A tale of two conferences
This ain't no party, this ain't no disco
this ain't no fooling around
Talking Heads: Life During Wartime
1.
For those us getting ready to head out to YearlyKos, Chapter 2 of Crashing the Gate presents a daunting challenge. Titled "This Ain't No Party" the chapter asks why the old saw that says the Democratic Party stands for everything while at the same time standing for nothing continues to speak to a core problem for progressive politics in the United States. As Jerome and Markos write: "If you want to see the problem up close, all you have to do is put a bunch of progressives together in the same room."
Yikes! Kinda of sounds like YearlyKos, doesn't it?
Still more troubling, in a chapter dedicated to analyzing the fundamental failings of the Democratic Party, the authors use as their central case study a conference of progressives. The setting is a conference hosted in March 2005 by the Center for a New American Dream in Monterey, California. The ostensible purpose of the conference was to seek lessons from the 2004 election debacle and foster ways for the many interest groups that make up the Democratic Party to work better together. The chapter provides a forceful and forthright analysis of the divisive role played by single-issue advocacy groups within the Democrat Party. Their conclusions are right on the mark and deeply disturbing.
The conclusions Jerome and Markos reach are on the mark because they show how the narrow-minded pursuit of their own agendas by the issue groups has led to a dysfunctional party suffering from institutionalized disunity.
Members of each issue group--environmentalists, pro-choice activists, civil libertarians, plaintiffs' attorneys, and so on--promote their agenda above all others and show little or no understanding of the larger progressive values they share with the other groups. And so the whole is never really greater than the sum of its parts.
The analysis is deeply disturbing because the authors draw a convincing connection between our institutionalized disunity and our failures both at the ballot box and in advancing the progressive agenda generally. Indeed, though the tipping point may be hard to identify, progressives must now face the fact that the our agendas have not only been stalled going on 20 years but we are now losing significant ground. This, in spite of the fact that most Americans support the fundamental outlook and policies of the progressive agenda. Markos and Jerome acknowledge that the GOP and conservative operatives have been very effective at framing progressive positions to their benefit ("tree huggers", "welfare queens", "feminazis" and worse). But in the end their analysis does not seek to shift the blame. The Democratic Party and more broadly we progressives, dominated by single-issue interest groups whose ways of operating have not changed since their long-passed heydays, are authentically responsible for failing to respond effectively to an energized conservative backlash such that our values and aspirations for what our nation can be have been all but run off the rails.
The authors provide an interesting look by way of contrast at how conservative advocacy groups operate along side of but do not constitute the Republican Party. Moreover, the conservative groups have the discipline and sense of shared purpose to reinforce one another's messages to the electorate and promote one another's agendas. This level of coordination, focused on winning elections and gaining power, is not what the authors find in the Democratic Party and its associated advocacy groups. It is at this point in their analysis that they introduce the Monterey conference as the prime example of the problems we face.
...on our side, the issue groups and the identity groups are the Democratic Party...
If you want to see the problem up close, all you have to do is put a bunch of progressives together in the same room.
In April 2005, we had a chance to see just that, when about a hundred progressive leaders descended on Monterey, California...The organizers from the Center for a New American Dream hoped to extract lessons from the 2004 election debacle while finding ways for progressives to move forward. It was a worthy endeavor, and one that offered rare networking opportunities between progressive leaders.
But it was also Exhibit A in the `Why Democrats Will Never Win' file. It was a prime example of a divided party, a split movement.
What follows is a description of some of the well-known fauna that thrive in the Democratic ecosphere followed by a very interesting analysis of how several major pro-choice groups betrayed their own goals by taking a symptomatically narrow-minded position in the upcoming 2006 Rhode Island Senate race by pre-emptively throwing their support behind nominally pro-choice Republican Lincoln Chafee and forcing solidly progressive though anti-abortion Democrat Jim Langevin out of the race. Chafee has already paid them back for their support by voting with his caucus to end debate on the nomination of anti-choice Judge Sam Alito thus ensuring his appointment to the Supreme Court.
