Yesterday, in celebration of our country's independence, former DNC press secretary Terry Michael offered
his manifesto on why and how to rebrand the Democratic Party for the 21st century. He bases his suggestions on the history of the Democratic Party and calls for a return to our Jeffersonian roots. He compares the decline of the Democratic brand to the decline of the Episcopal Church in the 1950s and 1960s. The problem is primarily in the lack of a narrative that presents an overview of the party. We can win elections without a strong brand, but it will continue to be difficult. The solution to our problem is to offer up a new vision for the Democratic Party, one that tells people what we are for and why they ought to be Democrats.
Terry Michael offers a brief history of the Democratic Party as the party of the little guy. The changes in the policies of the Democratic Party, from Jefferson's limited government to FDR's New Deal, were responses to changes in the economic condition of the little guy.
Born in the Agrarian Era of its founder, Jefferson, the Democratic Party's original story was of a limited central government serving self-sufficient "little people" (farmers, artisans, shop keepers) prizing and preserving individual liberty - juxtaposed against the elitist federalists, and their seemingly monarchical, big central government ambition.
The Democratic Party narrative was refashioned in the Industrial Era, particularly with arrival of the New Deal, when one-size-fits-all, central authority, wealth re-distributive policies were appealing to many of those little guys. Most had traded self-sufficiency for wage labor that would have distressed Jefferson. Their economic lives revolved around big centralized economic units, corporations, against which they eventually were represented by big centralized labor unions.
The United States is moving away from an industrial society and moving to a post-industrial society. Manufacturing is on the decline, even as productivity is up. Most Americans are turning to a career in the service industry, although some have also highlighted the increasing importance of the "Creative Class." All of these economic changes are having an impact in changing the old New Deal outlook of the people, even if the Democratic Party hasn't kept up with the changes.
But somewhere around the middle of the 20th Century, with the advent of a post-industrial Information Era, the little guys, from the working class to the great middle class that Democrats have always claimed to represent, edged back toward more self-sufficiency. They benefitted from the democratization of technology, finance and information, which Tom Friedman describes in "The Lexus and the Olive Tree." This paradigm shift, from used-and-abused workers to empowered, share-holding consumers, allowed our "little guys" to make -- tailor-make, in fact -- choices for themselves. To use a trivial, but instructive example, a few years ago I built my own Nikes online; a hundred pairs at Foot Locker weren't enough. The "Central Authority Solutions" story offered by Democrats, from the late-19th century populists to mid-20th century social welfare liberals, lost luster. With significant implications for the economic frame of political issues, the average American's relatively successful quest for food, clothing and shelter was at least partly displaced with a focus on amusing our well-fed selves and seeking the psychic rewards of "the good life and its discontents" (see Robert Samuelson's superb book with that title.)
The Democratic brand has not yet responded to these changes; the party is stuck between the past and the future and not sure how to move forward. He contrasts the Republican brand and its clarity with the soft and muddled message of the Democratic Party.
You might reduce the resulting GOP brand, which helped produce Republican victories in seven of the last ten national elections, to this: "Government bad. America good. The marketplace will provide. In God we trust. Meritocracy, but not equal outcomes, for all."
What's the story behind today's Democrat brand? I continue to be a partisan Democrat, but I'm not sure. I believe it's something like: "Government isn't all that bad; look at Social Security and Head Start. America isn't always that good; we try to impose our will on a multi-cultural world. The marketplace is full of bad guys who need to be restrained, including their greed-driven political speech. Hey, we're religious, too. And, not just equal opportunity for all, but re-distributive social justice entitlements for special "minority" victims, because, except for me and my friends, racism endures."
It is not so much that the Democratic brand is wrong, but that it is weak and lacks clarity. It lacks the focus that the party once had under President as diverse as Jefferson, Jackson, FDR, and LBJ. Having established the need for change, Terry Michael turns to the two common solutions offered by pundits and politicians. Both are found very lacking, in particular the suggestions of the DLC.
