Here’s another reason we Democrats had better figure out how to win in so-called “red states.” Electoral power is shifting to the South and West. The West is projected to have 45.8% growth from 2000 through 2030, while the South is projected to grow by 42.9%. Meanwhile, the Midwest will grow by only 9.5% and the Northeast by only 7.6%.
You will not be able to win in future without winning the “red states” in the West and South, and the OP is right: economic populism is the way to victory there.
I disagree with some posters who seem to be focused primarily on the poor. Not that theirs aren’t valid concerns; it’s just that (for electoral purposes) part of the problem for the Democratic Party is that it has been successfully caricatured as the party of a grasping, dependent underclass.
Appeals to the middle class are what will win elections. And there are plenty of populist middle class issues: the health care crisis, Social Security insolvency, the unfairness of the repeal of the estate tax (when argued properly), the credit card industry’s predatory lending practices and the need to rein them in at the national level, environmental issues (which will have increasing appeal in the South and West as greenspace is lost to development and air and water quality suffer), an enlightened (and coordinated) energy policy to wean the US from dependence on foreign oil.
Are these the same people who can’t abide taxes? Because these are the people who create the current paradox. Yeah, you hate the deficit, but again, just like the universal health care problem, you don’t want to pay to get rid of it. Shrink the military? Nope. Infrastructure? What, are you kidding? Public education? In theory, maybe, but it’s a NIMBY problem, and since everybody’s got a back yard, you squeal like stuck pigs when it’s your piece of pork getting cut. Same goes for all the other pork. Such as…Farm subsidies? And turn those honest God-fearing agrarians into the streets and watch the Heartland collapse? Insane! Mostly you get some token cuts, like Head Start, or some egghead scientist’s pet project slashed (e.g. SSC), which is a drop in the bucket in terms of the real spending problems. So: You can’t cut, but you can’t raise taxes? What are you left to talk about? Abortion! Gays! Illegal aliens! Immigration! Etc. Now you’re back to the drawing board. Take those pet issues from the Dems, and they cease to be Dems. Now everybody picks on minorities, or whatever powerless group one wishes to scapegoat for all of America’s real problems. Meanwhile, the real problems never get solved.
You can’t have fiscal responsiblity without taxes. Period. The nation doesn’t run for free. Regressive taxes kill the working class. But if the rich can buy off the pols, there’s no stopping that either. Really, I see no viable place for either social liberalism, nor fiscal conservatism, in the current environment. The electorate, as a whole, won’t support either common-sense goals. Let’s face it: Libertarians and commies are the lunatic fringe. Centrist politics sounds noble, but it’s saddled by the right-leaning zero-sums game of pork-barrel hypocrisy, where pols tout responsible govt. while grabbing more than their share with both fists for their constituencies. They give their voters what they want, which is everything for nothing. Give me roads, schools, protection; but don’t make me pay for it. And don’t call me greedy or bigoted, even though deep down I believe if you’re getting more of the pie, I’m naturally getting less.
Matter of perspective, I guess. I say the Whig Party died because of strident ideaological purists in the North, who declined to seek compromise and consensus on the issue of slavery. Instead of trying to find a middle ground (for example, a way to gradually end slavery, as happened later in Brazil), these Whigs insisted on immediate abolition, and so divided and destroyed the party.
I fear that some Democrats today, like their Whig antecedents, are all too willing (and even eager) to effectively divide this country along sectional, “red-state/blue-state” lines. That is a mistake, since the blue states are losing electoral power. If the party follows that path, it will condemn itself to permanent minority status and perhaps extinction.
Don’t get me wrong: I like the guy. I think he’s a good politician (but then, anyone would look good by comparison with Judy Martz), and I voted for him. I wouldn’t mind seeing him in the White House, but realistically, a large part of why he won was that he ran a bipartisan ticket: His running mate (and now Lieutenant Governor) is a Republican. He does have charisma, and maybe he even has enough of it to win over the country, but his election to governor doesn’t prove it.
IOW, it’s not because of natural increase of the native population, but a swarm of Yankee immigrants. Which will tend to turn the red states blue, in the long run . . . I mean, when people relocate in search of better job oporotunities, they don’t change their values and politics in the process. My own state, Florida, once solidly conservative (i.e., Southern Democrat, back in the Jim Crow days), now might be classed as a “purple” state – i.e., a swing state – which was almost evenly split in the last two presidential elections and might go either way in the next one.
And another part of the problem is that the Dems aren’t really the party of the poor, so the poor see no compelling reason to vote for them, and so, for lack of appealing alternatives, they don’t vote much at all. That’s what we need to change. Last year, in the most hotly contested national election in living memory, 40% of eligible persons still chose not to vote, and I bet most of them were lower-income. Whoever can recruit them to vote will win handily.
But that’s all good too. The Dems need to transform themselves into the party of the Low and Middle, united against the High. If they can do that, they’ll be unbeatable, even in Texas.
But what would be the contemporary analogue of slavery? What would be “the great issue of American politics” of this period, which Dems will have to learn to deal with if they are to survive?
