Single issues, Part II

Lots of comments in that last thread, yet this one best summarized my point:

Political economy

We expend effort fighting for choice.

We expend effort fighting for freedom of religion.

We expend effort fighting against the Patriot Act.

Or we put all that effort into fighting for the right to privacy, and then get everything that follows from it for free.

We are a party built on single issues, with our single issue groups fighting their own battles to the exclusion of everyone else. Their charter is, without a doubt, to promote their own core causes.

The problem arises when those single issues dominate the party and prevent it from developing a fundamental, coherent message.

The GOP has a fundamental, coherent message: smaller government, family values and strong national defense. And from that core message, as much bullshit as it may be, everything they do flows. Their single issue groups work off that framework, which is why Dobson always frames everything under "family values", and Norquist under "smaller government". They all work off the same script.

What's more, they'll even work together to help each other's agenda. Dobson will work just as hard for the next round of tax cuts as "smaller government" Norquist will to enact the next round of government restrictions on abortion or contraceptives.

At the end of the day, those conservatives groups are working in coordination with the party, subservient to the broader party themes.

Our groups don't work off a party script. There are two main reasons for that, which I will explore in later posts -- money (funding sources) and egos. Yet, despite the lack of coordination and fealty to broader principles, those single issue groups have come to dominate the party.

It doesn't have to be that way. Again, it's something to discuss in a future post, but briefly -- the era of the single issue group is in its closing days. Note the new generation of activist organizations -- MoveOn, Democracy for America, the blogs -- all confederations of activists, banding together for the common progressive cause.

That's the future of our party. I'd love to see the single issue groups become quasi-think tanks, pumping out research and information the rest of us could use to generate activism. Unlike NARAL or Sierra Club, these confederations can walk and chew gum at the same time. We could work to defend a women's right to choose on Monday and fight to proctect ANWR on Tuesday.

To those who fight to defend the status quo, in which the single issue groups dominate the Democratic Party, just one more argument -- they've lost. We haven't won a majority of the popular vote in a presidential election since 1976. We've lost our congressional majorities. We've lost the courts. A unified conservative movement has systematically attacked and destroyed our divided side -- from labor, to the environmental movement, to the choice groups. Those groups have failed.

Their singular focus on themselves, at the exclusion of all else, has cost our movement dearly. And if there's one thing none of us should tolerate, it's failure.

So defend your favorite issue, but don't defend the system. A system of special interest checkboxes won't win elections. A principled core philosophy will.