I hear others on this site talk about how Democratic weakness is to blame for the whole hostage crisis that lead to the downgrade. The front page had all kinds of jabs about caving, complicity, and whatnot. Though it may feel good to vent feelings, especially if these are your real thoughts, they don't do your message much good.
Nuance takes time and care, and you really might not have that kind of time or opportunity. If somebody asks you what happened, what are you to tell them? The weakness/caving/complicity narrative has a basic problem: it uses your precious time to essentially tell people that switching to the Democrats will not change things for the better.
It's been a bet, really, we have not won yet: that Democrats would turn out to be just as bad as Republicans. However badly we feel about the Democrats when they are in office, and making compromises, Republicans don't tend to stay safely in the middle. Even the formerly milquetoast Republicans of the MidWest have taken to imitating the Tea Party positions in their Rhetoric, and folding to those positions when they take power. There is a difference, and it is pronounced, and it might mean the difference between getting what you want, and seeing what you value destroyed.
In communication, the main motivation is to affect the behavior of others. Sometimes, it's as simple as telling a loved one of your affection, or that you're angry with them. Sometimes it's as mundane as telling your significant other to pick up something at the store.
In politics, you're trying to set up a much more complicated dynamic, but one that usually has simple results. On person voted for, rather than another.
Nuance and truth aren't bad, but we have to be clear on where we're leading people, and what our argument to them is.
I'm not sure some people here are clear on that. They seem to be simply pushing the kind of thing they'd say to fellow Democrats as the right message to send to people in general. We have to recognize a certain asymmetry, in my opinion, in the way folks think about us, and think about our politics, and be aware of what exactly we're encouraging people to do with our words.
We're dealing with a pretty binary choice here, with pretty binary consequences. We can talk theoretically about third parties, or even try and factor in independents, but until we see an indpendent candidate in the race, or an actual third party candidate getting large numbers of votes, they don't really factor in, except in marginal cases.
The choice, as we have it right now, is between Republicans and Democrats. And right now, many of us are frustrated with Democrats. So, we're not really thinking all that clearly, because our desire for a purer Democratic Party is coming into conflict with our desire for Republicans to be defeated, and sent packing from the village on a rail.
We have a purer party than we once did. But it's not a party in power, so the purity is wasted. Meanwhile, we have an eighty seat loss to make up for, at least in part. The stakes couldn't be higher, especially with Republicans being responsible for pushing the series of events that led to the downgrade we suffered Friday night.
I would say that while it may satisfy certain internal complaints we might have to go complaining about how feckless and capitulatory the Democrats are, it's not very smart messaging, and it sets up the wrong dynamic.
What is the right dynamic? Well, put simply, one that raises the Democratic Party's desireability at the expense of the Republicans. This is really a zero sum game, if we're playing it right: what takes support from the Republicans gives support to Democrats, what takes support from Democrats, gives it to the Republicans, or at least reduces the slope between Democrats' desireability and Republican's undesireability. Think of it like a water slide: The steeper the incline, the faster the fall, and the more profound.
Now, we shouldn't support the Democrats based on a story that might collapse, but I don't think we have that problem. However, our problem may be that some with good intentions will go out there and say things that will equate what the Democrats did to what the Republicans did. That kind of equivocation, that kind of lukewarm sort of comparision isn't a good idea. For one thing, it's not really true. Republicans do much worse things, and don't do them because they are forced to, but because they want to.
That there should be key: reluctance, resistance, and other inhibitions are there in the Democrats. It may seem cold comfort, but you can honestly say that you stand a better chance of maintaining your entitlements, your economy, and other things against the depredations of Republican Policies. It's not perfect, nor what you have expected of Democrats from the age of Golden Lions like Ted Kennedy, but then we're not at that point yet. We're struggling up against Republicans' resistance to our changes of policies, so that part will be a bit muddled for the time being.
