I need crowdsourcing help with a question about Cambodia

As many of you know, I'm a huge fan of James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds (I've written about the book here, here, and here). One of the great things about the internet in general and blogging in particular is that it sometimes enables one to harness the wisdom of the crowd.  Sometimes a reader will leave a comment that adds an insight or that bit of data or a link that blows one's mind -- that one could not have found through traditional search methods. I don't have as many readers as I used to as a result of not keeping up with my blog (during graduate school).  But I have a question that I very much need help with.  So I thought I would send it out into the world and see what comes back.  

Here is the question that I could use your help to answer:

On page 325 of the paperback (1998) edition of Elizabeth Becker's brilliant book, When the War Was Over, she writes:

"Like the Eastern Zone cadre who escaped to Vietnam once they understood they were scheduled for extermination, the cadre under the minister of industry bolted and went into hiding.  But they were not close to a border; they were not within the protective reach of the Vietnamese army. They could only band together and operate as a rogue vigilante group in Phnom Penh itself, a group of angry, armed factory workers bent on taking revenge against Pol Pot, Duch, and the revolution.  They apparently ambushed and killed other cadre. When Ieng Sary said he feared a coup d'etat inside Cambodia at the time, he was undoubtedly referring in part to these men."  -- Elizabeth Becker, When the War Was Over

I am eager to know more about this group of factory workers who fought back. I checked in the Notes at the back of the book but I did not see a reference for this paragraph. Can anyone point me to any books or sources who might have additional details on this rebel cadre?  Has anyone documented their whole story? 

It is my feeling that Cambodia needs to find its own Oskar Schindlers -- the people who fought back and the people who resisted Pol Pot.  Elizabeth Becker's book Bophana does a brilliant job of that.  But I know there are many many more stories of resistance that can be brought to light -- and this story of the factory workers who fought back seems like a promising possibility. 

Any help you can provide to track down more information about these factory workers would be very much appreciated.  

Some thoughts on Cambodia

Having just returned from four months in Cambodia, I thought I'd jot down my thoughts while they are still fresh in my mind.

1.  Angkor Wat is not doing Cambodia any favors.  Angkor Wat like many wonders of the ancient world, and like much of the U.S. Capitol including the Washington Monument, was likely built by slave labor.  It is physically beautiful but it is also a testament to the power of despotic kings to force people into bondage.  The Khmer people rightly turned away from the Angkor temples following the fall of the Angkor Kingdom -- claiming that the area was haunted by ghosts.

It was the French, in the twentieth century, who rebuilt Angkor Wat temples and revived the myth of Angkorian greatness -- in order to develop a sense of Cambodia nationalism in order to further French colonial aims (Elizabeth Becker, When the War Was Over).

The Khmer Rouge explicitly stated that their goal was to replicate the greatness of the Angkorian empire.  The forced labor camps of the Khmer Rouge were done in the attempt to replicate the irrigation systems of the Angkorian empire and to squeeze two rice crop out of the land each year instead of one (Angkor supposedly achieved 3 or 4 rice crops a year as a result of their irrigation systems -- but one of the leading theories of the collapse of the Angkorian empire is that the land was rapidly depleted leading to declining crop yields and hunger).  The Khmer Rouge even named the party, "Angkar," to invoke the memories of the Angkorian empire.  Ironically, in many ways the Khmer Rouge succeeded in replicating the Angkorian kingdom -- re-instituting slavery, hunger, and societal collapse.

Now, many Cambodian universities, in the attempt to rebuild Cambodia society after the Khmer Rouge are once again invoking the greatness of Angkor in order to propel the rebuilding of the country. This is just repeating the mistakes of the last 100 years (and the last 1,000 years).

I believe that if Cambodia is ever going to have a peaceful and prosperous future, it needs to call into question the legacy of the Angkorian kingdom and Angkor Wat.

Furthermore, UNESCO has some explaining to do.  Many UNESCO Heritage Sites were originally built by  slave labor.  Yes the sites are often archaeological wonders and they bring badly needed tourism dollars into the country.  But it seems to me that UNESCO also has a responsibility to question the slave labor systems that brought these works into existence in the first place.  In fact, the entrance fees to visit these sites (often paid by wealthy white people from the developed world -- people who benefited from the legacy of slavery) should be viewed as a form of reparations for slavery and should be directed towards social programs to reduce inequality.

