Not long ago,
Ruy Teixiera claimed that there existed a "identity gap" in which people do not understand what the Democratic Party stands for. The argument is made repeatedly, there is either the perception or the fact that people do not know what Democrats stand for. This is quite odd since Democrats all over the nation repeat over and over again what their positions are. People claimed not to know where Senator Kerry stood in the 2004 election, but Senator Kerry made his positions generally very clear, repeating them over and over again. But too many people seem to just not get it. Why? I seek to answer that question below.
If Democrats repeat their actual positions over and over again but the message fails to get across, then evidently voters cannot retain the information or figure out what links Democratic positions together. This doesn't seem to be a problem on the Republican side. But I ask, what is the unifying idea of liberal/progressive/Democratic politics? Going back through our history and through political theory, that common unifying idea appears to be community mindedness and belief that we live within a social contract, it derives from the ideas of Locke, Rousseau, and Arendt among others. Republicans, following the thought of individuals like Milton Friedman, Adam Smith, or Niccollo Machiavelli have built their ideology arround a kind of right wing form of individualism. This idea that Democrats derive thier ideology from a committment to community has been advocated by
Michael Tomasky at the American Prospect, and in a less clear way by George Lakoff in his books "Moral Politics" and "Don't Think of an Elephant!" as he describes what a "nurturing parent family" is. The common unifying idea here seems to be concern for the community.
It was with this in mind that I set out on a small scale research project, sampling 283 students at a small private liberal arts college I asked questions about basic essential political principles, community concern, and and individual mindedness. I recognize that my sample is limited here, but I thought my findings interesting enough to suggest that an improved version of this study should be conducted with a more representative sample.
To measure community concern I relied upon asking respondents to agree or dissagree with statements such as "when one member of the community is harmed, the rest of the community suffers as well," and "the role of government should be to promote a strong community and opportunity." To measure one's inclinations toward individual concerns I asked respondents to agree or disagree with statements such as "the collective good will ultimately be achieved if individuals pursue their own self interest," "the role of government should be to promote the principle of self reliance," and "some people are inherently superior to others." I felt that these all drove at the kind of right wing individualism I wanted to measure, they all correlated with one another, and thus I was able to use the three to construct an index measuring individualism.
When comparing cross tabulations of the index I constructed from actual policy positions and the index for individualism, there was a statistically significant moderate relationship between the variables. As individualism increased liberalism decreased. Another question in my survey asked people to self identify their politics. Roughly the same correlation occurred, individualism made people more conservative. Party identification saw a similar trend, as did their vote in the 2004 Presidential election. Individualism proved to be a pretty clear predictor of politics.
When measuring the results for community concern, I found things much less predictable and far more interesting which lead me into the identity gap.
Both statements measuring community correlated towards political liberalism in policy positions with a similar trend to the trend that individualism and conservatism showed. However, that trend failed to exist in how people self identified their political views. Comparing these community variables with Party affiliation broke down even more. No trend whatsoever between Party preference and concern for the community. Furthermore I cross tabulated these variables with the 2004 Presidential vote and again found absolutely nothing.
Concern for the welfare of the individual makes one more conservative, concern for the welfare of the community makes one more liberal. But while these correlated as one would expect to party affiliation and voting for those with strong individualist views, there was no correlation between party identification and voting for community views.
What can we take from this then? Those who have strong individualist inclinations are conservative because they are likely to want policies that reflect the kind of social darwinism that derives from those individualist inclinations. That means no government regulation, no government persuit of social equality, and low taxes for individuals and businesses. Those with strong community inclinations are likely to support regulations for the better good of society (example:polution control), they want progressive taxation, and like the government to spend on antipoverty and job creation programs to create collective prosperity. But where conservatives who hold strong individualist views vote and identify Republican, liberals who hold community centered views do not vote or identify Democrat.
It is my belief that where others have determined that their is an identity gap, I have actually found the identity gap. It revolves arround this idea of community. I have been excited to see this becoming a major party discussion as of late at this site and arround the left media/blogosphere. One cannot be sure of my results until a nationally representative sample is used (something I was far away from), but this holds that there exists a promising set of liberal Democratic voters to be had who because of holes in Democratic rhetoric do not realize their own liberalism or equate their views with liberal and Democratic policies.
John F. Kennedy talked about collectively moving forth and making personal sacrifice for a greater good when he stated in his inaugural "ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country." Democrats, as Tomasky argues have lost sight of this in recent years, and have resorted to "retail politics" where Democrats are trying to connect with an electorate by telling them how they personally will benefit from Democratic policy positions. The overarching philosophical argument for these policies is lost and many voters do not equate the policies being promoted with any larger vision for the Country. Compare this with the Republican side, President Bush ran the entire 2004 election on the idea that he would keep people personally safe. Voters in Nebraska were scared into voting for President Bush out of raw fear for their life. It shifted the public mindset enough to the individual to swing the election to Bush. Kerry had no community response, Kerry's only response seemed to be "I have a plan..." People were left with the choice, vote to protect themselves (for Bush) or reject Bush and vote for whoever the other viable candidate is. Just enough people chose to vote for themselves instead of a rejection of Bush.
The 2006 election will be precisely the same, and the answer is for Democrats to focus on collective good, collective gain. Republicans have clearly drawn the line for who to be afraid of in 2006, the Democrats will gain some number of seats, because the groups to be afraid of are not as compelling, but the fear campaign will return. This time in the form of gays and "illegal immigrants." Democrats must respond with a theme of "common good" or face a very dissapointing election with only modest gains in the House and Senate in 2006.