Republicans lead. Democrats follow. And that makes all the difference. Libertarian and wealth-protecting Republican ideologues invest to influence and change most people’s normative ideas and values, whereas Democrats seek to discern and appeal to what voters already think. That has been the case for decades. It has been a triumph for conservatism and the protection of privilege. For Democrats, it remains a losing strategy to win elections, a disaster for a more equitable nation, or any hope of avoiding the worst effects of climate change.
The Republican’s route to power has been to shift public thinking toward several big ideas and implied values: Resources are scarce and therefore competition and inequity are natural and inevitable. Therefore, the pursuit of personal advancement is the only reasonable course of action. In that context, the advance of underrepresented minorities has been understood as coming at the expense of White people. The values message has been, “Look out for yourself because no one else will.” That dystopian message is designed to enable Republicans' core idea: Financial regulation and taxes on wealth are a counterproductive limitation.
Responding to Republican inroads with white working class and lower-middle class voters in the Nixon and Reagan years, Democratic leadership, led in particular by Bill Clinton, pursued a different approach. They attempted to gain or retain political office by discerning how people already think and crafting appeals and policies to meet them. In pursuit of votes of the elusive undecided voters, Democrats picked up on conservative themes, ceding the war of ideas to Republicans.
For example, upon signing the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 and in an exchange with reporters on August 22, 1996, President Bill Clinton said, “The new bill restores America’s basic bargain of providing opportunity and demanding, in return, responsibility.”
Clinton was responding to Ronald Reagan’s characterization of minority welfare recipients as con artists eating steak and driving Cadillacs living off the tax contributions of hardworking, law-abiding white workers.
The theme was still very much in play in 2013 when in an economics speech at Knox College, President Obama declared:
“Here in America, we've never guaranteed success — that's not what we do. More than in some other countries, we expect people to be self-reliant. Nobody is going to do something for you. We've tolerated a little more inequality for the sake of a more dynamic, more adaptable economy. That's all for the good. But that idea has always been combined with a commitment to equality of opportunity to upward mobility — the idea that no matter how poor you started, if you’re willing to work hard and discipline yourself and defer gratification, you can make it, too. That’s the American idea.”
So, we have Democrats at the highest level parroting the conservative shibboleth that poverty is a problem of the failure of personal responsibility and self-discipline rather than racism and inequity built into the structure of our socio-economic system.
Mainstream Democratic response to the push for charter schools is yet another example of their acceptance of deeply conservative language and with it, its underlying ideology. Publicly supported alternatives to democratically governed public education have several roots: getting tax dollars for religiously based schools; support for schools to skirt the Supreme Court rulings against the segregationist separate-but-equal doctrine; acceptance of the idea that government-led bureaucracies cannot be reformed democratically; attempts to squeeze profit from K-12 schools at taxpayers’ expense; and last but not least, undermining the influence of strong public-sector unions. The tagline du-jour for all of this is the right to parental choice, the core of which is the idea that education is a personal consumer good rather than a shared society necessity.
The bipartisan education policy of the last forty years has been a response to insecurity. American schools predictably fail to live up to the absurd disingenuous or naïve promise that education can provide equity in a systemically inequitable society. For Republicans, such insecurity is an opportunity to sew fear and division while promoting their everyone-out-for-yourself dogma. Unfortunately, Democrats rather than challenge that core ideology, have settled for, “You can’t save everyone, so let’s save a few.”
The same ceding of foundational ideas to Republicans has characterized Democrats’ refusal to launch full-throated, rights-based advocacy for universal healthcare, the Green New Deal, and housing rights. Unless and until Democrats abandon their delusional, conflict-avoiding play-to-the-center approach to winning elections, they will continue to lose and, and without a viable working-class party alternative, so will most Americans. Democrats need to shift their focus from what to say to win elections to what to say and do to influence how people think. They need to lead, not follow.
Democrats have long drawn on a broad constituency but with sometimes conflicting interests. For example, the Roosevelt administration supported labor rights and public works projects to put people back to work but did not want to endanger support from the southern Democrats who supported virulent segregation. So, when Democrats designed the National Labor Relations Act to protect workers, they excluded domestic and farm workers that included huge numbers of women and African Americans. Similarly, when rules were set to support the home mortgages that fueled suburban sprawl and subsequent wealth accumulation in the post-war era, racial covenants were included that excluded non-white people. Pandering to the so-called far left-wing? Nope! However, this so-called compromise had a lasting damning effect. It legitimized and normalized two destructive ideas: Not everyone deserves the same rights and segregation is normal and acceptable.
I saw a poster in a store window recently that read. “Equal rights for others does not mean less rights for you. It is not pie.” That is the simple message for the organizing necessary to push Democrats toward a more unifying, inclusive, vote-winning direction. Americans of all races and backgrounds and across the economic spectrum experience insecurity with respect to housing, medical care, the cost of post-secondary education, and volatile weather and fires caused by climate change. Democrats need to speak directly to those insecurities, abandoning the self-destructive notion of fixing a little and providing paltry help only for the most vulnerable because of limited resources. Not helping everyone, permits resentment to grow and fester and burst into hatred, violence, and acceptance of authoritarian anti-democratic solutions.
The progressive common good values that supported the New Deal in the 1930s, the growth of unions, the advances for civil rights in the 1960s, the establishment of environmental regulation, and more recently marriage equality, have eroded but they are not dead. The meet- voters-in-the-middle strategy of the last several decades ceded the struggle for people’s ideas and values to the normality of inequity and with it, racism and climate disaster. Instead, Democrats must lead with concrete proposals for addressing widespread insecurity, while giving voice to progressive ideas and values.
Arthur H. Camins is a lifelong educator. He writes about education and social justice. He works part-time with curriculum developers at UC Berkeley as an assessment specialist. He has taught and been an administrator in New York City, Massachusetts, and Louisville, Kentucky. The ideas expressed in this article are his alone.
Follow him on Twitter: https://twitter.com/arthurcamins