This is a late hit, but it's an important topic. If you haven't read Michael Tomasky's
"Party in Search of a Notion," or Digby's
excellent critique of it, do yourself a favor and check them out. They're long but important, as I say, and Tomasky's essay serves as an introduction to a four-part series on discerning a new Democratic identity.
Part one came out on Thursday; part two
came out yesterday.
Tomasky's main concern is the Democratic struggle for self-definition. He believes Dems are otherwise in pretty good shape, electorally speaking: the Republicans are hobbling around with self-inflicted foot wounds, while Democrats have discipline, ideas, and tactics. But:
What the Democrats still don't have is a philosophy, a big idea that unites their proposals and converts them from a hodgepodge of narrow and specific fixes into a vision for society. Indeed, the party and the constellation of interests around it don't even think in philosophical terms and haven't for quite some time. There's a reason for this: They've all been trained to believe -- by the media, by their pollsters -- that their philosophy is an electoral loser. Like the dogs in the famous "learned helplessness" psychological experiments of the 1960s -- the dogs were administered electrical shocks from which they could escape, but from which, after a while, they didn't even try to, instead crouching in the corner in resignation and fear -- the Democrats have given up attempting big ideas. Any effort at doing so, they're convinced, will result in electrical (and electoral) shock.
But is that as true as it appears? Certainly, today's Democrats can't simply return to the philosophy that was defeated in the late 1970s. But at the same time, let's recognize a new historical moment when we see one: Today, for the first time since 1980, it is conservative philosophy that is being discredited (or rather, is discrediting itself) on a scale liberals wouldn't have dared imagine a few years ago. An opening now exists, as it hasn't in a very long time, for the Democrats to be the visionaries. To seize this moment, the Democrats need to think differently -- to stop focusing on their grab bag of small-bore proposals that so often seek not to offend and that accept conservative terms of debate. And to do that, they need to begin by looking to their history, for in that history there is an idea about liberal governance that amounts to more than the million-little-pieces, interest-group approach to politics that has recently come under deserved scrutiny and that can clearly offer the most compelling progressive response to the radical individualism of the Bush era.
The response Tomasky suggests is a philosophy of liberal governance based around the idea of the common good. Translated from poli-sci speak, that means "Democrats should run the government because they want to do it for everybody, not just the priviliged few":
This is the only justification leaders can make...really: That all are being asked to contribute to a project larger than themselves.
In terms of political philosophy, this idea of citizens sacrificing for and participating in the creation of a common good has a name: civic republicanism. It's the idea, which comes to us from sources such as Rousseau's social contract and some of James Madison's contributions to the Federalist Papers, that for a republic to thrive, leaders must create and nourish a civic sphere in which citizens are encouraged to think broadly about what will sustain that republic and to work together to achieve common goals.
The ideal of shared sacrifice for a common good drove liberal electoral dominance from the New Deal through the 1960's, Tomasky argues. (See also Jeanne D'Arc's powerful statement on this point.) He traces the rise and fall of the idea, arguing that it met its demise in special-interest politics and Reaganite redefinition in the 1980 election. Tomasky believes that Reagan was brutally effective in turning the notion of the common good on its head by pointing out sacrifices middle-class whites were being asked to make for "a greater good of which they were not always a part."
Digby's response on this point is penetrating:
Can you have a "common good" comprised of only the interests of resentful "regular" racists? I sure hope not.
I've always wondered what the Democrats are supposed to have done differently in light of this? Accede to this racist vision of the common good? Lower the boom on welfare and crime instantly to show how much we resented black people too? Tell Jesse Jackson to STFU?
I want to be careful not to draw too sharp a line between Digby and Tomasky. The former clearly thinks the latter is on the right track, but that there are important questions yet to be answered: who defines the common good? Who determines when sacrifice of a particular good must be made in the interest of a greater one? What do you do with issues on which there doesn't seem to be much room for compromise? How and when do you confront the real wrongs done to the powerless?
I don't mean to be dismissive. I think it's important to embrace big ideas and big philosophy and reach for some inspiration. The Democrats have been issuing stultifying laundry lists for as long as I can remember and I couldn't be happier that people are thinking in these terms. But I can't help but feel that we always end up back at the same spot somehow. The unions, the womens groups, the civil rights groups, trial lawyers, consumer advocates --- the whole array of narrow special interests being held responsible for the fact that half of this country really resents the hell out of minorities, women and working people getting a fair shake. And the Democrats continue to pay the political price for that resentment.
