So it now appears that the New Republic has fired a shot across the bow of the "Dean for DNC" groundsell. Much of their criticism of Dean appears predicated on the fact that Dean would represent a "move left." This disappoints me. Not that I was or am a big Dean person. Because I didn't support him for President. But Dean appeals to me, but not because he is "a man of the left." Its much more complicated than that.
From what I can glean, Dean's appeal in 2003 was twofold. Firstly, and more simply - what folks like those at the TNR and the more clueless members of the "liberal establishment" like Nick Kristoff at the NYT or Richard Cohen at the WaPo see when they see Dean - is his opposition to the Iraq War. To these folks, they see Dean as the return to liberalism's "McGovernite" impulse. Many of these folks came of age politically during the 1960s and 1970s, and view liberalism's problems primarily through a Vietnam War prism. However, I think this fundamentally misses Dean's appeal and the fervor he attracted. Sure, part of Dean's support came from what can be termed rather crudely (and perhaps unfairly) the "Michael Moore" left, who sees the fundamental problem in the world today as America. However, if this were really his appeal, why would these folks have backed Dean, and not, say, Dennis Kucinich? After all, Kucinich was the most "McGovernite" candidate in the field.
No, what Dean represents is a one of what I view to be two of the crucial missing pieces of a renewed and ascendant liberalism. Dean represented a creative approach to American politics and to liberalism more specifically, a liberalism that remembers that "big government" is not an end in and of itself, but only exists as a "necessary evil" sometimes to protect against the ways in which unchecked corporate power can be just as destructive of liberty as government oppression. When Herbert Croly founded the (aformentioned) New Republic in 1912, designed to be American progressivism's leading journal, he understood this. His intellectual goal was for the American left to achieve "Jeffersonian ends through Hamiltonian means." Sometime in the 1960s, the reason why liberals supported government imposition was forgotten and the programs - and defense of New Deal programs - themselves became the ends, not the means to a greater good - the Democratic Party became too much a party of both Hamiltonian ends and means. This is what the Reagan revolution took advantage of - it promised to achieve Jeffersonian ends through Jeffersonian means. But the current GOP has come adrift from this message - it now wants to achieve Hamiltonian ends through Jeffersonian mean.
This represents a key and troubling departure for the GOP, one that offers liberals a golden opportunity. But we have to seize it, however. We can't continue as what I term the "prescription drug benefit" party if we are to fully seize the moment.. Its not that a "prescirption drug benefit" wouldn't be a good thing, and I think most Americans know this. But, too often, it seems that when Democrats suggest or propose programs like these, it just seems like politics, another way to get into office, to get the American people dependent on a kind of federal patronage. Rather than being proposed for reasons of liberty or freedom or morality, it is simply proposed as a pragmatic (read bureaucratic) solution. In his own funny way, I think Dean gets this. The most successful Democratic candidates do - Clinton, Carter, Obama. But the Democratic Party and many of its leading lights do not.
This lead me to my second point. The moral dimension of politics. Now when I say "moral politics," I'm not talking about George Lakoff. Rather, I'm talking about a venerable tradition of the Anglo-American left. This tradition is especially clear in Britain. From Gladstone in the 19th century to the Labour Party in the 20th, the British left has been Britain's "moral conscience." Indeed, as late as the 1960s, 50% of Labour's Parliamentary MPs were religious non--conformists (read Methodists, Baptists, Quakers) who have traditionally been the well-spring of British reformism and social democracy. Indeed, one could argue that the decline of religiousity in Britain in the last 50 years has cost the British left dearly.
That the same cannot be said of the American left in all its guises is scandolous, particularly in a country still as pious as the United States. Why is it that the aforementioned Clinton, Carter, and Obama have been some are leading lights in the last quarter century? Because they live and deeply undersand this "moral politics" that in Britain would be known as "Christian socialism." Its not because they're from the South, its not because they're "moderate," its not because they're favored by the DLC. No, its because they speak the language of moral politics. At the end of the day, Christianity is utopic as is (and should be) the left.
The left has simply forgotten these things. It has forgotten how to be the strongest proponent of human freedom in this country. It has forgotten to speak to the utopic desires inherent in humanity. It has forgotten to speak of the Christian Brotherhood of Man. It needs to remember these things.