own mind. I can imagine that people are wondering whether the US is winning the war or not. But I don't think they are wondering about whether X should be saying Y in Z way or not.

More importantly, the Democrats' tendency to shy way from that kind of questions only reinforces the belief that they do not stand for anything. Even if Americans are divided on that question ("Do I believe that the US is losing the war in Iraq, yes, or no?), the fact that no one is asking it does not help anyone figure out what the answer is.

I can believe that there is a war of ideas going on out there, but this sure is no way to be fighting it.

Tags: Howard Dean, progressive, Democrat, grassroots

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