In contrast to the Chafee disaster Markos and Jerome present an anecdote about how Ralph Reed, then head of the Christian Coalition, lent significant support to Newt Gingrich's 1994 push to elect a majority Republican U.S. House of Representatives even though Gingrich refused to give Reed a "family values" plank in the center piece "Contract with America". Reed recognized that electing a Republican majority to the U.S. House of Representatives would serve his own cause whether or not his agenda was expressly enshrined in Gingrich's Contract--imagine that! Here are some lessons the authors draw from these examples:
Could liberals also put aside their pet causes in the name of the broader progressive movement? Could liberals get away from the laundry lists and litmus tests in the service of a big-tent progressive majority, one in which their causes would flourish?
If the Monterey conference was any indication, things don't look so hot.
At one point, the conference split off into working groups to learn practical steps for effectuating an advocacy campaign. It was meant to be a how-to guide for progressive organizations, a lesson in coalition building, communication strategies, and goal setting...But from the beginning the session ran into problems. One participant's hand shot up: `This isn't speaking to my issue. When are we going to talk about my issue?' That set off an avalanche of copycat complaints--`What about my issue?'--from all corners of the room. To make a long and painful story short...[t]he bane of the progressive movement had struck--the demand by single-issue groups to focus on their issue to the exclusion of anything else. Even for one hour, in a session about working with other groups [emphasis mine], they were unable to pay attention to any issue but their own.
As Jerome and Markos point out, anti-abortion Senator Minority Leader Harry Reid found reasons to vote against Alito. Furthermore, in a majority Democrat Senate, while supporting a broad range of progressive policies and legislation Jim Langevin would never have the opportunity to vote for anti-abortion judicial nominees.
2.
And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another...world...
And you may ask yourself-Well...How did I get here?
Talking Heads, Once in a Lifetime
How did we get here?
You'll have to go the Crashing the Gate for the full story but I think I can give you the gist of it here.
First, the progressive single-issue advocacy organizations were created when liberalism dominated American politics. They developed within this environment to be the policy and advocacy engines of the progressive agenda; there was no need to focus on winning elections. With progressive politics the consensus of the day these organizations thrived and scored important and lasting victories. The single-issue advocacy groups are devoted to pushing policy and in their outlook and organizational focus they take for granted that progressives hold power and their role is to push policy initiatives.
Second, the Democratic Party, the major single-issue organizations and many independent progressives have failed to recognize the size and scope of the shift in electoral power that has taken place since 1980. The conservative movement developed as outsiders and so focused on winning elections and gaining power. Their ideas and strategies are geared toward appealing to voters with a secondary interest in practical questions of how these ideas might become successful policies. In fact, given the incompetence of the current administration and its constitutive lack of interest in policy one is tempted to suggest that while the GOP calls itself the party of ideas this nostrum really means the GOP is a party of ideas only. Showing an interest in implementing an idea as a successful policy is a quick route to obscurity in today's Republican party. In spite of our current minority status, too many on the left and too many in the Democratic Party, the authors argue, behave as if the progressive hegemony of the past is merely a few talking points away, a minor tweak or two to this policy or that initiative is all that is required to return to power. The reality, however, is quite different. The progressive agenda, despite its past successes and the genuine values it has delivered to Americans of almost every class, is no longer the political consensus, the life blood of voters' passions come election day. The Democratic Party does not know how to win elections in large part because they have yet to understand in their very bones that they are not in fact the governing party.
Third, the single-issue advocacy groups, though their expertise and focus is not on winning elections, still dominate the funding and vetting of Democratic Party candidates according to Jerome and Markos. If a candidate does not sufficiently support the group's issue the candidate risks not receiving funds, volunteers or votes from the group's partisans. So, despite the need to solve the absolutely essential problem of how we can once again elect Democratic majorities to the House and Senate and in the state legislatures, our candidates cannot get vital support without jumping through hoops set up by organizations that take the practical matter of getting elected as a foregone conclusion.
