You’ve probably noticed and hopefully been intrigued by the change in the Pandagon banner and the new sidebar ad for a book called Get Opinionated: A Progressive’s Guide to Finding Your Voice (and Taking a Little Action). Now I’m ready to formally announce it. Yes, I have a new book out, and is indeed called Get Opinionated: A Progressive’s Guide to Finding Your Voice (and Taking a Little Action). And I’m really proud and excited about it.
My last book It’s a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments was basically what it said it was, a comical look at various irritants in a feminist’s life, and how to cope and laugh about it. This book has a similar format—-many short chapters on a variety of topics—-but it’s a much different book. This book is about being a liberal/progressive. What does it mean? What do we believe? What do we want? I put forward a vision of liberalism, and like with the last book, it’s heavy on the jokes.
I put together the proposal during the election season, and as I wrote it, I thought one thing was for certain, which is that after November 2008, things were never going to be the same for liberals. Sitting at my desk in fall 2008, I thought two things: a) it seems there are a lot more self-identified liberals around now than there was 8 years ago! and b) our unity as a movement is deeply threatened by this upcoming election. The reason for both of these things can be summed up in one word: Bush. Bush was really good at destruction, taking out entire nations, and the worldwide economy as part of his path of destruction. He destroyed aggressively and passively, as in the case of New Orleans. But he did a great job at building up the liberal movement, especially online. It’s easy to be a liberal when that’s the word you use for the people that are against Bush. And perhaps if McCain won, we would have continued to hold together in opposition. But if Obama wins, I thought, we’re going to be faced with a scary prospect of being for something instead of just against something. Winning’s the hard part. You can’t just rest on your laurels. You have to have goals and the will to act on them. To make it worse, conservatives tend to be really energized, even more so than liberals, by being the opposition. Hating and pouting is their natural state, and we have to react by being even more strenuously for things. So I set out to write a book about being for things, and how there’s lots of things to be for. Quoting my intro:
What I do want you to take away from this book is not liberal dogma, but a belief that these various issues are intertwined, and that someone who comes to liberalism for issue X will do well to care about issues Y and Z as well. Don’t let people pigeonhole you! You may start off as a feminist, but there’s no reason not to add “environmentalist” to your list of interests. Liberal economics, anti-racism, secularism, and support for science—-these seemingly disparate issues have more in common than they would seem to have at first blush, and they work together in interesting ways.
I go on to talk about how we need to stop letting the mainstream media use the term “values” to mean only conservative values, because liberals have values that we should advocate for.