Since the mid-terms there's been a lot of talk about messaging and failures of messaging. It seems to me that both progressives and ardent Obama supporters agree that the democratic party has a serious problem with messaging (so there is some common ground), but it also seems that these two factions have very different conceptions of just what this problem is. Follow me beneath the fold for my thoughts on this difference.
For the ardent pro-Obama crowd, the problem with democratic messaging lies primarily with a hostile media. Here the story goes that Obama and the democratic congress did as well as possible in a field of antagonistic forces arrayed against them ranging from the republicans, a lazy, pro-corporate media, and big money interests. Overall, this narrative runs, they did a good job but the public was just unaware of their substantial achievements.
There's a lot of truth to this with respect to the ability of progressives to get their message out. In the November 1st issue of The Nation, Alyssa Katz recounts the fate of The Working Families Party in New York. Despite making rather modest proposals that benefit working and middle class families, this party has been largely decimated by the forces of capital arrayed against them. Any little bit of power taken away from big money, it seems, is intolerable. As a consequence, these forces brought a lawsuit against the party, alleging election fraud, not unlike the treatment received by Acorn. The point was not that the party had committed election fraud-- the courts found they hadn't --but rather, through this lawsuit the coffers of the party were significantly drained, making it more difficult for them to compete in mid-terms. Meanwhile, the papers picked up the story, casting aspersion on the party and diminishing support among average voters.
The fate of The Working Families Party is a parable of just how daunting are the forces arrayed against any progressive politics. Not only do we have a complicit media that seldom does its homework and that is itself reflective of corporate agendas due to media conglomeration, but we also have forces of capital or big money with unlimited funds that will use every legal and media strategy possible to demolish anything that might limit their ability to pursue capital unfettered.
It is important to be cognizant of these forces and the obstruction they present to progressive change. However, I think the ardent Obama-supporters place too much stock in the "media bamboozle" theory. Recall that prior to 2006 the American people had begun to wake up to the failure of the war in Iraq and Bush's mismanagement of the economy despite a media that continued to trumpet Bush. In short, people aren't just dumb herd animals incapable of thinking for themselves but are capable of seeing through spin. In this connection, our defeat in the mid-terms should be read not as a result of people switching over to the republicans and tea party, but rather as a result of portions of the population simply failing to show up. They simply elected, pardon the pun, not to vote.
If this is the case, the question then becomes 1) that of accounting for why many were demotivated, and 2) what we can do differently. Here we encounter the night and day difference between the ardent Obama-supporter conception of our problems with messaging and the progressive understanding of the problem with messaging. For the ardent Obama-supporter, the problem is that the accomplishments of the democrats have not been reported. For the progressive, by contrast, this point is not discounted, but rather the far more pervasive problem is that our elected democrats have failed to craft an alternative message.
In other words, the problem is that democrats, by and large, continue to propose policy within rightwing frames. Above all, neo-liberalism or the ideology of unfettered free markets continues to be the reigning ideology embraced by both parties. There are a cluster of ideological assumptions surrounding this worldview: First, and foremost, there is the idea that markets are inherently self-regulating, that therefore government can't effect economy by intervening in economy, and that when it does, government can only cause economic disaster. Second, there is the idea that free market solutions are the best solutions to all of our problems. Third there is the idea that government solutions cannot work. And finally there is the idea that what is good for Wall Street is always good for Main Street.
If we look at democratic policies in the last two years we see this ideology at work in nearly all of their policy decisions. Here it is crucial to note that when progressives scream bloody murder over economics, when they say economics is at the root of everything, they aren't just talking about paychecks and whether or not people have jobs. Rather, the point is that a set of economic assumptions underlie the policies that democrats are proposing, and these assumptions are bad assumptions. In the case of health care reform, we saw democrats giving the lion share of control to insurance companies, a private, profit making enterprise. Isn't it clear that there is a conflict between providing care for people and making a profit? Isn't it obvious that the pursuit of profit will necessarily run afoul of caring for people because insurance companies must minimize their cost to continue making a profit? Consequently, isn't it obvious that insurance that people can buy into will be of little value as a consequence, again, of insurance companies striving to minimize cost? Will this insurance truly be worth anything more than a degree from the University of Phoenix?
In education we see sounds made all over the place to privatize education and pursue performance based wages for teachers. The stimulus went primarily to Wall Street and not Main Street, and there was hardly any reform of the financial sector. Increasingly it sounds like we'll continue tax cuts for the wealthiest among us based on the premise that this money will trickle down creating jobs for the rest of us. No one raises the possibility of tax breaks for those corporations that keep jobs in the United States and tax penalties for those that don't. On and on it goes.
The point is not whether or not we get policies that avoid these neo-liberal proposals (that will take time). The point is that our elected democrats are not, by and large, even proposing an alternative. At the first whiff of "class warfare" charges they tuck tail and run, but we are living in the midst of some of the most ferocious class warfare since the 20s and 30s. If we are to move forward, if democrats are to achieve electoral victory, they need to provide a genuine alternative. They need to at least put things on the table and cease framing policy in neo-liberal terms. If democrats don't seem to be supporting working and middle class families, then people just won't bother to show up at the polls. This, I believe, is exactly what happened during the mid-terms. What they saw is two parties that essentially represent corporate, Wall Street interests, not them. They felt powerless and hopeless and therefore didn't bother to show up. If we're to reverse this we need to no longer run in fear from any suggestion of class warfare and we need to abandon the idea that the market always knows best.