The liberal's cardinal sin

As a self-styled liberal and far-left progressive, I know I’ve often caught myself assuming that people to the right of me are less in support of human rights than I am. This is equivalent to the conservative tactic of accusing liberals of attacking liberty and restricting freedom.

Liberty, freedom, and human rights are not political views, they are moral views. Politics is where we differ on how to achieve those moral high points. This isn’t to sugarcoat the entirety of the political spectrum as uniformly supporting the same ideals. I believe that there are enemies of freedom and human rights, but accusing everyone with a different political opinion than me of being those enemies prevents me from accurately identifying and calling them out when I do come across them.

This applies to a lot of political discussions I’m involved in: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, health care reform, Guantanamo detainee housing, and more. All are curtailed by these accusations. We need to stop making them.

But that can be difficult; bipartisanship is an old tune when you’re working with people who don’t want to compromise. Hence, the value in Obama’s approach comes from the realization that as many of the people opposing health care reform do so on the basis of their own beliefs as do on the basis of corporate interests. Estranging those people by making them feel as though their opinion is not valid just makes for more political trouble down the line.

Now, that becomes a moot point when you have a GOP that’s adopted fringe tactics to delegitimize the President in any way, but we elected Obama to be better than that. He’s delivering. We don’t have what I’d call substantial health care reform, but it ain’t meaningless either. Us progressives need to stop arguing that Obama has betrayed our ideals and wake up to the fact that he did what we thought was impossible. We’ve broken a unified Republican opposition, and we’re on the way to lowering costs, bringing down the deficit, and providing substantial subsidies to people significantly above the federal poverty line.

When we equate political aims with moral beliefs, we estrange more people than we endear ourselves to, and we blind ourselves to what little good we can wrestle out of a deeply broken political system. It’s time to stop that equation, and to work for real change, both in the current bills, and in ending the necessity of a supermajority to pass anything. That is change we can believe in.