Democratic Party R.I.P.?
To address the reactions that might have been excited by poor communication or flawed logic on my part, I’d like to add the following clarifications:
Am I overreacting to a transient electoral hiccup? Shouldn’t we stick with the Democratic Party, stay the course, and hope that a better candidate and more aggressive campaign win us victory next time?
We can hope that a Clintonesque Bubba-nator with the prerequisite personal and ideological charisma will arise to win us a red state or two and national victory.
But as they say, hope is not a plan.
And maybe what worked for us pre-9/11 won’t work for us post 9/11. Prolonged Republican control of the government and and manipulation of the War on Terror discourse may have buttressed the GOP Hero’s Journey narrative to the point that the red counties may now be impervious to Democratic feel-your-pain empathy even of Clintonian proportions.
Without wedging some red county votes away from the GOP, I don’t see us winning a presidential election, let alone achieving an effective governing majority. And I don’t see today’s Democratic Party doing that.
Am I trying to grind a libertarian axe?
I don’t think so. I’ve only tiptoed around the edges of libertarian doctrine. I don’t consider liberty a panacea. In the real world, public power is needed as a counterweight to private power. But now public power in the shape of the federal government is buttressing private power instead. So we need people power, expressing itself in new channels, and through ideas and institutions that resonate with more Americans.
People power used to mean the pursuit of social justice through a powerful, politically engaged working class/urban/ minority coalition.
Thanks to decades of union busting, crippling minority political power through criminalization of behavior and imprisonment, and unfavorable demographics, that coalition looks like a paper tiger.
Your average suburban cowboy doesn’t have to worry about the outraged masses chasing his pickup through some cookie-cutter subdivision howling for white bourgeois blood. The response to “social justice” is “so what?”
To me, that means “liberty” for now instead of “social justice” as an ideology of popular mobilization.
Am I proposing some creepazoid DLC strategy to co-opt the Republican agenda and join the race for the political lowest common denominator?
I hope not. But I do believe that wedging the GOP support in the red counties is the following: a political necessity, a practical possibility, and a moral obligation.
The politics of polarization is the most destructive result of the Republican’s forty year offensive against the Democrats and liberal democracy. Accepting exile to our blue Bantu-stans and demonizing the Republican Other feeds the GOP strategy. When Democrats are powerless, clueless doofuses, engineering red vs. blue confrontations is going to push more people into the Republican and independent camps than into the Democratic camp. Look for fanning the flames of Red vs. Blue hatred to be a growth industry in the second Bush administration.
If one accepts that Democratic failings, in addition to Republican machinations and the moral and intellectual failings of Joe and Josephine Six-Pack, have combined to put our electoral fortunes in the dumper, we can find a little understanding and perhaps even a little love in our hearts for our misguided red county goobers. They aren’t evil assholes. They’re just normal people (inclined to be evil assholes perhaps) that we weren’t able to reach because while we were claiming to be America’s team we spent the whole game getting sacked, fumbling the ball, and punting from our own endzone.
So I can find it in my heart to share a professed love of liberty with these people. They might love liberty not just because they are callous Republican weenies; maybe it’s because “liberty” provides day to day moral and practical direction for their lives when big-city big-government concerns about social justice seem irrelevant and onerous.
I won’t buy the Republican idea of “liberty” as an excuse for political and moral disengagement from the obligations of a humane society.
But I do buy the idea of liberty as a driver for social organization outside the scope of the federal government: that we should put our money where our mouth is and redistribute our money and energy to the less fortunate, even — and especially — when the rest of the country and the federal government have told us it is a burden they can’t — or won’t — shoulder.
Then we can enter the political struggle for a broader, more redistributive solution from a position of moral, factual, and political strength.
That’s why I made the admittedly inflammatory suggestion that we ditch Social Security.
We can’t be afraid of crisis and confrontation. We have to be prepared for them. And we have to plan to articulate, promote, and achieve — if only in part — our goals for income security even if Bush, the GOP majority, Dem fecklessness, Wall Street greed, the media, and the red counties successfully join forces to gut Social Security.
If the only takeaway from a political defeat on the issue of privatization of Social Security accounts is high minded grumbling and a hope that next time a disgruntled electorate will punish Bush and Company at the polls, that’s an abdication of our moral and political responsibility to show leadership on the issue of Social Security.
We don’t have to just fight a losing battles in the public sector from a position of political weakness, trying to work through flawed and easily compromised elected officials; we carry on the struggle in the private, voluntary, and non-profit sector, showing how fair and honest social policies work.
We’ve got creativity, compassion, and commitment. We’ve got 55 million supporters. The only thing we don’t have is political power.
For instance, I love the idea of offering health insurance — and maybe even income security investment funds — through a nationwide progressive non-profit.
In other words, shift the focus of the struggle from electoral politics to a social movement — a social movement that’s at home in red states and in blue states.
If the social movement flourishes, then political power will follow.
Am I proposing to sell out the liberal, minority, and lower and middle class voters who have relied on the Democratic Party to protect their not only their interests but their health and livelihoods?
Short answer. Nope. The Democratic Party has already been failing them for years through compromise, retreat, and failure at the polls.
Am I selling out the New Deal?
Shorter answer. It is insane to campaign on the superiority of big government activism when we are shut out of all three branches.
Does Bush have a lock on the War on Terror discourse?
For now he does, in large part, I believe, because the Democrats never challenged him.
When America gets disillusioned with Bush, we’ll see a new discourse arise — one that doesn’t directly challenge the War on Terror, but supersedes it. Perhaps a populist narrative, indirectly critiquing the War on Terror by expressing a desire for transparency, accountability, and humility in the dealings of the federal government. Or generational, reproaching Bush’s plundering of our fiscal, economic, and environmental future by insisting we can no longer hide the costs of federal policies by adoption of an artificially short time horizon to gauge their impact.
Whatever this new discourse is, I think it will arise in the red counties. And when it does, I want our heroes and our myths to be there, to be ready to assume leadership roles in wedging the GOP block in the red counties and building a new national consensus.
If I’m wrong, no biggie. The Democratic Party will roar back and administer a royal ass-whipping to the GOP. No one will be happier than me. I’ve been wrong before — the last time when I thought that decency, self-interest, and love of democracy would combine to sweep George W. Bush from office in 2004.
If I’m right, then we’ll see at least one of two things.
We’ll see a migration of Southern sleazebag Democrats like Miller and Breaux into de facto alliances with the GOP, if not outright switches of party affiliations. It’s already happening, isn’t it?
And maybe we’ll also see a smarter, more principled progressive politician will do the red state math and see that he or she can supersede the Democratic Party and ride a grass-roots social movement bridging red and blue counties to electoral success.
Maybe we won’t have to kill the Democratic Party in order to save it. If we can bring in fresh blood — red, as well as blue — to revive it, maybe it will become worth saving.
Copyright 2004 Peter Lee
