Home > The Higher Calling of the Low Road

The Higher Calling of the Low Road

by Open-Publishing - Wednesday 10 August 2005
1 comment

Discriminations-Minorit. Parties USA Wayne Besen

by Wayne Besen

It is the 21st Century and the cover of Time Magazine has pictures of a chimpanzee and God under the bold headline, "Evolution Wars". I turn on the television and a non-descript talking head is promoting the bizarre idea that tax cuts for the rich lead to increased tax revenue. I flip the channel and an effeminate man is lisping about how he prayed away the gay.

How did such weird and scientifically bankrupt ideas find their way into mainstream culture?

The answer is at once simple and scary. GLBT and progressive organizations have long been outmatched, outworked and most importantly outfunded by the far right. For the past four decades, conservatives have plotted to remake America in their image by forming crackpot think tanks, biased media outlets and faux research groups designed to ape respectable mainstream institutions. They have largely been successful and as a result, dominate the national debate and control Capitol Hill.

Fortunately, this dominance may be ending, as progressives finally get angry enough to act, and serious enough to organize. The Washington Post reported on Sunday that 80 wealthy liberal donors have pledged to give at least $1 million each to a new group, the Democracy Alliance, which will fund an array of advocacy groups and think tanks to promote progressive ideas and combat conservative propaganda. The group has a goal of raising at least $200 million.

"To be effective in the 21st century in promoting your beliefs, it is necessary to have a financially secure institutional infrastructure that has the capacity to promote consistently and coherently a set of ideas, policies and messages," Rob Stein, a Democratic strategist who created the Alliance, told The Washington Post. "We understand that it is very hard to promote a belief system and to be operationally high performing if you don’t have multi-year funding."

The new group certainly has a major challenge ahead of it. In 2003, Stein told The Post, 19 progressive organizations with budgets surpassing $1 million spent a total of $75 million. In contrast, the 24 national think tanks on the right had $170 million in spending, along with state-based policy centers’ $50 million and campus-based conservative policy groups’ $75 million to $100 million.

It is hard to believe, but there is a huge $295 million to $75 million funding imbalance favoring the right. This means that when we engage in political crossfire, to use the popular CNN metaphor, progressives are shooting with BB guns and conservatives are blasting us with bazookas. We are not poor people, so there is no excuse for this.

It is about time that good Americans stand up and combat the dangerous and kooky ideas of the far right. The reason we are now in a political pickle is that we have taken the dumbest route possible: The High Road.

For years, we have patted ourselves on the back, stuck our noses in the air and laughed off surreal right wing ideas.

"No one is going to actually believe that global warming isn’t real," we scoff, as we wave a dismissive hand.

"The evolution battle was definitively settled at the Scopes trial in 1925," liberals confidently assert.

"No one really thinks homosexuality is a casual choice, like choosing between hair gel or mousse," we self-assuredly cackle, as out leaders glide past "fly-over" country.

If you haven’t noticed, we are out of power. We can no longer afford to dismiss the right and refuse to debate by arrogantly saying that we "don’t want to dignify" the idiocy of their ideas. In the effort not to dignify, we allow our opponents to glorify the inane. When we don’t competitively offer a dialogue, it becomes a right wing monologue. Until Air America, for example, Rush Limbaugh freely spoke into the void created by our silence.

The high road is quaint, but it is not the road to victory. This, of course, does not mean we lower our ethical or moral standards, it simply implies that we vigorously engage and confront the right by knocking down each and every dirty lie and myth, while proudly putting forth coherent policies that make sense to the American people. It is time we meet the right on the low road they prefer to travel on and defeat them at their own gritty game.

Thanks to the Democracy Alliance, the gay movement is on the verge of getting a much-needed boost, albeit this assistance only deals peripherally with gay rights. But, the Alliance is crucial because at the heart of the anti-gay industry are phony think tanks that hoodwink people into believing that their prejudice is grounded in science. Just look at the names of our opponents and this will become self-evident: The Family Research Council, The Family Research Institute, The Culture and Family Institute.

The strategy of conservatives, particularly on gay rights, has been to create confusion and throw enough pseudo-scientific dung against the wall in hopes that some of it will stick. Well, without proper funding on our side, a lot of it has stuck, and now we live in a stinking political outhouse. This new effort to dismantle the Neo-Puritan propaganda machine is a godsend for the GLBT community and essential for winning a culture war where we have been badly outmaneuvered. It is finally time to put away our slingshots and bring out the big guns.

http://www.waynebesen.com/columns/2...

Forum posts

  • Just because the Right has taken the low road does not mean that every issue backed by the Left is correct. The demise of either side is brought on by elitism. The Right is going down in flames for this very reason. The Left had best be taking notes.