Thursday, February 20, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Cover story: The dirty word

Las Vegas liberals defend their turf

By Geoff Schumacher

Nevada is a conservative state. Its 110,540 square miles are populated largely by people who distrust the government. Either they were raised in this last frontier of hardscrabble individualism or they moved here to escape what they saw as oppressive taxation or burdensome rules back home. Whatever the case, they bristle every time they get a paycheck and find that the government has grabbed a healthy chunk of what they earned. They vote down bond issues to build public amenities such as parks and libraries. They supported the "protection of marriage" initiative to prevent gays and lesbians from receiving the social and financial benefits of legal marriage.

That's the majority of the 2.1 million people in the Silver State. But that characterization does not represent everybody. There are some Nevadans who hold liberal views, who view the government as a potentially positive force and appreciate the various improvements and services that tax dollars provide. These people want to help the homeless, improve the public schools, expand health care benefits, raise wages, protect the environment and eliminate racial, ethnic and gender bias in the workplace. Interestingly, these liberals may distrust the government, too, but for different reasons. They believe corporations--casinos, developers, mining companies, etc.--wield too much control over the government, to the detriment of the people and the state's general welfare.

To be sure, this latter group is small, concentrated primarily in urban areas of Las Vegas, Reno and Carson City. Its makeup is multicultural, with African-American and Latino residents having significant representation. Unions in Las Vegas are major purveyors of progressive thinking. The universities in Las Vegas and Reno are hotbeds of liberalism, though not nearly so much as their counterparts in other states. In Carson City, a cadre of liberals can be found in the halls of state government. The arts communities of Las Vegas and Reno are populated with liberal minds, as are Las Vegas' free weekly newspapers.

These pockets of liberalism are small but sometimes potent. The Culinary Union in Las Vegas has fought for and obtained living wages and job security for its tens of thousands of members, most of them women and minorities. Nevada has higher percentages of African-Americans and women in its Legislature than any other state (though not all of them are liberal). Environmental activists and like-minded politicians have protected hundreds of thousands of acres of habitat and beautiful mountain ranges at both ends of the state that otherwise may have become playthings of the private sector.

Still, those achievements pale in comparison to the victories chalked up by the state's dominant conservative ranks. Despite its rapid growth and demand for public services, Nevada remains a low-tax state--low property tax rates, no state income tax and almost nonexistent business taxes. Nevada is a right-to-work state, meaning employees can be fired without cause. The state government is a barebones operation, providing the minimum level of services so as to keep its nose out of the people's business (and wallets). Individual liberties, from smoking in restaurants to carrying guns to wasting water, remain bastions of the state's libertarian ethic. Casino companies get whatever they want if it will keep the tourists coming. Zoning rules are routinely changed to allow developers to scrape the landscape.

It is in this hostile climate that the state's few liberals subsist. In casual company, they might choose to keep their views to themselves rather than start a fight, because they know they are outnumbered. If they are more vocal about their progressive views, they run the risk of being marginalized--losing credibility for being so far outside the Nevada mainstream. Liberals who stick their necks out, however, sometimes are surprised to find like-minded folks in the unlikeliest places.

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Since the rise of Ronald Reagan, "liberal" has been a dirty word in America, immediately associated with phrases such as "soft on crime," "tax and spend" and "bleeding heart." As a result, most liberals now call themselves "progressives." The liberals in Congress are the Progressive Caucus. This state's liberal umbrella organization is the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada. Even the most liberal Nevadans interviewed for this story seemed to wince at embracing the label.

"We live in a complex world," says Randy Shelden, a UNLV criminal justice professor. "I hate pigeonholing people into narrow areas such as liberal, conservative, etc. I can't believe I'm saying it, but a lot of things Pat Buchanan has talked about recently I agree with. Sometimes I even agree with Bill O'Reilly."

Which is surprising when you consider that Shelden has to be one of the most liberal people in Nevada this side of some communist cell hiding out in the wilds near Winnemucca. Shelden falls far to the left of what the mainstream considers liberal, personified by, say, Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy.

"A Kennedy liberal would be one that pretty much accepts the status quo but believes that solutions should be to give the average citizen a bigger stake in the existing system," Shelden says. "They support things like unemployment benefits, creating new jobs and protecting the environment but all within the framework of the existing political and economic system."

Shelden, by contrast, shares the thinking of leftists such as Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn and Ralph Nader, who say the existing system requires fundamental changes. "The ultimate sources of our problems are not with the government but rather with the corporate control of the government," he says.

Shelden cites a favorite quote from philosopher John Dewey, who said government is merely the shadow that big business casts on society. "When you attack the government, say it's wrong or too big, you are really attacking the shadow. You're not getting to the real source."

For this reason, Shelden shares the conservatives' distrust of government. "I don't trust it for the simple reason that it's not our government anymore," he says. "It's a government of the rich, by the rich and for the rich. When we want the government off our backs, what we mean is the corporate government."

