Talk about trouble coming not in single spies but in battalions. For much of his first term, almost everything that George Bush touched turned to political gold. He even managed to parlay a badly-handled war in Iraq into a vote winner. But now almost everything he touches turns to dust.
The Democrats are quietly jubilant. They are seizing every chance they can get--and there are plenty of them--to brand the Republicans as the party of "corruption and cronyism". They seem to be recruiting good candidates for next year's elections. Some even wonder whether 2006 may be their equivalent of 1994--when the Republicans won 52 seats in the House and nine in the Senate, ending 40 years of Democratic rule.
They should hold the champagne.
Can anyone name a single exciting Democratic idea for dealing with poverty? Or crime? Or reforming the public sector? Or winning the Kulturkampf with Islamic extremism? In fact, can anyone name a single exciting Democratic idea, full stop? The Democrats have squandered their years in opposition railing against the Republicans rather than recharging their intellectual batteries. They may be winning a few political battles of late--largely because of Republican incompetence. But they are losing the vision wars.
The reason for this is as simple as it is potentially lethal: the Democrats are split down the middle on everything from Iraq to gay marriage. Centrists believe in working with business, protecting family values and fighting terrorism. "We believe that the September 11th attacks changed America for ever," says the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), "and defeating terrorism is the supreme military and moral mission of our time." Liberal activists believe the opposite: that corporations are bad, family values are hogwash, and the war on terror a delusion.
Worse still, the wrong side is getting the upper hand. A new generation of angry young activists have used their mastery of the internet to tilt the party to the left. Groups such as Moveon.org (which claims 3.3m members) and blogs such as the Daily Kos (which has thousands of partisans venting daily) now colour the whole tone of the political debate on the left.
The teenage scribblers of the left seem to be turning the Democrats into a deranged version of Pavlov's dog--reacting to every stimulus from Professor Rove's laboratory rather than thinking ahead.
Ouch. On the one hand it strokes the ego perhaps more than necessary to say that we color the tone of the entire dialogue. On the other hand it smacks of the worst kind of caricaturizing and paranoia. Perhaps the best we can expect from the conservative London newsmagazine--even if it reluctantly endorsed Kerry last year. Certainly it is unfair of them to go as far as they do. But any challenge so direct deserves at least a serious consideration. Perhaps a casual perusal of the stories featured as I write this are worth a bit of a glance:
- How baseless are those charges now, Tom?
- The Miers effect
- Wingnut Handholding on Miers
- Open Thread
- Why the Right is pissed at Bush re: Miers
- Answering Your Questions About Montana's Black Gold
("I promoted Jerome a Paris diary questioning Gov. Schweitzer's plans to use the Fischer-Tropsch process toward an energy-independent United States with a cleaner fossil fuel while transitioning to the clean energies of tomorrow. Jerome's questions were good ones, and it's nice to see the governor respondinig to some of those concerns -- kos.")
- Waas on Rove's grand jury appearance
- Elitism and law school
- Plame investigation thread
- Call in ("it might be fun to catch the administration spin straight from the horses's mouth")
- PA-Sen: Another poll, another big Casey lead
- Open Thread
So is Lexington fair? For a quick simple categorization, here is my count of the score:
Liberal vision--1, Polls--1, Open Threads--2, Pavlov--8.
Now lets look at reccomended diaries:
- Huge change in Iraq
- Scott McClellan Calls Bush Absurd!!!!
- My Magnum Opus on the Plame Scandal
- Something Wicked This Way Comes
- Cervical Cancer Vaccine works...Dobson shits the bed
- War For Fear
- Herodotus weeps
- President Albert Gore Speaks: A-men
All of these are great, some are funny, some are even brilliant. When standing back and considering only subject matter, though, it seems that even here most diaries are written as primarily reaction to what the other side is doing, giving others little to react to of our own.
Of course, it's not necessarily the best time to be jumping into new adventures. For the past couple weeks the GOP has been pretty busy self-destructing, and for the couple weeks before that Bush was pretty busy fumbling Katrina. So it's not clear whether or whether not this casual glance recently DKos activity is representative in any way. On the other hand, there does seem to be a focus, right now, on tearing things down and less of one on what we're tearing it down for.