2.  I hate to say it, but it seems to me that Buddhism is not doing Cambodia any favors either. Yes, Buddhism was the only institution to provide education throughout the country over much of its history.  Yes, Buddhists  were horribly persecuted by the Khmer Rouge.  Yes, the country needs some sort of moral foundation and Buddhism seems like the most appropriate source of that wisdom.  Yes, Buddhist institutions are doing a wonderful job of providing housing to Pagoda Kids who want to attend university in Phnom Penh today.  Yes many aspects of Buddhist aesthetics and tradition are beautiful.

But Buddhism as an institution is deeply hierarchical and sexist.  It emphasizes rote learning over critical thinking.  And a theology that minimizes the importance of the here and now, teaching that life is just suffering, helps to create the conditions that keep monarchs and despots in power (why protest political conditions or organize to improve public policy if life is always just suffering?).

In fairness, no other religion is doing Cambodia any favors either.

3.  When the War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution by Elizabeth Becker is a masterpiece.  Understanding Cambodia is like trying to understand a game of chess played across 100 dimensions.  There are only a handful of people in the world who have enough experience in the region, perspective, and skill to tell the story.  I believe that Elizabeth Becker has written one of the greatest political science works of all time.  I highly highly recommend When the War Was Over to anyone who is thinking about traveling to the region or hoping to understand Cambodian society.

4.  Cambodia's Curse by Joel Brinkley is a dreadful book.  Yes, someone needed to write a book about the endemic corruption of the Hun Sen regime.  And that book had to be written by a foreigner, because any Cambodian who wrote such a book would likely be jailed or killed.  But Joel Brinkley's research is woeful, his thinking is a mess, and his writing is sophomoric.  In the acknowledgements at the end, Brinkley actually says that he read twelve books about Cambodia (by contrast a scholar like Elizabeth Becker cites hundreds of books in her research). Moreover, it seems that Brinkley's real goal is to use the on-going culture of corruption in Cambodia in order to excuse U.S. war crimes in the area in the 1960s and 1970s.  I have lots more to say about Cambodia's Curse, perhaps in another post. But for now, suffice it to say that Joel Brinkley is not doing Cambodia any favors.

5.  Studies of Cambodia refugees in the U.S. suggest that as many as 60% to 70% experience Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).  It seems likely that Cambodians still living in Cambodia (particularly older people) experience PTSD at similar or even higher levels.  But here's the thing to understand:  the majority of Cambodians probably were ALREADY experiencing PTSD, even BEFORE the Khmer Rouge came to power.  Five centuries of colonization proceeded by centuries of slavery and despotic monarchs will do that to a people.  The hyper-vigilence of the Khmer Rouge, the paranoia, and the extreme levels of violence of the Khmer Rouge are all what you would expect from people who already had PTSD.  The genocide by the Khmer Rouge surely dramatically increased the number of people suffering from PTSD.  [Evidence for this theory comes from the fact that Lon Nol, no communist, was deeply paranoid and had already begun massacres against ethnic Vietnamese people living in Cambodia as early as 1970. Elizabeth Becker, When the War Was Over.]

In some respects then, that makes Paulo Freire's work even more important for revolutionary movements.  Any oppressed people is likely experiencing PTSD.  And, as I've written previously,  Freireian pedagogy is really about treating PTSD in the society at large -- as the necessary first step to heal the wounds of colonialism before gaining power. Absent some transformative healing process, an oppressed people gains power only to violate all of its ideals by lashing out in crazy ways characteristic of PTSD.

6.  There appears to be this odd wrinkle to communism in Asia in that Pol Pot, Mao, and Ho Chi Minh are not listed as having any children.  That would be extremely odd given the conditions of the era (war, lack of access to health care including modern birth control) and given that men in those societies were generally expected to have children.  Now perhaps these men did have children and they were just kept a secret (in order to keep them safe).  But if these men indeed did not have children -- that's even more interesting.

It seems to me that children have a humbling effect on people.  Any national leader without children has never experienced the ego-distonic effect of having a little person, who is your own flesh and blood and who you love, absolutely refuse to do what you tell them.  I think children are vital to help soften and temper the excesses of our political leaders.

Communist Revolutionary heroes in Latin America -- Castro, Che, Ortega -- all have children.

