Thanksgiving Homework

If University of Chicago readers are anything like me, your programs are too easy and you're just itching for some more homework to do over the Thanksgiving break. As luck would have it, here is an assignment for you. Many of you will be spending time around lots of family, and, tragically, not every member of every family is as enlightened as we would like. Many of them may be conservative and/or Republican, and others will just want to hear what the smarty-pants college student at the dinner table thinks about the mid-term election results. So your homework, should you choose to accept it, is to think up something clever to say about why you're a Democrat and why it's good that Democrats are soon to be in power. And, as an internet personality, it's my job to help you.

I'm not actually the one who determines how you vote (maybe I will be some day, but for now it's up to you), so here is a quick range of options that might describe your situation. Maybe you're like Senator-elect Jim Webb of Virginia - someone who doesn't feel that he is particularly liberal but who is sick of the Republican BS. Webb worked in the Reagan administration, and he has been a lifelong military man; other turn-ons for Webb include walks on the beach, kittens when they yawn, and the Scots-Irish. This is the description of someone who thinks of himself as reasonable and realizes that there is no place for reason in the Republican party of today. More and more people who may not be bleeding hearts are finding that the Democratic party is the only one available for people who aren't complete psychopaths.

Or maybe you're more like me, and you identify yourself with liberal values. Fortunately, the list of desirable values that can now be considered liberal has grown dramatically in proportion to the growth of the aforementioned insanity in the Republican party. It used to be that the values liberals could claim exclusivity over were limited to things like taking care of each other, social justice, and compassion. Today, we can add reasonable and ernest political debate, intellectual integrity, the constitution, and more.

But, as I have pointed out before, probably the single most important thing you can do is make sure that whatever your rationale is, it can be summed up in one or two sentences. We lose the debate before it even gets started when Republicans can say "less taxes, less government" (even if it's not exactly true) and we come up with a fifteen point plan for why Democrats would do everything Republicans do but just a little better. If you're fortunate enough to think of yourself as having liberal values, Michael Tomasky has already done your work for you. In this piece he spells out the case for Democrats to embrace goal of "the common good." This is in contrast to the Republican platform of "personal this, private that" - a platform that puts everyone out on their own. So that's my plan. If anyone asks me to tell them why I'm a Democrat, it's because Democrats are the ones who believe we all need each other. What's yours?