Views » June 16, 2003

Needed: A Vast Liberal Conspiracy

By Ana Marie Cox

For all the indoctrination going on—you know, gay recruitment, media bias, and liberal professor brainwashing—it’s awfully hard to find the central headquarters for the side that supposedly won the culture war. Believe me, I’ve tried.

I know the right has recruitment centers and even training programs for young people interested in joining—and possibly leading—the conservative movement. There’s the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), which funds dozens of conservative college papers and several full-tuition scholarships in addition to running a speakers’ bureau and various conferences for future conservative leaders. Recipients of the ISI’s largess include Larry Arnn, the current president of Hillsdale College, as well as younger conservative leaders like Marc Theissen, who edited the ISI-sponsored Vassar Spectator and until recently was an aide to Jesse Helms.

The Arlington, Virginia-based Leadership Institute, meanwhile, has an alumni list that reads like a Fox News guest roster: anti-campaign finance reform crusader Senator Mitch McConnell, tax-slashing strategist Grover “starve the state” Norquist, and Ralph Reed have all attended one of the organization’s various programs (which include “Effective Television Techniques”—parts I and II, mind you—and “Candidate Development”).

All this from the side of the aisle that claims to be under siege from “liberal media elites.” If the left controls the culture, shouldn’t there be some place where we go to learn how to do this?

In order to find out, I first did what any college student looking for information would do: I searched the Web. Using Google, first I tried “liberal leadership training,” which produced mostly a selection of liberal arts colleges course catalogs. Then I tried “progressive leadership training,” which scored a direct hit! Alas, [url=http://www.progressiveleadership.com]http://www.progressiveleadership.com[/url] is not the left’s answer to ISI, but rather “an international executive coaching and leadership development firm.”

The more motivated student might actually, say, pick up the phone or thumb through lefty magazines. Where would this take our hypothetical young would-be progressive leader? “That’s a very good question,” says Nick Penniman, a youngish progressive leader himself and the executive editor of TomPaine.com. “It’s sad, actually. There’s no clear overarching organization.”

Let’s be clear: Part of the reason it’s more difficult to find liberal leadership training is that there is less money floating in liberal coffers. But some sources of funding do exist: The Florence Fund gave TomPaine.com, for instance, $2 million. The Tides Foundation regularly hands out grants of tens of thousands of dollars to groups such as Adbusters magazine and NORML. There’s some money out there: Won’t someone use it to train progressive leaders?

Hans Riemer, the Washington director of Rock the Vote, suggests that a search for “progressive leadership training” was not, perhaps, focused enough. He advises looking for “environmental leadership training” or “feminist leadership training,” and, sure enough, this produces results. If you want to save the earth or protect reproductive rights, you can sign up with the Green Corps’ Field School or the Feminist Leadership Institute.

This is heartening, and yet it also feels like a symptom of a larger problem: the chronic homelessness of many would-be progressive leaders. Activists with a liberal bent seem to instinctively distrust institutions that are directly connected to the dominant system. “It’s almost bred into you,” Riemer says. “You’re taught that party politics are evil and you don’t have any leaders that you’re really excited about. You just sort of focus on your cause.”

The conservative movement doesn’t suffer from this split between an “activist” wing and a political wing: They are one and the same. The success that such right-wing activists as Reed and Norquist have had in actually formulating government policy begs the question of their counterparts in the Democratic Party: Who thinks Medea Benjamin, co-founder of Global Exchange, will be advising senators on the draft of the next trade bill? Could Eli Pariser, the director of the progressive coalition MoveOn.org, be a successful campaign consultant?

The Democrats have shunned liberal activists on the theory that all major elections hinge on a sliver of undecided centrist voters. This leads to centrist candidates who, to inquisitive voters, appear indecisive. Recently, the Democratic Leadership Council, self-appointed party strategists of the 2004 election, underlined this point by launching an attack on former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean. Until he distinguished himself by opposing the invasion of Iraq, Dean was himself a DLC poster boy—he’s the only Democratic candidate, for instance, to earn an A rating from the National Rifle Association. Lately, however, he’s built upon the groundswell of support that greeted his Iraq statements with further attacks on the more mainstream candidates, declaring himself to be “from the Democratic wing of the Democratic party.”

In full responsible-adult scold mode, the DLC denounced Dean as being from the “McGovern-Mondale wing” of the party, “the wing that … transformed Democrats from a strong national party into a much weaker regional one.” In other words, while the available supply of trained liberal leaders continues to dwindle, the party long associated with liberal reform now seems bent on wiping out the demand for them as well.

There’s the vast liberal conspiracy: All dressed down, with no place to go.

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• Reader Comments

  The reason the republicans have a “training camp” is because there are so few young republicans. Most young people are democrat and as they get older lean more to the right. 

  Posted by Brad on Jun 16, 2003 at 8:08 PM

  We need a real conspiracy. this falls under the what conspiracy?

  We need to get this going… a serious one

  Posted by Nadin on Jun 16, 2003 at 8:34 PM

  That DLC crack about the “Mcgovern-Mondale wing” is one more nail in the coffin of my Democratic Party membership. Traditionally, progressive Democrats weren’t a “wing” but the heart and soul of the party. If anything “transformed Democrats from a strong national party into a much weaker regional one,” it was the inevitable dissolution of the unholy alliance between liberal Northerners and Southern Dixiecrats. If the DLC’s answer to this process is to turn the party into a less reactionary branch of the GOP, they’ll have to do it without my support (or my vote).

  Posted by Drew on Jun 16, 2003 at 8:45 PM

  The DLC is a fifth column of Republicans whose aim is to lessen the differences between the GOP and the Democrats and to force the Democrats to compete on the GOP’s terms where the Democrats will NEVER have an upper hand.  They mistakenly believe that the Democratic Party needs to move to the right to win elections.  The only problem with that scenario is that too many DLC Democrats are already Republican-lite (look at Joe Lieberman), and when you run a Republican against a Republican, the voters will pick a Republican every time.  Have the Democrats learned nothing from the 2002 mid-terms?  Obviously not.

  The DLC is hell-bent on reducing the differences between the parties, not increasing them.  They appear to want to take choice away from the voters and homogenize all politics in America into one big single-party system. 

  The DLC is part of the problem, not part of the solution.  The Democrats will never win elections if they continue to misrepresent their natural base at the behest of the DLC and continue in their failure to organize an effective counter to the GOP machine and to Republicans in general.  Cowering and kowtowing to the GOP never got them anywhere and it isn’t getting them anywhere now. 

  Standing up to the GOP for the people who have no voice and no special interest money is the way to win votes and energize voters.  Giving the voters a real choice and a strong voice is how to win elections.  Blurring the lines only helps the GOP.  It is sad that this is a lesson that many national Democrats including the milquetoast leadership appear to have failed to have learned.

  Posted by Troy on Jun 17, 2003 at 7:00 AM

  So Drew, who would you vote for? Our two last elected presidents were from the DLC—let’s not thrown the baby out with the bathwater, for god’s sake! We have to get this country moving in the right direction again. ANY dem who runs will have my vote, altho’ I have my preferences now. I just hope we don’t continue to ‘eat our young’ with remarks like they made about Dean. That only helps the other side. 

  Posted by Pat on Jun 17, 2003 at 7:13 AM

• extended discussion >>>Continued...

  Discussions with more than 5 comments are continued on our special discussion page to encourage continuity and ease of use. There are currently 51 posts.

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