* * *

Michael Green, a Community College of Southern Nevada history professor, is more of a traditional liberal, falling somewhere between the New Deal philosophy of President Franklin Roosevelt and the "Great Society" vision of President Lyndon Johnson.

"A liberal is open-minded and tolerant and believes that society has a duty to take care of its members, including the less fortunate," Green says. "And if society generally will not do that job, then the government our society has created has to do it."

Green says his study of history strengthened his liberal views. "It showed me that we have a lot to be proud of and grateful for as a nation and a world community, but we have a lot to be ashamed of and a lot that needs repair."

Growing up during the Reagan era helped push Green to the left. "I had the common sense to understand that ketchup was not a vegetable, that trees caused a lot less pollution than other things did, and that the Contras were not the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers," he says, citing three well-known statements by Reagan.

Attending graduate school at Columbia University in New York City also had a big effect on Green. "When I went to New York, Ed Koch, the mayor, had just reduced his budget problem by clearing out the mental hospitals, which is an oversimplification. But the homeless problem there was incredible. And that breeds one of two reactions: It hardens your heart or it makes it bleed."

Green's brand of liberalism differs from Shelden's in that he'll often take realism over idealism. While the far left was advocating a vote for Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader in 2000, Green chose Democrat Al Gore, because Nader couldn't win. "When I voted in 2000 I very publicly said we need to elect Al Gore," he says. "I held my nose doing it. I can look at the 2004 Democratic field and say none of them works for me but I would rather have just about any Democrat than George W. Bush. And for those who disagree, I just hope that if they are women or they have wives and daughters, none of them ever needs an abortion."

As for why liberalism has lost ground in recent years, Green cites a lack of a sense of humor. "One of the reasons the right wing has been successful is that liberals often fail to see the humor in things. Few people want to listen to constant haranguing about how bad things are. Liberals don't seem to have the ability to speak the language of the average American."

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The philosophical foundation for Mike Slater, executive director of the Nevada Interfaith Council for Worker Justice, is fair play. "I grew up in a Democratic family," he says. "It was really a set of values based around fair play. What I have learned is how little fair play there really is in our economy and social system. I get very angry and frustrated by the fact that there are so many roadblocks to achieving some kind of middle-class life."

Slater helps organize unions, fights racial discrimination and advocates for affordable health care. "Here we are in 2003 and we can't really deny that there's widespread discrimination for African-Americans and Latinos," he says. "We have no consensus on people's access to education and health care. It was an achievement of a majority of people who had liberal values in the '50s, '60s and '70s that we had strong public institutions that provided for everybody. Slowly these institutions have become unraveled."

Slater says a lack of organization is the main reason progressive causes haven't made much headway in Nevada. "There is a leadership failure in the state across many sectors and a lack of organizational sophistication," he says.

Last year, Slater ran unsuccessfully for the state Assembly. He lives in a Republican-majority district in northwest Las Vegas, so he faced long odds. Nevertheless, he garnered a respectable 9,000 votes. Going into the election, Slater and his advisers figured 12,000 people would cast ballots in the district and that he would need a hair more than half of them in his corner. "Instead we had 20,000 people vote," he says. "It was an incredible turnout, especially by Republicans."

During the campaign, Slater was dismayed to learn from a phone survey that many voters didn't have any strong opinions. "The majority of the people didn't have an opinion on any of the issues of the day," he says. "We asked 8,000 voters about reproductive rights, and 55 percent were undecided whether abortion should be legal. More than 50 percent of people were undecided on all the questions."

Slater surmises that those undecided voters are "doing fine in their own little world and couldn't care less about the problems around them." But he isn't ready to attribute that attitude to the conventional wisdom that people come to Las Vegas to get away from involvement in public affairs. "The way people develop ties is by being involved in organizations where they interact with other people," he says. "We don't have those here."

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Liz Moore, Southern Nevada coordinator for the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada, was raised to believe that "being involved in your community was a normal and important idea." She says her parents "taught us that the meaning of community is that you look out for each other."

Moore has faced a formidable challenge in passing those principles on in Las Vegas. "Part of the problem about Las Vegas and the perception of conservatism is that the folks who are the most conservative are the most organized," she says. "They don't necessarily outnumber the progressive folks but they are better organized than we are. They can mobilize. It's a very disciplined group of folks who write checks when they're told to write checks. Folks who are progressive aren't necessarily so disciplined."

Moore says the key to building a progressive movement in Las Vegas is to get like-minded people together. "In most cities, when I move there I find one or two people who are part of the subculture I'm looking for and then I meet everybody else. In Las Vegas the connections just aren't there. The community infrastructure hasn't kept up with the growth. The more folks can get to know each other, that's a real first step in building power and changing the self-perception of the community."

