Tax-and-spend? Have you not seen the current administration? At least taxes would pay for spending. I’m sure you’re consoled knowing the GOP will move towards smaller government . . .
. . . oh, never mind.
Because a candidate like that would be exactly what we need to get away from the ‘Republican Lite’ label. :rolleyes:
The Libertarians are forever doomed because of their giving out free dark-colored toy guns to Black kids in Harlem.
Kerry was doomed when he promised the same-old, same-old in Iraq.
The liberals are somewhat doomed when Bush did a Clinton and adopted their policy, overthrwing right-wing dictatorships. He left them complaining about the mess he made.
He and Cheney also announced that they both were for civil unions, even as Bush worked on banning gay marriage. This must strike many as a ballsy moderate position from the right (remember, the conservatives lambasted him for taking that position, while there was again meek silence from the liberals.)
Bush, stumbling and bumbling, said just enough right things to win, as the Democrats said and did just enough wrong things to lose.
I’m looking for a thread to post some catharsis and this is the one that comes closest. This is long and rambling, probably a thread-killer. I apologize in advance.
The Libertarians and the Greens, IMHO, approach the situation ass-backwards. Instead of forming a political party to capitalize on a popular movement, they form a political party to start a popular movement. It makes no sense – we are talking about representative government and in a non-parliamentary system, there is little reason to throw a vote away on what is essentially a single issue (environment with the Greens and government interference with the Libs).
I think it is high time for the Democratic party to look at what they stand for – they obviously don’t represent the issues that a scary majority of this country uses to decide elections. At the same time, though, they must realize that if they don’t represent the country, sometimes it is better to work to change the country instead of their views. Again, popular movements underlie political parties, not vice-versa.
A big problem with the Democrats is that in 1994, they lost the center of the country. “Moderate” became defined as what the 1994 GOP wave was preaching, and allowed the GOP control of both the political and much of the popular momentum in the country. The center has moved right since then, and the GOP centrists have only followed that movement. The big thing, though, is the movement of the center was not all passive; it was pushed to the right by churches feeding into (and fed by) the Religious Right, by talk radio, and a top-notch right-wing ideology that has caught like wildfire.
This is a paradigm. Popular movements, deserving of representation by political parties, do not spring fully formed out of the head of Zeus. They are shaped, they are nurtured at local levels, they are encouraged by getting people excited. Sept 11th managed to cement this shift to the right (people are conservative when afraid), but it was a near inevitability from the results of 2000. Since then, the Democrats have only played defense, trying to reclaim a middle of the country that they still perceive, not really aware that it has drifted far to the right since 1994 and doesn’t exist anymore.
My suggestions. First, to the present. In 2000, the DNC had become the Republican-Lite party. Clinton led it that way, in trying to find the center of the country, but hey, the center of the country was moving to the right. Gore nearly pinned it down, but it slinked off to his right. In 2004, I see similar things as having happened. Kerry went after a center of the ideologic spectrum which had now moved solidly right. Only the GOP perceived and moved on this, and therefore convincingly won.
The Democrats need to forget looking for a center, and start a movement to form a center of their own. Popular opinion changes, often rapidly. We are not talking about decades-long shifts, even without large traumatic events. People hear ideas, they sound good, and they adopt those ideas. So, for the present: the centrists of the DNC must go: Shrum, McAuliffe, even perhaps the Clintonites and the Clark people. Replace them with new stuff. I think Howard Dean’s crew came closest, and I think you saw the beginnings of exactly what I am trying to ramble on about: the formation of a popular movement that finds its voice in a political party.
So for the future. My wet dream would be an Rationalist Party: based on science and facts, using the best tested and true methods for managing the government, economy and defense. Since there is no reason to have laws that enfringe upon personal behavior where others aren’t effective, they will steer clear of those issues: ineffective laws are abandoned. This doesn’t necessarily mean smaller or larger government, but the Rationalists need to clarify what they think the role of government should be. In my dream, government will be used as a positive tool for the betterment of the country, the people, and the world. With careful apportionment of resources to actions that perform the best, I think that the size and the cost of government can be kept under control. Where this was hopelessly liberal a few years ago (especially “the world” bit), I think that a new Democratic movement could cleave this from the Neoconservative movement. It is a simple, easy message that makes sense in a global picture: conduct domestic policy like foreign policy. Promise clear goals to making people’s lives better using this formula. Don’t lie, don’t spin, just honest, like Abe.
This has the advantages of appealing to a wide swath of the country who is not particularly evangelical or socially conservative. Again, it needs to start on the street and percolate its way up. But this doesn’t need to take decades; with information spreading like it does nowadays, I can see big changes happening in the next two years. Dean did it in only a few months and with the money and resources of a national party behind him, who knows how far it would have taken him. There are a lot of progressives along this mold in the Republican fold. People like Glenn Reynolds of instapundit.com or Virginia Postrel. For that matter, Bob Barr (who can be categorized on some issues as ultra-conservative) and even Rumsfeld may be in line. The GOP in paying the piper will go right on social issues, and that has the potential to alienate quite a large group of people. Others will be turned off by future fiscal recklessness, and perhaps economic and foreign policy miscues. Forget the center of the country: create a new one. People get alienated from political movements every day. The trick is having a new movement to scoop those people up, make them enthusiastic, and believe that they need to be represented as such.
edwino, I disagree completely. Your mention of Howard Dean is enough to show just how flawed your theory is. Howard Dean is a perfect example of a movement that everyone thought was a groundswell, but it reality it was a mere blip. It looked way bigger on the Internet.