I'm all for finding our way out of it. Tomasky's message has real resonance; I like it very much. But I think that if the party stopped trying to figure out ways to get the "special interests" to shut up and started giving them some respectful assurances that they aren't going to be the sacrificial lambs in whatever the new paradigm turns out to be, they might find a little bit more cooperation.
I believe in the common good and I agree that it expresses the essence of the liberal philosophy. But the heart and soul of the Democratic party lies in its committment to freedom and equality for all Americans. I think we need to find a way to convince a majority of Americans that the common good is best served by not compromising those principles.
Digby's right to be suspicious of cries for sacrifice for the common good: anyone who's every read any of the history of racial minorities in the U.S. knows that when whitey starts to talk about "shared sacrifice," it means they ain't going to share, but you're gonna sacrifice. The track record on this isn't good - and sooner or later, it's going to have to be addressed. As Halpin and Teixeira point out, by the middle of this century, America will become a majority-minority nation, which raises the specter of apartheid government - or a radically different understanding of what the common good means. We'll come back to that point presently.
At the moment, I want to say that I couldn't quite suppress my nervous laughter while reading these pieces. Because, of course, this entire discourse is nothing new to members of mainline denominations, which - perhaps not coincidentally - went down the tubes at about the same time as the Democratic party. The questions are exactly the same: how do you define an identity to reflect a new situation without rewriting all the old power dynamics?
The UCC makes a great example, though really you could plug in just about any other mainline Protestant denomination. With the merger of the Congregational Christian and Evangelical & Reformed churches, the old denominational identities that defined the bodies no longer made sense. Combined with the earthquake in American structures of authority in the 60's and 70's and socio-economic shifts that created fertile ground for evangelical churches, the loss of those identities meant a prolonged - and painful - sojourn in the desert. It's only now, 40+ years on, that the UCC has been able to make progress on re-definining itself, and the pain isn't over.
Honestly, I wish more secular progressives were aware of these parallels. If nothing else, it might help them understand that we haven't necessarily had an incompetent Democratic leadership since 1968. There's plenty to bitch about, yes, but it's also true that we have all been in the grip of cultural forces not completely under anyone's control, liberal or conservative.
That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.
And I'm not the only one who thinks faith might have something to do with it. Here's Tomasky:
The common good is common sense, and the historical time is right for it, for two reasons. First, what I'm trying to describe here is post-ideological in the best sense, a sense that could have broader appeal than what we normally think of as liberal ideology, because what's at the core of this worldview isn't ideology. It's something more innately human: faith. Not religious faith. Faith in America and its potential to do good; faith that we can build a civic sphere in which engagement and deliberation lead to good and rational outcomes; and faith that citizens might once again reciprocally recognize, as they did in the era of Democratic dominance, that they will gain from these outcomes. Maintaining such a faith is extraordinarily difficult in the face of the right-wing noise machine and a conservative movement that, to put it mildly, do not engage in good-faith civic debate. Conservatism can succeed on such a cynical basis; its darker view of human nature accepts discord as a fact of life and exploits it. But for liberalism, which is grounded in a more benign view of human nature, to succeed, the most persuasive answer to bad faith, as Martin Luther King showed, is more good faith. All Americans are not Bill O'Reilly fans or Wall Street Journal editorialists. While they may not call themselves liberals, many of them -- enough of them -- are intelligent people who want to be inspired by someone to help their country.
Tomasky's second reason boils down to this: the current Republican leadership is a bunch of jerks, and they've been busily driving the nation off a cliff for about six years now, and people are sick of it. He has some poll numbers to back up his assertion:
[A] survey asked respondents whether they agreed with a series of 12 assertions about American life today; 68 percent strongly agreed with the assertion that "our government should be committed to the common good." This placed second only to "Americans are becoming too materialistic" (71 percent); it tied with "our government should uphold basic decency and dignity," which is a similar sentiment, and it came in well ahead of such conservative chestnuts as "religion is on the decline in America" (41 percent) and "not enough Americans know right from wrong anymore" (46 percent).
