In a lengthy essay, the American Prospect's Michael Tomasky wonders
what the Democratic Party philosophy is.
What the Democrats still don't have is a philosophy, a big idea that unites their proposals and converts them from a hodgepodge of narrow and specific fixes into a vision for society. Indeed, the party and the constellation of interests around it don't even think in philosophical terms and haven't for quite some time. There's a reason for this: They've all been trained to believe -- by the media, by their pollsters -- that their philosophy is an electoral loser. Like the dogs in the famous "learned helplessness" psychological experiments of the 1960s -- the dogs were administered electrical shocks from which they could escape, but from which, after a while, they didn't even try to, instead crouching in the corner in resignation and fear -- the Democrats have given up attempting big ideas. Any effort at doing so, they're convinced, will result in electrical (and electoral) shock.
But is that as true as it appears? Certainly, today's Democrats can't simply return to the philosophy that was defeated in the late 1970s. But at the same time, let's recognize a new historical moment when we see one: Today, for the first time since 1980, it is conservative philosophy that is being discredited (or rather, is discrediting itself) on a scale liberals wouldn't have dared imagine a few years ago.
Tomasky calls it a "philosophy". In other places, you'll hear it talked about as the party "narrative". This isn't our values (which seem to be coalescing around "opportunity, fairness, and investment in the future and our people"), nor is it the party brand. This is even bigger picture.
Tomasky argues that the New Deal Democratic philosophy was "that citizens should be called upon to look beyond their own self-interest and work for a greater common interest."
This, historically, is the moral basis of liberal governance -- not justice, not equality, not rights, not diversity, not government, and not even prosperity or opportunity. Liberal governance is about demanding of citizens that they balance self-interest with common interest. Any rank-and-file liberal is a liberal because she or he somehow or another, through reading or experience or both, came to believe in this principle. And every leading Democrat became a Democrat because on some level, she or he believes this, too.
Of course, the Democratic Party no longer holds that philosophy. Democrats seemed to think that notion was an electoral loser, though as we argue in CTG, Republican gains have come in large party (if not in most part) from their maassive machine that generates, markets, and sells their ideas to the American people without a countering liberal machine. And it was Reagan that landed that knockout punch to this traditional liberal philosophy.
By 1980, Reagan had seized the idea of the common good. To be sure, it was a harshly conservative variant that quite actively depended on white middle-class resentment. But to its intended audience, his narrative was powerful, a clean punch landed squarely on the Democratic glass jaw. The liberals had come to ask too much of regular people: You, he said to the middle-class (and probably white) American, have to work hard and pay high taxes while welfare cheats lie around the house all day, getting the checks liberal politicians make sure they get; you follow the rules while the criminals go on their sprees and then get sprung by shifty liberal lawyers. For a lot of (white) people, it was powerful. And, let's face it, manipulative as it was, it wasn't entirely untrue, either!
So what does Tomasky suggest? He thinks the moment is ripe, historically, for a return to the politics of the greater good, that asking people to stand and work for something bigger than themselves is a political winner.
Some will say that asking Americans to look beyond their own self-interest and participate in a common good will fail, either because it failed before (the 1960s) or because such a request can succeed only in rare moments -- a time of war or of deep domestic crisis. But that isn't what failed in the '60s. The first half of the '60s, the civic-republican liberal half, succeeded beyond our wildest dreams. The second half, the half that ditched the common good, is what failed, and it failed for precisely the reason that it did so. And yes, it may be that the times when such appeals can work are comparatively rare in American history.
For that to happen, Tomasky argues that the interest groups must be tamed and a leader must emerge to symbolize this transcendence from the individual and his or her pet cause, to something much bigger, much more inspiring:
I dream of the Democratic presidential candidate who, in his -- or her -- announcement speech in August 2007 says something like the following: "To the single-issue groups arrayed around my party, I say this. I respect the work you do and support your causes. But I won't seek and don't want your endorsement. My staff and I won't be filling out any questionnaires. You know my track record; decide from it whether I'll be a good president. But I am running to communicate to Americans that I put the common interest over particular interests." Okay, I said it was a dream. But there it is -- in one bold stroke, a candidate occupies the highest moral ground available to politicians: to be unbought and unbossed.
Yeah, that would make my heart flutter as well! And as I've argued a million times, that position is not borne of hostility toward the goals of those groups, but in their lack of grasp of the bigger picture.
Much of the work done by these groups, and many of their goals, are laudable. But if they can't justify that work and those goals in more universalist terms rather than particularist ones, then they just shouldn't be taken seriously. Immigration policy can't be chiefly about the rights of undocumented immigrants; it needs to be about what's good for the country. Similarly with civil-rights policy -- affirmative action, say, which will surely be up for review one day again when a case reaches the Roberts court. As I noted above, when talking about Gingrich's failure in 1995, there exist powerful common-good arguments for affirmative action. In addition to the idea that diversity enriches private-sector environments, affirmative action has been the most important single factor in the last 40 years in the broad expansion of the black middle class, which in turn (as more blacks and whites work and live together) has dramatically improved race relations in this county, which has been good, as LBJ would put it, for every American.
Tomasky's dream candidate is Gov. Brian Schweitzer from Montana, though he's still committed to fixing the mess Republicans made in Montana and won't be available for national duty until the next decade. Others might and hopefully will emerge.
But it's clear that the future of the Democratic Party isn't the current collection of constituency and issue groups. It's committed, movement-building progressives who fight for higher principles than narrow self-interest, and sell that vision to an American public that isn't as selfish and self-centered as Republicans would have everyone believe.