As you admit, the center has moved to the right. If, as you suggest, we try to have some grassroots opinion changing, particularly if those opinions are liberal ones, you will only get the illusion of opinion changing. The next election, guess what, you will be unpleasantly surprised.
We have to follow the country to the right. But we have to do it in a way that is not Republican-lite. We have to actually be more conservative than Republicans are. Unfortunately, I think that this included social issues to some extent. Perhaps it would be better if the real leftists (and I count myself as one) would commit to the Green party, and let the Democrats veer sharply to the right. The real leftists are an insignificant minority, and their presence in the Democratic party only serves to hurt it. The Democrats can embrace religious intolerance just as well as Republicans can. Without the real leftists, the rest of the country could learn to embrace Democrats, which would continue to have real differences to Republicans with regards to the environment and other important issues.
edwino, you make the Democratic Party’s pursuit of the centre ground sound like someone chasing a wet bar of soap. Every time you think you’ve caught it, poink…it jumps even further right.
And you cannot even ask the soap to, at least, stay where it is for the time being. Because the soap then thinks you’re talking down to it.
The US electorate is now way, way to the right of the rest of the industrialised democratic world. Good luck appealing to them on your own. I would suggest simply making damned sure they reap the whirlwind in the next 4 years.
Avumede
The religious right is spoken for. Social conservatives (except for religious African Americans) are spoken for. Forget about trying to go get them. They are the GOP core now. They are not the fringe of the party, waiting for a better option. They have exact representation: a president who they can call one of their own, passing policies left and right with a Congress run by sympathizers. The DNC cannot better that. But, for deficit hawks, their fiscal conservative wing of the GOP is evaporating. Social libertarians are right out. Even neoconservatism is probably a fading movement after the disaster of trying to rebuild Iraq.
My example of Howard Dean only showed how he tapped into a movement for his support. This allowed him to say exactly what he wanted, not bland truisms designed to appeal to the broadest swath of people. I used Howard Dean not because his movement was particularly big, but because it was particularly enthusiastic. Popular movements can fizzle like his, or they can snowball. The DNC needs to find people uninterested in the social conservative economic liberal policies of the GOP, give them a better message, and let them convince their friends to join them.
That’s exactly right, SentientMeat. The GOP has found its roots in powerful popular movements and has symbiosed with those movements to become a party of complete representation for evangelicals and social conservatives. Everything, from their good vs. evil foreign policy approaches, to their funding for faith based initiatives and other planks of domestic policy, will increasingly be designed to appeal to this center.
I agree that the US electorate is far right; so far right in fact that the DNC needs to forget about that as the center. Speaking as a liberal red-stater, and watching election reaction from around the country, we are all staring in disbelief at the tremendous turnout the the GOP managed to get from people who were voting on “moral values.” This clearly won the election for them. It is shocking to think that our views, which seem to make sense and seem to be closer to how the rest of the industrialized world works, are so far to the left of the entire middle of the country.
Letting them reap the whirlwind, at least in my books, is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Letting a socially conservative agenda derail 200 years of creating a free, representative, federal government would be a tragedy and perhaps unrepairable. What we need to do is to start at the bottom. Convince people that the past 200 years of increasing freedoms has served us well and will serve us well in the future. That government doesn’t need to expand to create a “decent” society. It would be easy to sell a message, especially to the American people who naturally distrust government. The DNC needs to be selling a message to the people that the Republicans, with their rightward trek, have now started to disenfranchise.
edwino, enthusiasm doesn’t count for much, I’ve realized. As enthusiastic as anyone may be, it’s just one man one vote. Appealing to the middle will not bring enthusiasm, but it will bring votes, and that is what counts. The Dean movement made clear that it is a lot more difficult to build a grassroots movements than anyone had guessed.
You may have a point about the libertarian wing of the GOP coming off, but I wonder if that wing didn’t come off already, and voted for Kerry. Before believing that they could save us, I’d like to see how many there are, and how they voted. My belief is that the Religious Right can stomp us anytime they want to, even with the fiscal conservatives on our side.
But enthusiasm will create a new middle.
We don’t need two parties vying for the attention of what is being touted as the middle of the country. There are plenty of us that find the “moral values” views opposite to what we look for in a politician. Even if every one of those moral values people vote Republican forever, only 20% of the people reported were ranking that as their first issue. There is a full 30% of other voters – those who voted Republican based on terrorism and Iraq, for the most part – that the Republicans are free to forget about now that they are probably convinced that they can thank the social conservatives for their “mandate.” Never mind the fiscal conservatives and the deficit hawks and the libertarians that are already on the fringe.
That 20% is tempting, but the Democrats have no hope in hell right now of getting them. Any movement to the right can only serve to alienate many, many more on the left than it can ever gain on the right.