Some piece of the national moral climate has shifted. The social issues that used to make such nice splitters have lost their edge, the public has lost what little appetite it had for culture war. In their place has risen a concern for how American society can unite to meet 21st century challenges. Funny how years of war, economic malaise, and mis-governance can bring people together. Well, things weren't great at the outset of the New Deal, and they stayed touch-and-go right through the Second World War. You've got to start somewhere.
Churches and other religious institutions have traditionally played a leading role in defining the common good in our society. Were they to cease existence - or be politicized into irrelevance - I wonder what would take their place? In my more cynical moments, I think they have already been supplanted by malls and mega-corporations.
But let's take Tomasky's thesis seriously. What if faith in America's potential was the central question? What if we believed, as Bill Clinton was fond of saying, "There's nothing wrong with America that can't be fixed by what's right with America"? Faith in that vision is a secular faith in America's "civic religion," but still there's a role here for religious faith, though it must be claimed carefully. Churches used to play a unique role in seeding civic faith alongside sectarian. In fact, the two were so intertwined that their structures of authority came to be seen as indistinguishable. When questions about capital-A Authority came into play in the 1960's, both secular and religious institutions suffered the consequences: the reigning elites in both suffered a loss of credibility, and alternatives sprang up in their place: secular life and voters on the left, increasing authoritarianism on the right.
That leaves us with the present situation:
In the 2004 election, Kerry carried those who attend religious services a few times a year by 54 percent to 45 percent and those who never attend by 62-to-36. And he carried all non-Christian groups by very wide margins: Jews (77-to-22); Muslims (74-to-25); those who profess some other religion (72-to-25); and those who profess no religion (67-to-31).
According to the exit polls, non-Christians were 20 percent of voters and the less-observant were 43 percent of voters in 2004 (the latter figure, incidentally, is exactly equal to the percent of voters who were highly observant). Both figures are likely to go up in the future. In the University of Chicago's General Social Survey (GSS), those who attend church only once a year or less is now 38 percent of adults, up from 29 percent in 1972. And in CUNY's American Religious Identification Survey, non-Christians grew by 84 percent (from 20 million to 37 million adults) between 1990 and 2001, including an astonishing increase of 106 percent (from 14 million to 29 million) among the purely secular.
Christians of any flavor are losing market share to other religions, or no religion at all. But this trend doesn't hit both left and right equally: non-Christians are more likely to vote Democratic, for one thing. But more important, moderate-to-liberal mainline denominations have lost the most "share" - not to conservative denominations, as is commonly supposed, but to that "purely secular" demographic. You might say our kids have "graduated" from Christianity.
Well, we did it to ourselves: by dancing too close to the flame of authority, we mainliners have managed to convince an entire generation that belief in Jesus Christ - the incarnate Word of God, the embodiment of God's love for humanity, the crucified and risen Savior of all Creation - doesn't make a damn bit of difference. So dude got killed by the powers that be yet came back in a mighty triumph over the grave. Big freaking deal. What's he done for us lately?
It's quite an accomplishment, if you stop to think about it.
For that reason, I'm all in favor of the increased marginalization of Christianity in our political discourse. Being the dominant voice in the cultural marketplace is nice, don't get me wrong. And I'll always be willing to fight with the pinheads who think that the insights of faith ought to be disallowed in social discourse. But the further the church is from the center of power, the more able it is to speak a word of truth. The paradox of the church in culture is that the ekklesia - God's gathered people - are precisely most effective where they are weakest. Being "dominant" and being "Christian" don't go together very well at all. I'd much rather see the church faithful and small, taking our chances in a vibrant, diverse ecology of competing beliefs. It's where we belong.
Standing away from authority also opens the possibility for the church to offer two great gifts to politics. The first is the prophetic critique of power. The point here is not so much that a theistic perspective is inherently better than a rationalistic one, but that seeking to interpret God's will is not the same as calculating the political benefits. Reinhold Niebuhr, as always, is instructive. His answer to Digby's questions about "special interests" becoming "sacrifical lambs" at the altar of the Common Good surely would have been, of course they will. Humanity lacks the perspective to step outside its own partiality, Niebuhr taught. We couldn't possibly imagine everyone who needed to be brought to the table, let alone a way to overcome our hidden participation in the power dynamics that keep them away. Niebuhr's conclusion was that reconciliation - the final achievement of the common good - was possible only through divine intervention, specifically in the atoning sacrifice of Jesus. (He was a Christian theologian, after all.) But we don't need to agree with that conclusion to understand its corollary: that given the pride and arrogance that accompany human sinfulness, a rigorous system of Calvinist checks-and-balances is in everybody's best interest.
