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Me too....BUT I read this yesterday, and it makes SO much sense...and it scared me, because it made me realize how much work there is to do. Please, please, if you read no other blog today, go to www.mydd.com and read Chris Bowers's analysis of what we need to do, long-range.
from www.mydd.com
"As far as I can tell, the main problem facing Democrats is that conservatives, when compared to liberals, have superior organizational control and power over what Louis Althusser famously called Ideological State Apparatuses and what on this blog I have taken to calling ideological conversion machines. To put this another way, I believe that conservatives are largely in control of those mechanisms that determine an individual's ideological outlook, which these days is largely determinative of how an individual ends up voting. I believe that our problems are growing particuarly severe when it comes to four specific ideological machines:
* Education While education is the most unionized profession / industry in the country, and while voters with a post-graduate degree favor Democrats, outside of actual educators liberals are getting crushed by conservative organizing within the field of education. This is particularly true when it comes to on-campus student organizing in colleges and universities, where conservative student organizing is exponentially more advanced than liberal student organizing. This is also the case among school board seats that largely determine the curriculum of primary and secondary schools. It has been a decades-long priority among the Christian right to capture and dominate school boards, again with little organized liberal opposition outside of teacher unions. Of course, this hasn't stopped some factions of the Democratic party from assisting in the demonizing of teacher's unions which remain pretty much our only bulwark against total conservative domination of the American educational system.
* Labor Speaking of unions, we must increase union density, or we will continue to lose ground in another major area of ideological influence: the workplace. While union members tend to have a pro-Democratic partisan index of over twenty points, union density in the American workplace has steadily declined for the past forty years. If this situation is not reversed, liberalism will be facing a near-total collapse of influence over one of the nation's most powerful ideological conversion machines.
* Media. I expect all of us here know about The Republican Noise Machine by now, so there is no need to explain it in detail. It simply goes without saying that we must match or surpass the Republican Noise Machine or else conservatism will continue to dominate the nation's political discourse, which is an undeniably important ideological conversion machine.
* Religion While I have written in the past that long-term religious demographics clearly favor liberalism, .the fact remains that over the past three decades right-wing religious organizing has far surpassed that seen on left. During that time period, white Christians have become significantly more conservative, and considering the current imbalance of organizing within religious circles that trend will almost certainly continue. If this does happen, any gain Democrats make in this area from demographic trends will be significantly muted, if not entirely wiped out. The religious left absolutely must begin to organize voters of faith on an equal level to conservative efforts or else Democrats will continue to surrender yet another important ideological conservation machine."
www.mydd.com
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