Jerome and Markos make this case more deeply, more brilliantly and more cogently than I can and I apologize to the extent that I have distorted or misrepresented their analysis or views. But the lesson is clear, the time has come for progressives of all stripes to let go of the fantasy that we wield effective electoral or governing power. The next question is how do we get it back?
3.
Hold tight; wait till the party's over
Hold tight; we're in for nasty weather
There has got to be a way
Talking Heads, Burning Down the House
Thus we return to the question of how YearlyKos can do better than the Monterey conference. That is, can the sector of the netroots, of the Democratic Party, and progressives represented by the DailyKos community begin to overcome the single-issue parochialism that has, according to the analysis of Crashing the Gate, relegated our politics, our aspirations, our values and our vision of America to minority status? Have we recognized that while we believe most Americans are prepared to support a significant part of our vision, we do not yet know how to rebalance our activities away from policy advocacy and move toward a practical focus on winning elections, building majorities in legislatures, state houses and other policy enacting institutions so that our agenda once again has a chance to become law. In order to crash the gate we must change the way we do politics.
This is not to say issues are not important. Quite the contrary, as the GOP has repeatedly demonstrated, issues are where our passions live. I feel passionately about the wilderness, education, health care and civil liberties. I care deeply about economic equality for women. As the child of a divorced single mother with a good though low-paying job as a secondary school teacher in the late 60s, I watched as she was turned down over and over again for home loans because of her marital status. A divorced, Catholic apostate, she finally had to appeal to her piously disapproving father to co-sign a loan so that she could move her family out of a series of horrible rental properties into a community with good schools (the very school system where she herself had taught for 15 years). In the seventies, thanks to single-issue advocacy groups focused on equality for woman, the Democratic Party was pushed to enact laws so future single mothers would be evaluated on their ability to service the loan and not on their social status. Yes, issues, policy initiatives and a fundamental will to promote social justice will continue to animate us. What Jerome and Markos are challenging us to understand is that our passions cannot be fulfilled until we recognize that the prerequisite to policy success is electoral success. Democrats have forgotten how to win elections. Democrats have forgotten the crucial synergy between winning elections and fulfilling our passions.
How many of us attending YearlyKos are prepared to rise to the challenge Crashing The Gate poses? We are challenged to rethink how we do politics. We are challenged to understand that crashing the gate means focusing on doing whatever we can, within the framework of our values of fair play and honesty, to win elections. We are challenged to remember that the Democratic majority that came into being in the 30s and 40s was built by people who knew they were in a fight that would determine whether they would have a voice in politics or be silenced; and that the Democratic majority was built because our predecessors did not back down from that fight. We are challenged to change the way that progressive-minded Americans practice politics.
Can you say this? I will fight to elect Democrats and promote our progressive vision even if the issues I am most passionate about may not always be at the top of the list because I understand that governments run by Democrats foster the environment where issues important to me will flourish, to quote Jerome and Markos on last time. I will not demand that a Democratic candidate pass litmus tests--if she has a record of supporting a broad mix of progressive issues and a record of working within our communities and with other progressive elected officials to realize our values I will support her. If I cannot bring myself to support a specific Democratic candidate because of extreme policy differences, I will not work against his campaign or trash talk his record because I am possessed of a practical understanding that our values and hopes are best served when legislatures and other governing bodies have Democratic majorities even if some of those Democrats may in my view be less than full-blooded progressives. My politics will henceforth be a practical politics that recognizes I am better off living in the big tent than living in the "right" tent.
Can the first of what we all hope will be many YearlyKos conventions be a milestone on the road to Democratic majority governance? Can we begin to build a Democratic Party that is once again greater than the sum of it parts?