Turning that idea around just a hair: I don't trust myself to define the common good for everyone. Do you? We need one another, and still we need Christ. (Turns out I also am a Christian theologian.) Wise churches and wise political parties would both do well to build themselves with an eye to diversity.
Which leads us to the other gift. When the church lives up to its full potential - and it doesn't always - it seeks to bring good news across all kinds of lines in our society: race, class, gender, sexual orientation, age, ability. That's what I learned sitting in the pew at my dad's church, anyway. We are all painfully aware of the power of Christian exclusivism, but its power of unification can be just as powerful. Ask the good people of L'Arche if you don't believe me. At its best, the good news can be a dynamic road to bringing many disparate communities together:
"Jesus didn't turn people away, neither do we." When you're gutsy enough to make such a claim, it's not always easy to make good on it. Following Jesus' lead, the United Church of Christ strives to keep doors open to all. By God's grace--in the past and today--we do what needs to be done to be bold people of God's welcome.
Jesus lived and breathed gracious hospitality. Even though there were powerful people who opposed Jesus' extravagant welcome, he still embraced those who were often shunned. In the reign of God that Jesus spoke of, he declared there is room for all--children (Luke 18:15-17) and those who are hungry, thirsty, homeless, ill, poor, grieving, persecuted, and in prison (Matthew 25: 31-46 and Luke 6:20-26). Jesus put faith and hospitality together: "Whoever receives one whom I send receives me" and those who received Jesus, embraced God (John 13:20).
This kind of hospitality is characteristic of both God's faithfulness and, at our best, our faithfulness. God welcomes, and also feeds the hungry, forgives sins, stands with those who are poor and oppressed, comforts the suffering, and becomes home for those who wander. In gratitude, faithful people welcome strangers. A surprise in the Bible is the way you welcome a stranger expresses how you embrace the very presence of God (Genesis 18:1-8).
The church, since its beginning, continues to "extend hospitality to strangers (Roman 12:13)." The church, after all, is a blessed company of strangers held together by the grace of God.
Which, if you stop to think about it, ain't so different than this:
But the other piece of this is that there's a new paradigm in the country. Of course, the voters figured this out frankly before we did. The new paradigm is that candidates of color are getting elected by white voters not just by ... the usual thing is you have an African-American so they come from an African-American district, or an Hispanic ... we're seeing people in Tennessee -- that's the example I always use -- a guy named Nathan Vaughn got elected in a 99 percent white district in northeast Tennessee. So things are dramatically changing. I said to him, "How did you do that?" He said, "I spoke about my values." Voters are more and more interested in values and less and less interested in ethnicity and racial stuff. And the electorate I think is ahead of where the party has been. That's the other big piece of remodeling that we're trying to do -- change the way we do this. I think the complaint that we take communities for granted is a legitimate complaint and that's stopped. I spent my whole summer going around to major organizations of various hues in order to reach out and make it clear that it no longer can be a debate about a place at the table, it has to be a debate about a place on the ticket. And one thing I want state parties to do is to really make an effort, now that we have a lot of senior people of color in the hierarchies of state legislatures, I want now to make a real effort and push diversity on the statewide tickets because I think that ultimately in this country the tickets of our party have to look like the people whose votes we're asking for. That's the ultimate test of whether we're serious about diversity or not. And it's going to be a struggle, but I think we can do it and I think we're ready to do it because the voters started doing it before we picked up the trend.
That's Howard Dean, good UCC boy that he is, explaining where he thinks the Democratic party is headed. According to Dr. Dean, what brings us together in pursuit of the common good is - the pursuit of the common good, and talking about that pursuit. Who we are - the amount of money we make, the color of our skin, the sex of our partner waiting for us at home - is in the end less important than our willingness to engage one another in shared enterprise by talking about the important stuff. Americans are a people constituted not by creed, not by color, not by royal commission, but by conversation. For all the complex monkeybusiness I've introduced above, I believe the future of progressive politics and the future of mainline Christianity center around a simple question: do we want the conversation of this society to be a monologue, or do we want it to include many voices?