NPR LIBERALISM.

NPR LIBERALISM. Right on, Sam! Very well put. I read George Sciallaba's multi-book review last night on the bus, and the section Sam noted made me want to call The Nation and demand that they Cancel My Subscription, except the operator in Sioux Falls would probably point out sweetly that according to their records, my subscription seems to have expired in 1993.Here's the paragraph following the one Sam quotes:

How to accomplish it? ["It" being a diminishment of the influence of "Limbaugh, Falwell, Rove."] I don't know. Perhaps population exchanges or year-abroad programs between blue and red states. Perhaps The Nation should offer free subscriptions to registered Republicans. Perhaps Katha Pollitt and Ann Coulter (or Thomas Frank and David Brooks, or Greg Palast and Matt Drudge) should barnstorm the country, the way Stanley Fish and Dinesh D'Souza did in the 1990s. Perhaps all secular liberals should sign a pledge: Every time one evangelical reads a nonreligious book, one of us will go to church. Somehow or other, someone must sow a healthy appetite for informed, discriminating political argument across large swaths of the electorate where it now appears lacking. Otherwise, public life will become wholly (what it now is largely) a marketing competition, and nothing more.

Unlike Sam, I'm kind of a reformer. I'm interested in campaign finance reform, other electoral reforms, Habermas-ian deliiberation. I think process matters and can be improved. But one reason that the reform agenda doesn't connect with people is that it's usually infected by this sort of attitude -- that if only everyone listened to All Things Considered and had A National Conversation about something or other, they would ultimately all come around to our side.You don't have reach Rosenfeldian levels of cynicism to be turned off by that. Isn't it enough to say that the first step toward more enlightened discourse is to take people's views seriously and treat them as held in good faith? Would enlightened discourse suggest that instead of offering some sort of deal under which "Every time one evangelical reads a nonreligious book, one of us will go to church," why not just make an effort to learn something about American evangelical protestantism, regardless of whether evangelicals hold up their end of the deal?(And, by the way, unless you've taken Pascal's Wager, you probably shouldn't go to church as part of a political bargain. You should go to church or temple if the exercise of religion in that form is meaningful to you. And, another thing, incidentally: there are quite a lot of people who are "secular" in a political sense who also do go to church because it is important to them personally. In fact, that's probably the majority of Americans, perhaps even of Nation readers, and one should at least be aware of that.)Obviously, there are some things that people believe that tend to be pretty unshakable -- views on abortion and gun regulation, for example -- and other things that are much more malleable and subject to debate, and require some knowledge, such as whether single-payer health care, the Schwarzenegger plan, or Health Savings Accounts are the best way to solve problems. It would be good to have better forums for those discussions -- for example, media that might give much more time to them. But it's always going to feel like "a marketing competition" in some ways (Justice Holmes didn't call it "the marketplace of ideas" for nothing) and if you're side doesn't win, it's a lot more effective to think about how you marketed your ideas than to pout about how you would have won but for the lousy discussion.One of the unappreciated strengths of the "netroots" crowd, by the way, is that they are incredibly realistic and respectful of this element of politics, and nearly immune from the NPR fallacy, even as their outrage at "Limbaugh, Falwell and Rove" is no less than Sciallaba's.

--Mark Schmitt