Fighting for What Doesn't Count? (aka Apoplepsy About Warren)

A note on the left's outcry over Rick Warren being invited to the inaugural prayer. The American left has devoted far too much time and energy to fighting symbolic battles over whose cultural iconography will reign. From school prayer to flag burning to the visibility of fundamentalist loonies, the left has fretted and frenzied over the cultural influence of the right, draining energy from the substantive contests over policy and power, and simultaneously offering kerosine to the right's bonfire of its particular enemy effigies.

Of course, the right exerts even more time and energy into this fight - to see entire elections revolve around whether stone inscriptions of the Ten Commandments will be publicly displayed in a Georgia courtroom attests to this. But these symbolic cultural tugs-of-war are a winning strategy for the right and not for the left, and we must recognize this key asymmetry in the playing field of American politics. To engage the right on their terms, fighting over whether or not a prayer is said before the high school football game, is a stupendous tactical error. It is political suicide, akin a tribal guerilla army donning a uniform and walking straight into a Soviet armored regimen for an open firefight. To fight over cultural symbols is to engage the right on their terms, within their cognitive framework of the world. Successful progressive coalitions have always been constructed around a scaffolding of pragmatism, practicality, fairness, and a broad agreement to ignore one another's quirks, peculiarities, and creeds, even when and if they assume a noxious dominance in the popular culture. Politics that concerns itself with the latter is not really a progressive politics at all, but really an expression of personal wishes and cultural discomfort masquerading as enlightened liberalism.

I say, let Warren have his day. From the grade school locker-room, to incongruent and abusive human relationships, to the rocky terrain of American politics, the most efficacious disarming of a bully is often achieved by simply walking away, and constructing your own better future. Without the cultural bogeyman of the "other" to fight, whether they be called "Communists", "Hollywood," "Atheists," the right's raging cultural and religious fires will diminish to a whimpering ember deprived of fuel.