7.  One of the biggest barriers to transitional justice -- in Cambodia and in other war scarred regions around the world, is that political leaders in the United States are often unindicted co-conspirators, who should also be on trial.

It is true that the Hun Sen regime is dragging its feet in prosecuting former Khmer Rouge leaders through the ECCC.  The Hun Sen regime's failure to engage in a process of truth and reconciliation is a national disgrace that prevents the country from healing and reaching its full potential.

But it is also true that the U.S. committed genocide in Cambodia prior to the Khmer Rouge.  McNamara and Nixon were both war criminals and should have been prosecuted as such (both men are now dead).  But Henry Kissinger is still alive and is one of history's most notorious mass murderers.  Making matters even more complicated, I believe that the U.S. was right and just to oppose communism in the region. But the carpet bombing of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia during the Second Indochina War was genocide and should be prosecuted as such.  Again it is a post for another day, but if the world is ever going to move to some sort of standard of international human rights, war criminals from the United States will need to be prosecuted according to the same standards that are used to judge others.

Inside the mind of the oligarchy

From the brilliant, "Manhood and Politics: A Feminist Reading in Political Theory" by Wendy Brown: 

Writing about Greek culture during the time of Aristotle:

Greek man grasped his existence through acting politically and could not know that he existed unless others acknowledged his action by bestowing honor upon him.  "Denial of honor due," says Jaeger of the classical Athenians, "was the greatest of human tragedies." Failing to receive honor for great deeds did not merely diminish the glory of the activity but threatened man's sense of self at the deepest level.  According to Jaeger, Greek man, "estimated his own worth exclusively by the standards of the society to which he belonged.  He measured his own aretē by the opinion which others held of him."

More significantly for the nature of political life, this recognition and honor by one's peers could not be shared with another and still serve the purpose of asserting and affirming one's existence.  For a man to achieve recognition, hence existence, he had to obliterate the greatness and thereby the existence of some other man or men. Manhood itself appears to have been predicated upon the shortage of available existences.  "As aretē is man's only weapon against oblivion," the diminished aretē of another was the only means of asserting one's own aretē and existence. The agonistic nature of Greek politics was thus not a mere component or consequence of the quest for manhood through action but part of the bedrock of this quest, a necessary feature of its foundations.

--Manhood and Politics: A Feminist Reading in Political Theory, p. 62

So think about the indignity that Mitt Romney and his surrogates express when he is asked to release his tax returns.  It's not just that they are saying "no" -- it's that they are offended that any of the little people would even dare to make such a request.  The reality is that this has been going on for thousands of years.  It's not enough for the oligarchy to be rich, they only get pleasure when they are rich AND we bow down to them. 

So too when Republican Governors fall all over themselves to deny services and increase pain for poor people. But their actions stem from the very ideology described above. For them, greatness is a zero sum game -- they can only be great only through obliterating the greatness of others (in this case women, people of color, and the poor). 

Debt: The First 5,000 Years, Part II

Another chunk from David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 years that blew my mind today:

"Legally, our notion of the corporation is very much a product of the European High Middle Ages.  The legal idea of a corporation as a "fictive person" (persona ficta) -- a person who, as Maitland, the great British legal historian, put it, "is immortal, who sues and is sued, who holds lands, has a seal of his own, who makes regulations for those natural persons of whom he is composed -- was first established in canon law by Pope Innocent IV in 1250 AD, and one of the first kinds of entities it applied to were monasteries -- as also to universities, churches, municipalities, and guilds.

The idea of the corporation as an angelic being is not mine, incidentally.  I borrowed it from the great Medievalist Ernst Kantorowicz, who pointed out that all this was happening right around the same time that Thomas Aquinas was developing the notion that angels were really just the personification of Platonic Ideas. According to the teachings of Aquinas," he notes, "every angel represented a species."

Little wonder then that finally the personified collectives of the jurists, which were juristically immortal species, displayed all the features otherwise attributed to angels... The jurists themselves recognized that there was some similarity between their abstractions and the angelic beings.  In this respect, it may be said that the political and legal world of thought of the later Middle Ages began to be populated by immaterial angelic bodies, large and small: they were invisible, ageless, sempiternal, immortal, and sometimes even ubiquitous; and they were endowed with a corpus intellectuale or mysticum [an intellectual or mystical body] which could stand any comparison with the "spiritual bodies" of celestial beings.

