All right…
::dusts butt off::
The feeling that I might want to spend the rest of my life sitting in a corner sucking my thumb and watching while the world comes tumbling down around my ears (along with the ears of culpable Republicans) is starting to recede.
I notice that there’s a post-election “blame Kerry” thread and at least one “how did the Democrats manage to fuck this one up” thread.
I don’t think Kerry or the Democratic party did anything particulary wrong, strategically. Our problem is not that we didn’t snag enough votes in Florida or Ohio to put us over the top (although it would have been damn nice if we had, of course). Our problem is that an incompetent President running on a platform of religious-tinged social conservatism, international imperialism, and fiscal spendthriftity wasn’t working his butt off to successfully carry Utah and Wyoming.
Forget '08 for a moment. Think 2016. Think about the hearts and minds in Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas. Ask yourselves: why the fuck aren’t these folks voting Democratic?
a) Economically: These folks aren’t millionaires. The old notion that the Republican party is the party of the filthy rich oligarchy while the Democratic party is the party of the common people is in the toilet and in danger of being flushed. And yet it continues to be true that the Republican party eviscerates Federal income via tax cuts (especially tax cuts for the wealthy), thus jeopardizing services that the common folks in these states utlize, find useful, and in many cases would perish without. Certainly not all Georgia, Kansas, Virginia, etc., voters would necessarily be Democratic voters by economic nature, but why are we getting our ass kicked amongst what oughta be our natural constituency? Is it purely the social-religious stuff, or are the existing/available Federal services somehow not being perceived as a benefit of having a government, or are existing Federal services genuinely not providing them with useful services, or what? WE NEED TO KNOW. And if Federal government services aren’t meeting these folks’ needs, we need to conceive of programs that would. (The free market can only effectively offer services that result in profit to the offerers, so there should always be a range of other stuff that only government services can effectively address unless all human needs can be addressed through processes that also generate a profit – yes?). On the other hand, if we’ve got good services in place, we’ve got a serious PR problem with these folks. What’re we going to do about that?
b) Also Economic: Our best wedge issue is, surprisingly enough, that we’re the party of fiscal responsibility. After all those years of being tarred with “tax and spend liberals” labels, we now have a decent history of running social programs only out of the proceeds of taxation, i.e., not engaging in deficit spending. I think it’s damn good fiscal policy and we should embrace it in a big way, and make lots and lots of noise about it. We can pick up otherwise-Republican voters who feel dismay at the untax-and-spend-anyway deficit-spending behaviors of the current Republicans. Part of the reason they’re doing it is to “starve the beast”, i.e., run the Fed gov so far into debt that it needs to spend all its tax proceeds on servicing the debt so it can’t offer much in the way of domestic services. We need to barbecue them on this issue, and to embrace balanced budgets as a Democratic tradition, in my opinion. What do you think?
c) Social Issues: We’ve been on the defensive too much. Egalitarianism, expanded civil rights, considering any “moral” issue from the standpoint of whether or not to come down on the side of letting people do as they wish instead of imposing coercive force to stop them — these should all be winning us support. Admittedly it won’t win us support from whatever contingents believe in a definable “right” and “wrong” and think that “right” should be enforced at the expense of “wrong” and “wrongdoers”. We need to claim the moral high ground and do battle with those who think this way instead of pussyfooting around the moral issues. We need to call them names, if necessary. Meanwhile, we need to spell out what we stand for, in moral terms, in justice terms, in American-traditional terms, and cast it down as a moral challenge rather than equivocating and squirming and acting as if our social positions are questionable. Yes, I’m strongly opinionated on this. OK, I’ve said what I think, how about you folks?
d) The Vision Thing: The Republicans have a vision. It’s an “Ozzie and Harriet / return to the American 1950’s when things were uncomplicated and better” vision in lots of ways, and there are disparaging things I could say about it, but hell at least they’ve got a vision. We need to have a vision. What is the idealized Democratic future? We can’t fly on “Well, we sort of still stand for helping out the poor and disenfranchised although we’re rethinking quotas and aren’t necessarily committed to taxing the rich to help the poor and we don’t really believe Big Government is a good idea anymore, and mostly we just want to not see further changes in a Republican direction”. Where do we want to take the country, and the world, in the next 50 years? World government (how? how to frame it, how to sell it?)? Increases in democracy, in distribution of decision-making power (how? got prototypes? are there formidable objections, and if so, what are our responses?) Are there adjectives and adverbs we can use to designate what possible social/domestic programs are the sort that we’d encourage, as legitimate and worthy expenditures from the collective national pocketbook? We’re against lots of sleazy creepy shitty things that the Republican party seems to have embraced, but we need more than what we’re against. We need a vision.
Wanna do a think tank?
Seriously, the question was how best for liberals to win the hearts and minds of voters. To do that we do need to understand social conservatives and other factions that voted against us overwhelmingly (and I started another thread before this one, in which you and I have both participated, where that’s the intent) — but we don’t need to become them. That would kind of defeat the purpose and the political system doesn’t need the redundancy. Given the choice of becoming a more socially conservative party as a means to doing liberal economic things or becoming a more fiscally conservative party as a means to doing socially liberal things, the latter wins hands down.