On abortion, the Dems shouldn’t yield an inch. That’s the safe position anyway. (I think most Americans are uncomfortable with abortion on some level but still want the clinics available in case their teenage daughter gets pregnant.) But on gay marriage, gun control, etc., the Dems should present themselves as ready and willing for some compromising, logrolling and horse-trading – provided they don’t have to yield any ground on economic issues.
Um…I asked you first. If you think its a popularist position to soak the rich in America, do you have a cite to back that up? If you don’t have a cite (it might not be something easy to find one way or the other), can you explain why you think a majority of Americans want to soak the rich for a bunch of social programs? Seems if this was the case the Republicans wouldn’t get such traction with their own rhetoric.
There are lots of poll results out there on specific questions of tax policy, but I can’t find one that asks a question in straightforward “soak the rich” terms. And I guess there won’t be, unless and until a major party has the effrontery to come out and frame the debate in those terms, which I don’t think has happened at any time since the FDR Administration.
I think that there is going to automatically write off a lot of red-state votes.
I don’t think the Democratic party should go anti-abortion at a national level; rather I think they should let it be decided on a state-by-state basis. People can always take their daughters to a different state, if necessary.
Safe, rare and legal. Worked for Bill, and Hillary knows it. Why dems don’t listen to their smartest politicians is beyond me.
BG, what about my suggestion about immigration reform? 2/3 of people think it’s at least “very important,” and most independants are unhappy with Bush.
But only 26% rate it as “extremely important,” according to that cite.
Personally I’m middle-of-the-road on immigration. I’m allergic to practically everything Pat Buchanan says, does or thinks, but I see the value of limiting immigration to protect American workers from competition from desperately poor Third-Worlders. (OTOH, an even better approach would be to enact a national living wage and enforce it fiercely, including and especially on anyone who employs foreign workers.) I’m fine with tighter limits on immigration so long as they’re racially and culturally neutral. Your specific proposal was:
Sounds good – especially as “border control” can be sold as a homeland-security issue.
Well, that’s it. I think a little close reading of those numbers suggests that people aren’t so much upset at the numbers of immigrants per se, but something else; the obvious candidate being* illegal * immigration. Hence “immigration reform” and “border control.”
IMO, most people are not obsessed with the Buchanan “preserve anglo-saxon culture” stuff, but they are pissed off by the sense that the rules are being broken and Washington doesn’t give a damn.
Making immigration racially and culturally neutral would require radical changes, but I like where you’re going.
You have to be careful with leniency. The country’s already been burned once on amnesty (1986). Also, as soon as Mexico gets wind of an amnesty in the offing, there will be a huge surge in illegal immigration - there was one when Bush came out with his “guest worker” plan, even though that plan contained no path to citizenship.
I’ve voted Democratic forever, but lately (since my kids were born) I have to really question where the party is headed. Not that there’s an alternative. Personally, I think anyone should be able to marry anyone (provided they give up the right to a no-fault divorce once they have kids). But the gay marriage thing is really typical of some of the cultural follies that have cost the Democrats so dearly. They needed someone near the top to tell them, “Look, I know you feel strongly about civil rights, but this gay marriage thing - people just aren’t gonna go for it.” That could be said of many, many issues that the Republicans proceeded to shove straight up the Dems’ asses on Election Day.
I think AHunter3’s post is a perfect example of the kind of thinking that has hurt the Dems for so long. “I only care about a liberal social agenda, and if I lose the election, so be it.” At some point you have to grow up and realize that judicious compromise can get you more of what matters to you than rigid posturing and rhetoric. The best hope at this point is that the Republicans are falling into exactly the same trap. They’re in power, they’re comfortable, they’re arrogant, and they don’t have someone telling them, “This social security privatization thing - people just aren’t gonna go for it.” And they will pay for it in 2006.
Loopydude, the Whigs (toward the end) divided into two camps: the Northern Whigs, who demanded immediate abolition, and the Southern Whigs, who did not. Now you may argue that the Northern Whigs held the moral high ground, and you’d be right, but their stridency and refusal to yield led them to abandon the Whigs for the Republican Party, destroying the Whig Party in the process.
If they had chosen another path, for example seeking a compromise in the form of a gradual abolition of slavery, the party might have been saved, and the Civil War might have been averted. But the insistence on ideological purity (on the slavery question) destroyed the Whig Party and at least arguably, did terrible harm to the nation (to the extent it contributed to the hardening of positions by North and South).
You may well have the moral high ground on gay rights and gun control. But if you insist that the party push those issues on a national level, you can write off the “red states” and any hope that the Democrats can remain a national party. They will go the way of the Whigs.
If you think its a popularist position to soak the rich in America, do you have a cite to back that up? If you don’t have a cite (it might not be something easy to find one way or the other), can you explain why you think a majority of Americans want to soak the rich for a bunch of social programs? Seems if this was the case the Republicans wouldn’t get such traction with their own rhetoric.