All this is worth emphasizing because while we are used to assuming that there's something natural or inevitable about the existence of corporations, in historical terms, they are actually strange, exotic creatures.  No other great tradition came up with anything like it.

--David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, p. 304.

I think that's how the Roberts Court see corporations -- as angels that are better than actual human beings.  That's why the Roberts Court consistently grants rights to corporations that actually exceeds the rights they grant as natural to human being.

Debt The First 5000 years, Part I

I'm working through David Graeber's Debt, the First 5,000 Years.  I'm not sure if the whole argument holds together quite yet for me (I still have 100 pages to go). But there are several sections in it that have completely blown my mind.  Like this:

Many of the specific arguments and examples that [Adam] Smith uses appear to trace back directly to economic tracts written in Medieval Persia.  For instance, not only does his argument that exchange is a natural outgrowth of human rationality and speech already appear both in Ghazali (1058-1111AD), and Tusi (1201-1274 AD); both use exactly the same illustration: that no one has ever observed two dogs exchanging bones.  Even more dramatically, Smith's most famous example of division of labor, the pin factory, where it takes eighteen separate operations to produce one pin, already appears in Ghazali's Ihya, in which he describes a needle factory, where it takes twenty-five different operations to produce a needle." 

--David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, p. 279

For more on these topics see: Hosseini, Hamid: [you'll likely need a library or university login to access these:]

1995, "Understanding the market mechanism before Adam Smith: economic thought in Medieval Islam." History of Political Economy 27 (3)

1998, "Seeking the roots of Adam Smith's division of labor in medieval Persia." History of Political Economy 30 (4)

2003, "Contributions of Medieval Muslim Scholars to the History of Economics and their Impact: A refutation of the Schumpeterian Great Gap" in The Blackwell Companion to Contemporary Economics III: A Companion to the History of Economic Thought.

How neocolonialism really works

If the apartheid regime had really wanted to break Mandela, they should NOT have sent him to Robben Island.  If you spend 30 years breaking rocks you will come to identify with others who break rocks (miners, laborers, farm workers).  No if they had really wanted to break Mandela, they should have sent him to Harvard, on a tennis scholarship. 

The Enlightenment as moral cover for unjust racial hierarchies

Ah yes, this is it exactly.  From The New Yorker, "Books: The Inner Voice: Gandhi's Real Legacy:"

Gandhi’s ideas were rooted in a wide experience of a freshly globalized world. Born in 1869 in a backwater Indian town, he came of age on a continent pathetically subject to the West, intellectually as well as materially. Europeans backed by garrisons and gunboats were free to transport millions of Asian laborers to far-off colonies (Indians to South Africa, Chinese to the Caribbean), to exact raw materials and commodities from Asian economies, and to flood local markets with their manufactured products. Europeans, convinced of their moral superiority, also sought to impose profound social and cultural reforms upon Asia. Even a liberal figure like John Stuart Mill assumed that Indians had to first grow up under British tutelage before they could absorb the good things—democracy, economic freedom, science—that the West had to offer. The result was widespread displacement: many Asians in their immemorial villages and market towns were forced to abandon a life defined by religion, family, and tradition amid rumors of powerful white men fervently reshaping the world, by means of compact and cohesive nation-states, the profit motive, and superior weaponry.
     Dignity, even survival, for many uprooted Asians seemed to lie in careful imitation of their Western conquerors. Gandhi, brought out of his semirural setting and given a Western-style education, initially attempted to become more English than the English. He studied law in London and, on his return to India, in 1891, tried to set up first as a lawyer, then as a schoolteacher. But a series of racial humiliations during the following decade awakened him to his real position in the world. Moving to South Africa in 1893 to work for an Indian trading firm, he was exposed to the dramatic transformation wrought by the tools of Western modernity: printing presses, steamships, railways, and machine guns. In Africa and Asia, a large part of the world’s population was being incorporated into, and made subject to the demands of, the international capitalist economy. Gandhi keenly registered the moral and psychological effects of this worldwide destruction of old ways and life styles and the ascendancy of Western cultural, political, and economic norms.
     He was not alone. By the early twentieth century, modern Chinese and Muslim intellectuals were also turning away from Europe’s universalist ideals of the Enlightenment, which they saw as a moral cover for unjust racial hierarchies..."
--Pankaj Mishra, The New Yorker, May 2, 2011

Mishra is reviewing a new book on Gandhi by Joseph Lelyveld, "Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India." In the book Lelyveld contends that the real Gandhi was much different than the myth created in the Hollywood movie -- and that Gandhi's actual political program was much bigger and more radical than we usually understand.