Of late, Moore has been one of the leaders of the anti-war movement in Las Vegas. As a member of the Coalition to Prevent the Erosion of Human Rights, she's helped organize public discussions on the USA PATRIOT Act and protest marches on the Strip against war in Iraq.

"U.S. foreign policy is so sadly, unfortunately, driven more by the interests of large corporations that fund campaigns than by anything called the interest of the American people," Moore says. "I am finding this time right now really frightening. We've sort of slid back into an arms crisis. We're talking about nuclear weapons again. I was born in 1973, and happened to be at a summer camp with a bunch of German kids the day that East and West Germany were reunited. In my adult lifetime people have not been talking so much about nuclear weapons and now they are and it's freaking me out."

At the same time, Moore is concerned about the erosion of civil liberties since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. "Things that were once illegal because of the biases they encouraged are now legal," she says.

Whatever the subject, Moore sees her liberalism through a very practical lens that most everybody can identify with: "The farm community I grew up in was the kind of place where if somebody got sick, somebody would bring a casserole over. There was a real sense of neighborliness. For me, a lot of the stuff that is at the base of my political ideas is just neighborliness."

* * *

Liberals may disagree on what to do about Iraq. While Moore and Shelden are staunchly against the United States meddling militarily in other nations' affairs, other liberals make the case that fighting tyranny and spreading democracy, even through military means if necessary, are essentially liberal-minded endeavors.

But most liberals would agree that the U.S. track record abroad is not good. Hugh Jackson, a Las Vegas-based researcher for the consumer watchdog group Public Citizen, points out that the conservative ideology that has gripped America is running roughshod over the globe. "It's the driving force behind the globalization that's going on," says Jackson, former writer and editor for the Las Vegas Business Press and CityLife. "The whole idea of `the private sector knows best' is rampant everywhere, and corporations are dead-level set at expanding it to every corner of the globe."

Jackson gives as an example the fact that if poor nations want financial assistance from the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund to build a water system, they must agree to let multinational corporations either own or operate--and profit from--that water system.

Public Citizen is strongly against privatizing municipal water systems, and for good reason: Water is too important to be placed in the hands of shareholder-serving, profit-driven corporations, Jackson says.

Atlanta, for example, privatized its water system four years ago. It was a disaster, and now the city of Atlanta has resumed the task of providing water to its citizens--at a lower cost. On the international front, Jackson points to Bolivia, where water privatization sparked riots. Bechtel, which operated the water system (and also manages the Nevada Test Site), was basically driven out of the country. Now Bechtel is suing Bolivia for tens of millions of dollars it says it would have earned if it had kept running the water system.

"That lawsuit is going to be conducted in secret," says Jackson, noting yet another corrupt element of globalization. "Neither the public nor the media are allowed to view the arguments or the case. The citizens of Bolivia are not allowed to be a party to the case."

Jackson admits that understanding and standing up against globalization is a lot to expect from average American citizens. "People are busy," he says. "They've got kids to take care of and jobs. It's hard for folks to come to terms with these types of things. But as multinational corporations get control of water systems in the United States, it's coming closer and closer to people's lives. It's moving from abstraction and into actual repression. As that continues, people are going to find themselves more and more engaged."

Locally, Jackson says the media should shoulder part of the blame for the weak progressive movement. "If the media coverage were a little more insightful and curious, it would be a huge start," he says. "It's not just bias. There just appears to be a lack of energy. The media in this town could certainly benefit by expanding the diversity of views and perspectives that are brought to bear on policy."

And on the national level, the absence of liberal voices can be deafening. Shelden cites an array of progressive commentators who could enlighten TV viewers with new perspectives on issues. "But you don't see these people on CNN," he says.

That could change if a group of wealthy Democratic Party donors has its way. The New York Times reported Monday that a $10 million plan is in the works to start a liberal radio network in response to the slew of conservative hosts on the airwaves. The group is talking with liberal satirist Al Franken to participate.

* * *

One reason liberals have taken cover in recent years is a perception that they aren't patriotic. This line of thinking, fueled by the likes of rabid talk radio nuts and Attorney General John Ashcroft, is wrongheaded but prevalent.

"I've been accused of propagating hate against America," Shelden says. "My brand of patriotism is to follow what Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence: It's your duty as a citizen to question authority."

Shelden says flag-waving patriots remind him of children who have been abused by their parents and refuse to acknowledge that their parents have done something wrong. "We don't even want to look at how we supported Hussein for a while, or Noriega," he says. "Let's instead focus on how we handed out care packages all over the world or something like that."

Green agrees there's more to being patriotic than erecting a flag in the front yard. "I know very well from reading history that the Founding Fathers were not democrats with a lowercase d and the Constitution had a lot of flaws and we shed a lot of blood to correct some of them," he says. "But I'd still rather take my chances here."