It may seem out of place that a diary here is devoted to discussing an
article from the
Weekly Standard. This article outlines a path to victory its authors think Republicans should use. In fact, it is nearly perfect for Democrats. If we have the courage to push for it - and Republicans the self-absorption to reject it - it outlines a path to regaining Congress and the presidency.
First, the authors (Ross Douthat and Reihan Salan) admit that
Bush-style conservatism is a spent force:
The intellectual exhaustion of the current majority should have been obvious at the close of the last legislative term. After months of political reversals--including the defeat, without a shot fired, of Social Security reform--the congressional leadership managed three victories: a pork-laden $286 billion in new transportation spending, an energy bill larded with generous corporate subsidies, and a noble but unpopular free trade act, CAFTA, that may prove a poison pill for vulnerable GOP congressmen come 2006.
They then turn to Pew's Political Typology to point out fractures in the Repub coalition:
Unsurprisingly, the core of the GOP's support turns out to be drawn from "Enterprisers," affluent, optimistic, and staunchly conservative on economic and social issues alike. But the so-called Enterprisers represent just 11 percent of registered voters--and apart from them, the most reliable GOP voters are Social Conservatives (13 percent of registered voters) and Pro-Government Conservatives (10 percent of voters). Both groups are predominantly female (Enterprisers are overwhelmingly male); both are critical of big business; and both advocate more government involvement to alleviate the economic risks faced by a growing number of families. They tend to be hostile to expanding free trade, Social Security reform, and guest-worker proposals--which is to say the Bush second term agenda.
This is a point that has often been made in liberal circles - the Grover Norquist, pro-business types use the social conservatives as "campaign fodder" - play on their social issues to endlessly deliver votes, but do little to actually advance their agenda. Tax cuts, energy handouts, bankruptcy bills, transport pork - big business gets all it wants, social conservatives get squat.
In What's the Matter with Kansas, Thomas Frank argued that this works because Democrats have not succeeded in articulating an economic message that appeals to white working-class voters. For years, Democrats have struggled to win back, as Dean put it, guys with Confederate flags in the back of their pickup trucks.
The Republicans are clearly vulnerable.
This is the Republican party of today--an increasingly working-class...party whose constituents are surprisingly comfortable with...liberal ideas like raising the minimum wage, expanding...environmental regulations, or hiking taxes on the wealthy to fund a health care entitlement."
Therein lies a great political danger for Republicans, because on domestic policy, the party isn't just out of touch with the country as a whole, it's out of touch with its own base. And its majority is hardly unassailable...
Now we get to the policy proposals. The authors, showing startling honesty for a Republican, admit that talk of self-reliance is meaningless without economic security:
it would mean recognizing that these objectives--individual initiative, social mobility, economic freedom--seem to be slipping away from many less-well-off Americans, and that serving the interests of these voters means talking about economic insecurity as well as about self-reliance. It would mean recognizing that you can't have an "ownership society" in a nation where too many Americans owe far more than they own. It would mean matching the culture war rhetoric of family values with an economic policy that places the two-parent family--the institution best capable of providing cultural stability and economic security--at the heart of the...agenda.
In our society, raising children is very difficult. Health care is expensive, secure jobs hard to find, and just balancing family life with work well-night impossible. Women are the hardest hit - and married white women have been deserting the Democrats since 2000.
The trouble is that the contemporary workplace demands that women follow the male career track, which assumes a seamless transition from school to full-time employment, and a career path that begins in the early twenties and continues in unbroken ascent until retirement. For many women, this is an appealing model--but many more find themselves losing their best childbearing years to the workplace, and then scrambling to squeeze in a child or two before middle-age arrives.
It isn't fair that women are still forced to choose between career and family, while men seldom are. There are a number of ways governments can help families:
A better way to approach the division between work and family life might be what sociologist Neil Gilbert calls a "life-course perspective," with measures that would allow a mother (or father, for that matter) to provide child care full-time for several years before entering, or reentering, the workforce. For instance, the government could offer subsidies to those who provide child care in the home, and pension credits that reflect the economic value of years spent in household labor. Or again, Republicans might consider offering tuition credits for years spent rearing children, which could be exchanged for post-graduate or vocational education. These would be modeled on veterans' benefits--and that would be entirely appropriate. Both military service and parenthood are crucial to the country's long-term survival. It's about time we recognize that fact.
Such a recognition, not incidentally, would be a recipe for continued GOP political dominance. Married couples are already the most reliable Republican voters. Policies making it easier to get married, stay married, and have more children would cement these voters' loyalties, and they would also draw wavering, culturally-conservative-but-economically-anxious voters into the Republican fold. The party of James Dobson isn't going to win back wealthy social liberals any time soon. But a pro-family economic agenda might make inroads among, say, upwardly mobile minorities, or working-class whites in increasingly up-for-grabs states like Minnesota and Iowa.
Substitute the word "Democrat" for "Republican" in the above quote and what is there to disagree with?
The article then turns to health care, and admits (again, with startling accuracy for a Republican) that the health care crisis is worse than commonly supposed:
By now, the fact that over 45 million Americans are uninsured is familiar, as is the conservative rejoinder that many of these millions are uninsured by choice. But the 45 million figure is a snapshot--the number who are uninsured at a particular moment in time. The number who are uninsured at some point during a typical year--usually because they lose coverage while switching jobs--ranges from 57 million to 69 million. Over a period of 24 months, that number climbs to over 80 million. This means that at some point every two years, millions of American parents dread seeing their child catch a bad flu for fear of facing long lines at an understaffed, overworked emergency room. Even if this transitional period lasts only a few months, it's a period fraught with anxiety. Nor are health care anxieties confined to voters who lack insurance. Most current plans serve as prepayments for routine medical expenditures. When the unforeseen comes along, millions of families find themselves financially vulnerable.
Their ideas for health care, however are blinded by ideology. They reject single-payer, predictably, and propose instead that governments make health insurance mandatory and ban preferred pricing for insurance plans. In reality, these proposals are nowhere near enough to solve the health-care crisis.
They do make a key point: one reason health care reform has repeatedly failed is that the insured majority think of it as a new welfare program - something that won't benefit them. It can be successfully reframed:
Instead of approaching health care reform as the left does, as a problem for the uninsured--a matter of charity for those less fortunate--conservatives should cast the health care crisis as what it really is: a problem for the insured, for people whose insurance plans will lapse if they lose or shift jobs, whose plans don't cover expensive crises, and who must pay extra, in the form of higher premiums, to cover the medical bills of the permanently uninsured.
This is, of course, deeply ironic from a party that torpedoed the 1993-94 reforms on precisely these grounds. But the argument is valid - health care reform benefits everybody, even those currently satisfied with their care.
Another good idea is wage subsidies:
One tool...is a program of wage subsidies, like that proposed by Columbia University economist Edmund Phelps, which would help less-educated single men make ends meet... There's no question that a serious wage subsidy would be expensive--Phelps figures up to $85 billion a year--but the cost would be reduced if it lowered incarceration rates and reduced outlays of other government benefits. Far from being a new entitlement, wage subsidies would be an anti-entitlement, with government helping only those who are already helping themselves.
Variations on this idea has also been floated by some progressives as well. The Democratic version of this should supplement, rather than replace, minimum wage increases.
Of course, the article is silent on foreign policy issues, which remain the Democrats' biggest vulnerability. But, given that the Norquist mafia that runs the Republican party today is unlikely to embrace ideas like these, they offer valuable pointers for Democrats.