This is the third installment of a series of diaries trying to come to grips issues raised by and underlying the recent controversies at Dkos over election tampering in Ohio.
The first diary presents an overview of the whole, which will undoubtly change somewhat in response to people's comments along the way.
The second diary dealt with what unites us--"A Fighting Faith In The Spirit of Martin Luther King."
This diary reviews the analysis developed by Chris Bowers showing the importance of growing liberalism and attacking conservatism if Democrats are to win national political power. It concludes with the argument that we can "break the majority Republican coalition...by liberalizing / progressivizing the 10-15% of the population that is currently primarily reform minded and non-ideological." In the next diary, I will connect this with Lakoff's analysis of the Right Wing Power Grab.
The Bowers Analysis.
In the wake of the 2004 election, Chris Bowers went on an analytic tear, beginning with some very serious nitty-gritting number crunching, and then moving on to a broader analysis of what it all meant. Four points that he developed are relevant here:
(1) This was a battle of the bases, and the GOP won because it had a bigger base: There are more self-identified conservatives than self-identified liberals. Self-identified conservatives vote heavily for the GOP, self-identified liberals vote heavily for the Dems. This means that Dems always have to win self-identified moderates by a significant margin.
In "Conservatism Is Our Enemy" Bowers put it like this:
In all of my post-election analysis, when all of the tactical ideas are put aside, I keep coming back to a single, basic idea: conservatives are the enemy, and conservatism as an ideology is our main roadblock to electoral success.
We have long since left the era when the two parties could accurately be considered regional and ethnic coalitions rather than ideological coalitions. There are no longer any more conservative Democrats than there are liberal Republicans. A few of each kind manage to hang on, but the ideological vote in this election was clear:
Bush Kerry Margin
Conservative 84 15 69
Liberal 13 85 72
Bowers also presented a state-by-state demonstration of what this meant in his story "Where Is Liberalism?". The only states in which liberals outnumber conservatives are DC, MA, VT, RI, HI, NY, CT, and NJ.
Most pointed, Bowers commented in a followup story:
"The difference between the number of liberals and the number of conservatives is so great in this country, that only in states worth 275 electoral votes is the liberal vote, plus a double-digit lead among moderates, enough to pull out a victory."
This is a structural disadvantage far more fundamental than the widely-discussed distinction between Red States and Blue States. It is a disadvantage we cannot ignore if we are serious about regaining national power. Hence then next point.
(2) To level the playing field, we must grow the number of self-identified liberals and shrink the number of self-identified conservatives. This entails a committed project of (1) vigorously attacking conservatism, (2) defining liberals in terms of a few short phrases that create strong, positive frames and (3) defending liberalism vociferously. These ideas were discussed in a number of stories Chris did, (such as "Conservatism Is Our Enemy", "Real Conservative Values", and "What is Conservatism and What is Wrong With It?") as well as MyDD's first "Book Discussion," which was actually about Phil Agre's essay, "What Is Conservatism and What Is Wrong With It?"
Agre's essay begins:
Liberals in the United States have been losing political debates to conservatives for a quarter century. In order to start winning again, liberals must answer two simple questions: what is conservatism, and what is wrong with it? As it happens, the answers to these questions are also simple:
Q: What is conservatism?
A: Conservatism is the domination of society by an aristocracy.
Q: What is wrong with conservatism?
A: Conservatism is incompatible with democracy, prosperity, and civilization in general. It is a destructive system of inequality and prejudice that is founded on deception and has no place in the modern world.
These ideas are not new. Indeed they were common sense until recently. Nowadays, though, most of the people who call themselves "conservatives" have little notion of what conservatism even is. They have been deceived by one of the great public relations campaigns of human history. Only by analyzing this deception will it become possible to revive democracy in the United States.
In contrast, liberalism is the political philosophy on which America was founded. It is the faith written into the core of our Constitution. There is a reason that the word "slavery" is not present in the Constitution--it shamed the framers to admit that they accepted it, because it was so at odds with the fundamental thrust of their core liberal values--government justified by the consent of the governed, law-making by open public deliberation, protection of individual liberty and minority rights, checks and balances to prevent the consolidation of tyrannical power, etc.
It is striking how openly the Bush Administration opposses such core American values. It should be easy for any Democrat to defend liberalism against this assault. Hence, the next point.
(3) This is not about the argument of whether the party should move left or right, Bowers argued, particularly in stories such as "Moving and Moving, Part Two: If The Question is Wrong, The Answer Will Follow. It is about strengthening the party's brand-a brand it has been running away from for almost 30 years, but can never escape. To clarify: Democrats have to defend liberalism, whether or not they personally identify as liberals. This only seems hard or even contradictory because Democrats have been in denial and on the defensive for so long. Moderate Republicans do this sort of thing all the time with conservatism, which is a much harder sell.
(4) We have a major recruiting opportunity on the issue of political reform. Best just to quote from Chris's story "Eureka! Or How To Break the Republican Majority Coalition":
I believe it is possible to break the majority Republican coalition, which is primarily an ideological coalition of conservatives against liberals, and create a majority Democratic coalition that will last for at least two or three decades, by liberalizing / progressivizing the 10-15% of the population that is currently primarily reform minded and non-ideological (and thus has a strong tendency to support major third-party efforts). While it is currently non-ideological, this segment of the population, which has existed in large numbers since at least the 1880's, has an outlook on politics that is far more closely allied with liberalism than conservatism because of its emphasis on reform....
Our future success is not predicated upon moving to the left or the right, but rather in our ability to move from the inside to the outside in the national political frame. This is something we succeeded in doing in the past . This is something that Republicans learned immediately following the Perot movement of 1992, and executed so brilliantly in their 1994 "Contract with America," campaign. The Contract With America was filled almost entirely with reformist, rather than conservative, legislative proposals. Conservatives won, and are currently in power, because they swung the reformer vote their way, even though our coalition is a more natural fit for such voters. We can change this and set things right. Howard Dean as DNC chair is a darn good place to start.