The netroots love to talk about infrastructure and they've been very successful in building a more active and connected progressive movement, from think tanks to advocacy groups to watchdogs to rapid response organizations. The general importance of building infrastructure, as I understand it, is to have both day-to-day push back and long-term strategy. Together, these are supposed to move the terms of the country's debate in progressives' direction, just as the conservative movement succeeded in doing. One thing that I think is missing from this effort is an attempt to label contemporary American conservatism as an incompetent ideology.
This may seem like an obvious strategy, but I have found very few efforts to make such a broad statement amongst leading progressives. They give it lip service, but then move on to spend most of their time criticizing President Bush for his latest horrific decision or leading Democrats for being spineless. But isn't it time to ask the questions a) how do we prevent future politicians with President Bush's failed ideology from being elected? and b) how do we get elected Democrats to become more comfortable pursuing policies that we agree with and standing up against policies that cause damage? The answer is to shift the playing field of the debate.
That can be done by waging dual campaigns. First, a campaign to promote ideas and to present a progressive agenda. Secondly, a campaign to expose conservatism as a discredited, intellectually bankrupt ideology that is out-of-touch with the concerns of everyday Americans and unsuited to deal with the challenges of the 21st century.
The problem is that the Democratic Party is (as has been said many times before in the blogosphere) an election-to-election operation without much in the way of a long-term agenda. They don't want to start painting conservatism as a failed ideology because it might alienate voters who see themselves as "conservatives" but don't approve of a certain Republican candidate and so might vote Democratic in an upcoming election. That means it falls to the progressive movement outside the Democratic party to carry out this message campaign.
This movement largely emerged following the 2004 election, since most progressives started thinking long-term following President Bush's re-election. At first, the movement too often fell into the trap that the Democratic Party had fallen into. That is, they criticized a specific policy or politician or even the Republican Party, but mostly passed on connecting the dots and painting a larger picture of conservative incompetence. Then things improved slightly. Alan Wolfe's cover story in the Washington Monthly shortly after Hurricane Katrina entitled "Why Conservatives Can't Govern" was, in my recollection, the first attempt to catalogue the ideology's extensive failures. The article provided material for the increasingly popular catch phrase: conservatives say government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove themselves right.
Following Wolfe's piece, other examples popped up. The Campaign for America's Future held an event called "The Big Con" in which panels discussed how conservatism itself had failed. On the defensive, conservatives started to argue that the real reason President Bush and the GOP Congress failed so miserably is that they didn't adhere closely enough to conservatism. Simply put: they didn't do it right. This argument (called the by Greg Anrig the "ideological purity dodge") is laughable on its face. So much so, in fact, that progressives didn't do a good enough job of responding to it. They simply were happy to have won the congressional elections and thought that the conservatives' new excuse was so ridiculous that no one would believe it. Whether or not that is true remains to be seen. However, because progressives took the pressure of right-wing incompetence, elected Republicans have been allowed to reassure themselves that their spin is actually legitimate. This explains how Mitch McConnell and John Boehner kept such a unified caucus on the issue of Iraq, despite extensive evidence that the vast majority of Americans (including swing voters) want to withdraw. It explains why every single Republican candidate for president has said that tax cuts increase revenue when not a single serious economist, including President Bush's own Council of Economic Advisors, agree. It explains why President Bush just vetoed an incredibly popular health care program. It explains why every Democratic proposal to solve America's health care crisis is disregarded with a wave of the hand and the utterance of the words "socialized medicine," even as the GOP puts forward no alternate strategy.
Maybe even heavier losses at the polls will force the GOP to reconsider its outdated policies and admit that conservatism has flaws that must be addressed. That's the argument Zachary Roth put forth in the June 2007 issue of the Washington Monthly:
If Republicans are going to help solve any of today’s most challenging problems, from fixing our health care system to fighting global warming to restoring America’s ability to lead the global security system—and if they hope to win elections again—they’ll have to undergo a version of this same process. And that’s the problem. For decades, their party, and the broader conservative movement on which it depends, has prided itself on the appealing, bumper-sticker simplicity of its core ideology: limited government and a strong defense. (Indeed, this formula had until lately been so successful for the GOP that in recent years liberals have actively tried to develop a similarly succinct expression of their own governing philosophy—without notable success.) Little wonder, then, that most Republicans prefer to misunderstand the message voters sent last fall. If their ideological pillars crumble, Republicans will face a troubling question: What’s left, beyond a cultural traditionalism that younger Americans are rejecting, for their party to stand for?
Let's hope that happens. But let's not leave it to chance. Progressives need to spend how ever long it takes to pound away with message of conservative failure. That's the only way to create a long-term change in the political debate. Let's dream of a day when on Fox News Sunday NPR's Juan Williams interrupts William Kristol in the middle of another neoconservative ramble and says "Excuse me, Bill. When was the last time you were right?" When that day comes, America will be on its way to the government it deserves.
(For a book that documents the point my post is trying to make check out Greg Anrig's The Conservatives Have No Clothes: Why Right-Wing Ideas Keep Failing.)