Occasionally I look at No More Mister Nice Blog, and a couple posts on practical politics caught my interest. One asks, Why Gay Marriage and Not Other Issues? Indeed, we're suddenly seeing an astonishing amount of progress on gay marriage at the same time far right Republicans, at least where they've seized power, are passing draconian anti-abortion laws, are restructuring tax bases to even more favor the rich, are underming public employee unions and bankrupting school systems -- all things that are vastly unpopular according to every known poll, but they seem to be able to run roughshod anyway. So, why gay marriage?
One reason, I think, is that LGBT people have fought relentlessly for respect and rights, especially since the beginning of the AIDS epidemic. They've shouted and implored and appealed to the rest of the public's better nature. And they've maintained a sense of group identity -- they're very politically active on multiple fronts as an interest group. This really isn't happening anymore regarding abortion rights -- in large part because many people don't see any threat to legal abortion (often because, where they live, there is no real threat), there isn't an impassioned, organized societal bloc fighting to keep reproductive rights alive. [ . . . ]
Again, I think that when people regard themselves as an interest group, and make it known in the political arena that you ignore their group concerns at your peril, things change. On guns, gun-control proponents don't fight relentlessly as a bloc -- whereas pro-gunners absolutely do, which is why they win nearly all the time. Poor and working-class people don't vote and agitate as a bloc -- certainly not across racial lines. And so they're ignored.
I think members of a group need to be politicized, and not easily mollified. If politicians feared that women (or fertile womwen, or fertile heterosexuals of both genders) were highly attuned across the country to the reproductive-rights threat, they might fear punishment at the polls if they pushed for draconian abortion laws. If poor and middle-class voters routinely voted their class interests, politicians would fear crossing them.
Gay people (and their families and friends) have made it clear that they're politically engaged on gay issues. And that makes a big difference.
One can think of a few other reasons: that at least some politically connected big donors are gay or otherwise deeply engaged in this issue, so there's actually money behind this issue; that gay people are often well-regarded, and well-publicized, celebrities; that nearly everyone knows actual gay people and increasingly respects them; that marriage reinforces the conservative "family values" meme; that anti-gays almost always are recognized now (mostly for the reasons above) as ignorant louts. The latter is perhaps the biggest change: perhaps as recently as ten years ago homosexuals were the last group it was respectable to hate. And bigotry is one of those traits that thrives in crowds: it is a chit to join the crowd, and thereby the crowd validates your own base instincts. But as the mob thins out, people become more reluctant to join in. A decade ago right-wing preachers led the assault, but more and more they stand alone, losing their cloak of community leadership and turning into dead-end cranks.
Of course, one other reason is that gay marriage doesn't change anything else that really matters. It does nothing to reverse the slide toward economic inequality. It has nothing to do with the financialization of the economy. It offers virtually no support for job security or social security. It doesn't touch the culture of corruption that pervades politics and the media. It won't stop us from going to war. And the list could go on and on. One reason lack of a marriage option discriminates against gays is that it makes it harder to get health insurance. Gay marriage helps that problem, but only very marginally -- the real solution there is universal health insurance.
But I think the author is right, that the main reason is that there has been an organized political movement to advance equal rights for gays. That also is the case for marijuana legalization, which also in the last decade has gone from something no politician would dare talk about to something that has begun to poll favorably -- one recent poll gives it majority support. Yet other issues (abortion and guns most obviously) trend the opposite way, even against popular opinion, largely because they have intense pressure groups that can be effective given the general corruptness of the political system.
Here's another quote from No More Mister Nice Blog (I guess we'll have to call him NMMN), starting with the observation that there's something like 90% support for background checks for gun sales, but nobody's going to make that happen, because a small number of gun nuts are much more organized than the masses who'd like to keep guns away from the crazy and malicious:
Actually, it's not "almost impossible to manufacture that [action] artificially." In fact, we know exactly how to do it: just do exactly what the right has done for past thirty years. Develop media that politicize citizens with propaganda and get those citizens to seek out that propaganda day in and day out, as entertainment. Pay lots of people lots of money to make that audience increasingly paranoid about their imminent loss of freedom, autonomy, and money because of what the evil bastards on the other side are doing. Repeat as necessary.
Fox News and talk radio have been doing this for decades. So have organizations like the NRA on individual issues. They've learned how to prime people to take action (at least we assume fired-up right-wingers will take action, if only at the polls, and that threat is enough to make us take right-wingers' opinions seriously).The Obama campaign got the Democratic voter base fired up about a lot of issues -- the availability of birth control, for instance. It gave voters a plan of action -- vote Obama -- and they took action.
But right-wingers do this every day of every year, in election season and out. The way Democrats get voters fired up for a presidential election, the right gets its base fired up for everything. That's why Democrats are competitive in presidential elections, but overmatched between them.
I could go into a screed here about how corrupt the political system is, and how we need to get the money out of it, but that still wouldn't account for the intensity advantage that single-issue obsessives have over general interests, or the advantage that private interests have over public concerns. What's needed there is some kind of organization drive to counter all the other organized interests. One can look to a few examples in history. We tend to view unions as a special interest group now, but that wasn't always the case: during their peak period (in the US), they tended to take a broader view. The civil rights movement, and the new left movements of the late-1960s and early-1970s -- anti-war, women's rights, environmental concerns, consumer interests -- each served to unify broad swathes of the populace, and had significant effects at least at the time (not that they've stuck around the defend our gains).
I don't have a full proposal ready to go here, but for me the key issue of our time is reversing inequality and building public goods to increase the general wealth. Back around 1935, Huey Long set up a national network of political clubs to support his run for president, and he came up with a slogan that fits the times today as well as it did then: Share the Wealth. Long's own thinking on this wasn't very well developed -- he mostly came up with redistribution schemes, not that there's no need for that -- but the sentiment is right, plus he hitched the slogan to the organizational drive needed to promote it. This is only the germ of an idea, but it's the right combination.