For fifteen years now the Democratic Party has been plagued by the apologist naysaying fucks of the Democratic Leadership Council. The
only thing I have ever seen the DLC do is criticize Democrats and explain why the traditional Democratic agenda must be abandoned. During the nineties they were telling us to be "fiscal conservatives and social liberals," and now they're talking about traditional values and appealing to culturally conservative southern white men. So what's their winning combination? Fiscal conservative
and social conservative. No wonder they've earned their stripes as the Republican Wing of the Democratic Party.
However, that is not why the DLC is self-contradictory....
.... The reason that they are self-contradictory is their dual devotion to rational-choice median voter theory and to "electability."
It's pretty clear that the general idea of the DLC is to bring the Democratic party as close as possible to the median voter's position, which, according to the tenets of rational choice politics, should guarantee electoral victory. But median voter theory is based on the central assumption that voters are rational in that they choose the candidate or party that is closest to them on the issues. If that is true, then whichever alternative claims the median voter wins, because they also claim all the other voters on one side of the median. Of course, it gets more complicated with plural dimensions (say, social and economic issues), but the principle of the median voter can be extended. So the DLC thinks that the electoral strategy of the Democratic party should be to appeal to the median voter and thus win elections.
But then comes "electability." Arguing in the simplest possible way, electability should just indicate a candidate's distance from the median voter. The most electable candidate claims the median voter. But the DLC contradicts itself by suggesting that people should vote for this most electable candidate. If, in choosing whom to vote for, the voters take electability into account, they are contravening the central assumption of median voter theory, that voters are rational in choosing the alternative closest to them. Something else informs their vote. Or at least, that's what the DLC wants, because they want us of the Democratic party to pick the most electable candidate.
As seems clear from the Democratic party thus far, electability does play a major role in determining people's votes. Since that is so, the DLC's first conclusion is wrong. We don't actually have to appeal to the median voter because voters don't vote on the basis of ideological positions. They're not rational utility maximizers, so we don't have to run a rational strategy.