Gandhi’s indictment of modern civilization went further. According to him, the industrial revolution, by turning human labor into a source of power, profit, and capital, had made economic prosperity the central goal of politics, enthroning machinery over men and relegating religion and ethics to irrelevance. As Gandhi saw it, Western political philosophy obediently validated the world of industrial capitalism. If liberalism vindicated the preoccupation with economic growth at home, liberal imperialism abroad made British rule over India appear beneficial for Indians—a view many Indians themselves subscribed to. Europeans who saw civilization as their unique possession denigrated the traditional virtues of Indians—simplicity, patience, frugality, otherworldliness—as backwardness.

Gandhi never ceased trying to overturn these prejudices of Western modernity. He dressed as an Indian peasant and rejected all outward signs of being a modern intellectual or politician. True civilization, he insisted, was about moral self-knowledge and spiritual strength rather than bodily well-being, material comforts, or great art and architecture. He upheld the self-sufficient rural community over the heavily armed and centralized nation-state, cottage industries over big factories, and manual labor over machines. He also encouraged satyagrahis to feel empathy for their political opponents and to abjure violence against the British. For, whatever their claims to civilization, the British, too, were victims of the immemorial forces of human greed and violence that had received an unprecedented moral sanction in the political, scientific, and economic systems of the modern world. Satyagraha might awaken in them an awareness of the profound evil of industrial civilization.

There are two points I want to make about this article and the above quotes:

1. This is the first time in my life that I've ever seen the Enlightenment challenged in print. And the critique feels exactly right. I feel like I've been circling around this idea for a year now and finally someone put their finger right on it -- which is this: many of the enlightenment philosophies that we celebrate in the West: Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill and Utilitarianism; and classical liberalism  -- are really just elaborate justifications for racial hierarchy, colonialism, neocolonialism, and hegemonic dominance of capital over people. (Neoliberal economic theory as practiced by Milton Friedman and the University of Chicago consists of taking the racist, colonial, hegemonic theories of Bentham (and Hayek) and expressing them through calculus and graphs.) 

2. One of the things that people don't understand about Gandhi is that for him -- satyagraha was about liberating the British from the violence of CAPITALISM. For Gandhi, British rule, capitalism, and violence were all one in the same, and liberation, economic simplicity, and nonviolence were all one in the same.  Modern progressive Americans want to hold up the nonviolence piece but they don't recognize that they are missing the larger context -- that violence is a symptom of capitalism and nonviolence necessarily also requires the rejection of capitalism.  I think that's really quite profound.

What Barack Obama could learn from Lula da Silva

For the last eight years, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil has been an unapologetic champion for the poor and working class.  The result?

By expanding cash-transfer programs for the poor, subsidizing housing loans and raising the minimum wage, his government pulled more than 20 million people out of poverty. The middle class has grown by 29 million people since 2002.

The country, which received a record $30 billion bailout from the International Monetary Fund when it was close to economic collapse in 2002, now lends money to the I.M.F.

And what happens when you show leadership by consistently standing up for your base?

Mr. da Silva, the 65-year-old former metalworker with a fourth-grade education, leaves office with an approval rating of more than an 80 percent.

It's sort of obvious to the point of being ridiculous -- if you stand up and represent the interests of 80% of the public, then you'll have 80% approval ratings.  In some ways it demonstrates the insanity of the U.S. political system.  In DC, Democratic elected officials actually believe that they have to regularly piss on their base in order to be taken seriously (and it seems that President Obama has come to believe that he has to be Wall Street's bitch in order to get re-elected).  And then they wonder why they have such low approval ratings. 

Obama could have 80 percent approval ratings right now too if he would stand up for the people who voted for him by:

• bailing out homeowners in the same way that he rescued the banks;
• supporting Medicare for All instead of mandates to purchase private insurance; and
• taxing the rich to pay for (human and physical) infrastructure to grow the economy for everyone.  