Centrists, like the Democratic Leadership Council, continue to propose triangulation tactics that divert attention of persuadable voters from the Washington-based politics of interest and identity group-dominated left-liberals. DLC Democrats offer government as a tool, not an end, to provide middle-class economic opportunity. They've been good at talking to the center on pocketbook questions, but haven't offered a coherent energizing philosophy for the base. They can't seem to fully understand that today's political middle is dominated by moderate-to-liberal Baby Boomers on social-cultural questions, rather than by the more conservative Depression Era voters who filled the center when the DLC was formed in the 1980s. And their foreign policy prescriptions are a kind of Neo-Conservative Lite, which resulted in their collusion with the disastrous elective war policies that have so rightfully infuriated much of the party's base.
While I understand that the are other reasons people here dislike the DLC, I've always found their constant support of a foreign policy that broadly parallels that of the neocons to be one of the most offensive attributes of the organization. Second to this would be their desire to take social and culture issues of the table, typically by moving to the right on them. So they're not an option. But Michael finds fault with the alternative too.
The second approach, offered by the economic policy reactionaries overly represented in the party's congressional wing, preaches a return to an "old-time religion," "complete-the-New-Deal" ideology. That Fifties and Sixties battle cry might have made sense once. But it is mis-matched for today's smarter voters, who want to make decisions from their homes, or at least their states. Social welfare left-liberals often peddle a kind of middle-class neo-populism, a William Jennings Bryan appeal to folks with SUVs and satellite TV, with selective-memory imagery of the good life of the 1950s (again, see Bob Samuelson's book.) Sometimes they push class warfare, a version of which the ultra-ambitious John Edwards now seems to be selling as the self-appointed trial lawyer for the underclass. Old-time religion seems to move (or at least receive lip service from) the Dupont Circle, K Street and AFL-CIO Washington-based wings of the base, but usually leaves the hinterland center cold. And the Beltway-based lefties have lost their nerve on non-interventionist foreign policy, so afraid of that "soft-on-defense" Cold War scarecrow the DLC neo-cons have been peddling for two decades that they allowed Bush's elective war to commence without engaging any real debate.
The supporters of the return to the New Deal narrative act as if the party has entirely sold out the legacy of FDR during recent elections. Perhaps it is due to their selective memory. I would argue that the party has still turned to such a program in recent times, such as Mondale in 1984, and was handed a strong defeat. I'm not sure if I want to repeat that and hand the Republicans a victory in 2006 or 2008. For better or for worse, the New Deal is not able to take on the New Economy. The answer is to return to Jefferson.
The new desktop-empowered generations, convinced by Republican economic choice, but turned off by the social-cultural intolerance of the GOP's Talibanic wing, could embrace Democrats if we return to our founder's philosophy, a back-to-the-future Jeffersonian liberalism, now known as libertarianism.
Jefferson, who said the government is best that governs least, knew the era of big government was over two hundred years before Bill Clinton proclaimed it in the Nineties. If we listen to the man from Monticello, who advocated peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none, we can rediscover our anti-war, anti-interventionist nerve. We can be as insistent as Republicans that pluralistic democracy and free markets are noble and worth emulating; but we must equally assert that we don't intervene in the affairs of the rest of the world unless we're directly attacked or legitimately invited.
Jefferson can be an inspiration to our candidates, who need a better way to talk about religion and politics. Instead of mumbling some consultant-driven Religion Lite nonsense about restoring faith to public life, Democrats can find the courage to say what we believe: we protect religious liberty by keeping god out of government. Our Founders knew that, making not a single reference to a deity in the Constitution.
So maybe you don't like "libertarian." Fine, go with "Jeffersonian liberal" instead. The point remains the same; we would be rebranding the Democratic Party as the party of liberty, privacy, and choice. This is not a new suggestion, but it's worth thinking about on the day after our independence day. After all, isn't that what liberty, privacy, and choice are all about? Independence?