People who believe that their values are under assault? They're right!

[QC]

...though not in the way they think.

We're constantly hearing that many, or even most, Americans believe that their values are under assault.

Today, flipping through a copy of Newsweek, I saw a figure of something like 64% for those who think that religion is being attacked in America.

I'm as tired of this argument as anyone here. There's a church on just about every corner in my town, and I go to one of them most Sundays. No one has stopped me. Homeland Security hasn't busted in during the services and rounded us all up. The religious bookstores in town are still in operation. The preachers haven't been sent away to the gulags--instead they seem to be running most things around here. I suspect it's the same where most of the rest of us live.

But I think it is worth considering where this feeling so many people have is coming from. And having thought about it a lot lately, I think they are right, though not in the way they think.

Look at what has happened to working people in recent years:

• Median family incomes have stagnated since the early 1970s, and the only reason they have not crashed outright is that the two-income family is now the norm. In other words, just to keep their heads above the water, most families now must have two incomes, and often multiple jobs for each partner. That means that many kids are pretty much raising themselves, since mom and dad are always at work.
  
  
• Speculators have it just about made it impossible for working people to own houses.
  
  
• Job security is nonexistent. The old ideal of being rewarded for hard work is finished, because we are all expendable now.
  
  
• Benefits, when they even exist at all, generally suck now. Even if you have insurance, you can still end up in a deep hole if you get sick.
  
  
• The popular culture really is increasingly cheap, stupid, and vulgar.
  

In other words, people who work for a living feel vaguely but deeply uneasy about their lives right now, and for good reason.

The problem, I think, is that this justified unease is being skillfully misdirected. All of these troubling developments I named are the product not of some "elite" of artists and schoolteachers and the like, but of the hypercapitalism that has reigned in America since Reagan and his crew oozed into the White House. The idea that profit is the only legitimate goal in life has made workers expendable and insecure. The notion that the market best determines the value of all things, even cultural ones, has cheapened and vulgarized our lives more than any conspiracy of subversive, embittered English professors could ever hope to do.

Yet the very ones responsible for all this have managed to convince their victims that someone else--namely, us--is at fault. The so-called "War on Christmas" is but one strategy. As others have argued, an economic struggle has been propagandized into a cultural one, with liberals/progressives cast as the villains.

So here's the question: What can we do about it? How can we fight back? If we don't do something, I think we can only look forward to being blamed more and more as things get uglier.

[ananda]

1. Why not just..

.. live and let live.

Religious people go to your churches, and others do what you think best.

Tolerance, a scarce virtue these days... let's get it back.

Sue

[QC]

2. That's not the point.

Working people's insecurities are successfully being sold to them as cultural when they are actually economic in nature. What can we do about that?

[Warpy]

5. The only way is to rediscover the Democratic value

of economic justice. That means telling people who have been hammered by a vicious tax structure and disappearing benefits just WHY this is happening and what the party is prepared to do about it. Let them know what the real inflation rate is, not the fake rate caused by offshoring all their jobs. Let them know what increased worker productivity has meant for CEOS and don't let them forget that every bit of extra work that's been loaded onto their backs has fattened a Dick Cheney to the point he's ready to pop.

Of course, if we're going to discard the dogma of absolutely unrestricted trade with countries that have protections for their own workers, of supply side economics, of neoclassical economics in general, we're going to have to come up with a platform the DLC aint gonna like.

Only by readdressing the kitchen table issues of the ordinary working people who have been kept artificially poor and then stripmined by an unfair tax system for the pst 37 years can we possibly get them to get off their sofas on election day to vote. Only by giving them some hope for a better future can we convince them that maybe whining that a majority religion is being picked on is a load of rubbish.

Business as usual just isn't going to do it for any of them.

[QC]

7. I agree. It's time to be Democrats again.

Why do so many find the very suggestion so terrifying?

[Johonny]

6. I think you'll find

that this not a new trick. A newspaper of 50 years ago will be filled with editorials talking about the fall of morals and such not. It's still used because clearly it still works.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

3. An interesting note

Whereas these people are saying their religion is under attack--in Cincinnati today a mosque and a building associated with it were bombed. Whose faith is under attack again?

[QC]

4. Yeah, the "religion under attack" business is bogus.

Nonetheless, it's apparently a very effective way to divert attention from those who are actually responsible for making families so insecure.

[cpamomfromtexas]

8. Repubs use the "first law of thermodynamics"

When the heats on someone else, it's not on them!

[tx_dem41]

9. The first thing we need to realize is that the hard-working poor,

salt-of-the-earth and religious, were ONCE the Democratic base.

The second thing we can do is realize that due to the facts that you state in your OP, these people CAN be persuaded to vote Democratic again.

The third thing we can do is open our party up to these would-be voters by proposing a more populist economic agenda that centers on the working poor and middle class. (I realize that this is a very broad statement...possibly we can fill in the blanks on this thread)

And the fourth thing we can do here (at DU) is not knee-jerk against any and all religion. People will not vote for you if you don't RESPECT their core beliefs. You don't have to agree with them, you don't have to even cater to them...but you have to RESPECT them. Actions such as calling religion a "myth" and making fun of rural churchgoers as "rednecks" will assure that this group will NEVER vote Democratic again. And, it will cast our party into a state very close to permanent minority status.

[QC]

10. You're right. So how do the bridge the gaps between our current base

and our traditional base. Frankly, the two do not seem to like each other very much.

[QC]

11. Shameless bump here for an important issue.

In fact, I think that answering the values charge is one of the most important things we need to be doing.

Getting people to discuss it is another matter, of course. Perhaps I should have made this some kind of flamebait--that always garners lots of discussion here.