Republicans, meanwhile, will pull their Slim Pickens Atom Bomb Ride on this, and whoop and holler all the way down. Again, it's not the world's best choice, but between "Yeeehhaaaaaaaaaaa" and a muddled middle, the dynamic should be plain.
But people, of course, want Better, which ironically means they might consider waiting until Better comes along, while Worse and Worst remain in charge. And Worse and Worst don't waste any time in doing stupid, unethical, and dangerous things to this country.
We have to stop being so relentlessly present-focused in our politics. We ought to consider, in my opinion, that it may be best to term this as Republicans have long framed their politics, as a struggle against a persistent political force, rather than a short trip to the convenience store of political preference to pick up some agenda items. I don't think we properly prepared people for the resistance or the rhetoric that the Republicans put up. I don't think we anticipated it properly themselves. We all thought they should have just sat down and quit their antics, but quite obviously, they thought different.
And for that simple reason that I mentioned when I spoke of their framing: they see it as a struggle, which means that they don't shy away from taking the fight to us over the long term. Whatever our nuance, we do have to deal with the facts of what power the Republicans hold, and how they view that power politically.
In short, whenever you let them into office, debacles like this will ensue, because in their minds, there is no quarter to be given to us, no accomodation, not with people beyond their party. They want America a certain way, and when given the chance, they will do what they can to force their vision on the rest of us. This is not simply some passive quality of theirs, this is their active approach to politics, their way of doing business. So, voters might punish Democrats for being weak, but the punishment will reflect back on them in the form of intolerable policy and policy screw-ups.
And really, is that punishing Democrats who give in, when ultimately it forces us into positions where the actual ability to avoid lousy deals is lessened? As well intentioned as purity is at this point, it ignores an important fact: that political purism, in its way, is just like fiscal austerity: it only works well when the party in question has enough seats, enough power, to continue it's political dominance. It also helps if the seat in question is relatively safe. You don't do yourself much favors, in terms of heightening the concentration of your faction's power, if you lose real power as a result.
The dynamics of real power cannot and should not be ignored. Don't support different until you can ensure better, or at least equal takes its place.
Coming back to the debt downgrade, the nuanced approach presupposes that people will have the patience to sift through all that stuff to understand things your way, and presupposed that people will turn to more liberal candidates as you would. This is a mistake. As we can see, despite all things we know about what the Republicans did fiscally, people went back to them to solve that particular problem. Why?
It's pretty simple: the Republicans set up a dynamic in their rhetoric, a false one, but still a dynamic, where the Democrats were big spenders running the budget out of control, and electing them would help bring things back under control. They set up a dynamic, a false one but a dynamic nonetheless, where Democrat's regulatory efforts were creating uncertainty and hurting business, and electing them would help people get jobs.
Get the government under control, keep it out of the way of a business recovery. False narrative, but a story with drive and power nonetheless that the angry and dissatisfied voters could grasp simply, and act on.
And, to my mind, a great, powerful starting point for our correction on the course of American politics. Republicans didn't restore fiscal sanity, they destroyed it, and that must be corrected. Republicans didn't create jobs, they killed them by the hundreds of thousands, and their action seem poised to kill hundreds of thousands more, perhaps even send us into a new recession or depression, instead of improving the economy.
Very clear. And whatever Democrats have done, has been forced by Republicans applying the worst in hostage-taking tactics. Rather than speak of weakness or capitulation, we can talk about a positive that is still true: that Democrats showed more concern for the institutions and the government that people depended upon, while the Republicans showed nothing but contempt.
Clear narratives and strong dynamics win elections. If you can do better than me with that, if you can somehow find a way to present your nuances in a way that appeals to voters, that gets them to vote Democratic in the next election, that creates clear narratives and strong dynamics, feel free to offer them. But don't settle down in the mushy middle and expect people to be inspired to go and vote the liberals you like in if you're telling them that Democrats are little better than Republicans. A pox on both houses doesn't quite work that well if you're one of the houses.