The History of Beer, Politics and Other Things
That title is borrowed from an email doing the rounds at the moment, and that I received this morning. It starts off with a weak joke about how civilization began with the invention of beer and consequently humanity was split into two groups: Liberals and Conservatives. Liberals are credited with “[the] domestication of cats, the trade union, … group therapy … and the concept of democratic voting” (those evil Liberals) and are identified by what they eat and drink (tofu, sushi, French food, imported beer and white wine), by what they do for a living (social workers, journalists, hair dressers, Hollywood dreamers) and by either being women or woman-like. Conservatives, on the other hand, eat red meat and potatoes and have manly jobs like big game hunter, rodeo cowboy, lumberjacks, construction worker, corporate executive and soldier.
What struck me about this email was not how obnoxious it is, but how it fits nicely into the current received notion of what a Liberal is in this country. Liberals are the wine quaffing homos who want to live off the welfare state and Conservatives are the real people of America, the working johns who earn a living. So how did this happen? How did the American right manage to convince the working people of this country that they should look to the Conservatives to help them improve their lives?
The left are complicit in creating this image. George Orwell wrote that “the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents”, and it’s a sentiment that would spring to mind when I would be accosted by Socialist Workers (a political party in the UK) on the Holloway Road in London, screeching out their dogma in voices like sawing sheet metal. I felt the same disgust when I saw a man chalking ‘Bush Out’ in Union Square, but replacing the ‘S’ with a swastika, while the political puppeteers make ‘jokes’ about Bush and Cheney in high-pitched voices. These people seem to represent me and my beliefs in the popular imagination, but in fact do no more for me than grate my nerves.
Real, serious socialists (or leftists, or liberals – whatever you want to call yourself) need to reclaim the political arguments in this country and remind everyone who earns less than $100,000 a year that their interests are not best served by a party who wants to reduce the tax burden for the rich and free corporations of all those icky regulations that stop them from hammering every last drop of worth out of their employees before letting them free to fend for themselves in sickness or in old age. And the next time someone asks you how you feel about gay marriage tell them not as strongly as you do about America being below about thirty-five other countries in the infant mortality world rankings, below Cuba even.
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