It's simple, simple simple -- stand up for your base and they will stand up for you. 

Note: quotes are from NY Times: "Brazil's New Leader Begins in the Shadow of Predecessor" by Alexei Barrionuevo, December 31, 2010.

Their canon, Our canon

Completely brilliant article today in the NY Times on what radical conservatives are reading these days -- and how these writings are showing up in the speeches and plans of Republican candidates and office holders.  I highly encourage you to read the whole article, Movement of the Moment Looks to Long-Ago Texts by Kate Zernike.  So what are crazy Republicans reading these days?

"The Road to Serfdom" by Friedrich Hayek (1944)
"The Law" by Frédéric Bastiat (1850)
"The 5000 Year Leap" by W. Cleon Skousen (1981) 

Like the bible of modern conservatism, Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, these books are basically conservative porn made up of fantasies about a return to the 19th century when white men still ruled the planet and everyone else took orders from them.

But the article got me thinking about what a progressive canon might be and what foundational texts should inform our movement.  And it was harder to come up with a list of foundational books than I imagined.  I've come up with a few (none by economists by the way) but I'd welcome any additional suggestions from you in the comments below. 

I think every good progressive should read:

The Culture of Make Believe by Derrick Jensen
A People's History of the United States by  Howard Zinn
No Logo by Naomi Klein
Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein

But what's interesting about each of these books (and this is a self criticism more than anything else) is that they are all long on what is wrong with conservatives but short on what we would do if we were actually in power.  Derrick Jensen has the most brilliant analysis of modern culture that I've ever read but his remedy is for us to return to being hunter gatherers (which is a nonstarter for most people).  Howard Zinn would have us kill fewer people in wars of aggression (always a good idea) but as far as I know, he doesn't necessarily provide a comprehensive political program for how one might achieve a world at peace.  And Naomi Klein (in Shock Doctrine) provides a robust defense of Keynesianism, which is great, but I gotta figure that ultimately progressives should be fighting for more than just a return to Keynes. So anyway, if you have a chance please list what books you think should inform the progressive canon in the comments below (no sign in required -- but haters, as always will be deleted). 

George Lakoff 2.0

Okay so cognitive linguist George Lakoff has shown that there are two core frames when it comes to politics:

The nurturant parent model; and the
Strict father model.

Even though all people have both core frames in their heads, in progressives the nurturant parent model is active and in conservatives the strict father model is active.

It seems to me that Lakoff does perhaps the best job of any living person of explaining political worldviews and why progressives and conservatives think the way they do.

But here's the thing.  Which model is factually correct?  Both models make claims that are empirically provable.  Does the nurturant parent model actually lead to healthier, more creative kids (and later society)?  Does the strict father model lead to better behaved, more moral kids (and later society)?

In almost every case, the evidence from the social sciences shows that the nurturant parent model is more likely to lead to healthier creative people and societies. 

Take for example the recent "multiyear study that shows that spanking kids makes them more aggressive later on." Progressive claim that spanking causes all sorts of psychological problems in kids that later leads to aggressive or criminal behavior.  Conservative claim that spanking leads to more moral citizens.  But it turns out that only progressives are factually correct. 

Or take tax cuts.  Progressives claim that government spending (on infrastructure) is the best way to stimulate the economy.  Conservatives claim that tax cuts (for the rich) are the best way to stimulate the economy.  But you can actually measure the multiplier effective of each approach -- and it turns out that the multiplier effect of government spending (1.59) is much greater than the multiplier effect of tax cuts (0.29).  

But what's weird about Lakoff is that he seems to stop at merely pointing out the differences in worldview -- without going the next step and arguing that the correctness of each worldview can be measured through scientific evidence.

The Prop 8 trial illustrates the point that I'm trying to make.  By going to trial, supporters of marriage equality were able to put all of the evidence on the table.  And it turns out that it is empirically provable that marriages involving couples of the same sex lead to just as healthy and happy relationships, families, and societies as marriages involving opposite sex couples.  By contrast, the opponents of gay marriage had their strict father model of morality but no scientific evidence to back up the validity of their claims. 

See that's the thing.  In almost every case, the conservative worldview is not only different, it is factually incorrect.  So it seems to me that not only should we point out the differences in worldview between progressives and conservatives, but we should always go the next step and explain that usually only the progressive worldview is factually correct in the real world.