Then there's the matter of winning elections:
The teenage scribblers are wedded to a suicidal strategy: they think that their party's best chance of winning lies not in emulating Mr Clinton and moving to the centre but in emulating their nemesis, Mr Bush, and motivating their base. This ignores the most salient fact about American politics: there are three conservatives for every two liberals. The Democrats cannot win without carrying about 60% of moderates.
Is it really that bad? Marshall Wittmann, of the centrist DLC, counsels against despair about the party's future. He points out that the anti-Bush left has a built-in sell-by date: Mr Bush will not be running in 2008. He also argues that the person who defines the character of a party is its presidential candidate--and the strongest candidates for 2008, such as Hillary Clinton and Mark Warner, are forward-thinking moderates.
There are two problems with Mr Wittmann's optimism. The first is that Moveon et al will still be in full bark against Mr Bush in 2006. That will not help in a contest where the tables are already stacked against the Democrats. In the Senate, they will be defending seven potentially vulnerable seats while the Republicans will be defending five; in the House, 41 Democrats are defending districts that Mr Bush carried in 2004 while only 18 Republicans are protecting districts that John Kerry carried.
Second, even if a centrist Democrat succeeds in winning the party nomination in 2008, he or she will have a huge mountain to climb. In "The Politics of Polarisation", a new paper published by the Third Way group, William Galston and Elaine Kamarck, two centrist stalwarts, lay out the topography. The public is profoundly sceptical of the Democrats on both "values" (only 29% of Americans regard the party as friendly towards religion) and defence (it is no accident that the Democrats have won the popular vote only in recent elections--1992, 1996 and 2000--when national security was all but absent from the debate). The party has also lost ground with two groups of swing voters: married women favoured them by four points in 1996, but backed Mr Bush by 12 points in 2004; a 16-point lead among Catholics became a five-point loss in 2004.
The 1990s showed that left-of-centre parties can climb the highest mountains provided they start early and stick to the right path. Mr Clinton made his political reputation as a reforming governor who was willing to think afresh about everything from education to free trade. No sooner was Mr Blair elected leader of the Labour Party in 1994 than he started tearing up left-wing shibboleths about public ownership and rebranding the party as "New Labour". So far the Democratic Party has been so paralysed by its internal contradictions that it has wasted its years in opposition. Perhaps it will start laying out a blueprint for government soon. But time is short.
-The Economist (Lexington)
There it is, agree or disagree, it is an informed, and I believe, heartfelt piece from our cultural kin across the pond, far enough to see from the outside and close enough to empathize.
Is this fair? Let us step back and look at the bigger picture. First, an observation: Complete Republican control of the federal government, after all, was separated from the original ghostwriting of Conscience of a Conservative by four decades. Four decades.
Now to recent history.
During the 1990's, Bill Clinton's brand of DLC centrism led our party to short-term victories in 1992 and 1996, victories which to some extent masked an underlying malaise. While the Democratic party was winning in the short term, the long-term groundwork of a strong liberal America, and by extension the center-left majority that must be supported by a liberal core, was simply not being created. We here after the defeats of 2000 and 2002 and the Iraq war woke up to the need to start working on that liberal core, and I believe that the rise of this blog is one major manifestation of that realization.
Yet, no matter how tempting it may be, it does not serve our purpose to linger too long in the land of reactionary opposition. There is always danger in victory and herein lies the danger for the left today, even as the GOP appears to have been DUI of power, right off the road and into the hedges.
Even more deeply there lies a danger that comes from the very nature of the resurgence of the Democratic left in this century. This resurgence was to a great extent the product of a reaction to the Bush presidency. In its beginning, a large part of our movement was reactionary in nature. The hallmark of Fmr. Governor Dean's insurgent campaign, IIRC, was his opposition to the war in Iraq and his plan to repeal the Bush tax cuts. In that sense, he was the most conservative candidate in the field of all primary--and general election--contenders for 2004.
Though criticism has a natural place in opposition, making the government look bad is not the primary function of opposition. We must not allow ourselves to stay too long under this pernicious reactionary psychology. The left will never fulfill its role within the American political system if it overindulges in that sense... Not in the short term, and certainly not in the long term.
Lexington, ironically, is challenging us, the self-defined progressives, to start behaving like progressives and start focusing on progress. In the last century, the opposite of "progressive" was often not conservative, but that even more right-wing label: "reactionary".