Ever since the Republicans handed our asses to us on November 2nd in an election that could have and should have been a popular landslide for our side, there has been a lot of chatter on the Left about the sorry state of the Democratic message machine and how to go about making it better again. That's entirely appropriate: this kind of healthy if self-loathing meditation is crucial for getting our train wreck of a party organization back on track. But there's also a danger of going too far with the proposed solutions, being too convinced of their efficacy, and running the risk of mistaking tactic for strategy, and strategy for principle.
The DLC continues to confound the three with its dogmatic fixation on an obsolete centrist tactic that was marginally useful when it bore its only political fruit back in the `90s. Those of us who don't buy their centrist snake oil are looking to more promising solutions, but just as they did in the last decade, we're turning to Republicans for answers, and are fast becoming dangerously infatuated with the secrets of their success. Whether Democrats are sagely learning lessons from our opponents, or mindlessly copying from the Republican playbook, once again we're convinced of the wisdom of appropriating the successful strategies of the other side. Ten years ago it was Al From who told us that our future success lies in acting more like Republicans; today it's George Lakoff.
Not to be misunderstood: there's a strong case to be made for crafting a progressive message with the same dumbed-down, moralistic sloganeering of the Republican Party. There was also a strong case to be made during the Clinton years for co-opting the Gingrich Party platform, a tactic which did, arguably, help to win a second term for an elected Democratic incumbent president for the first time since FDR. As we know all too well today, however, there was also an associated cost - literally speaking, the cost of alienating the base of the party, metaphorically speaking, the cost of selling the party's soul. There will, no doubt, also be a long-term cost to pay for "framing" our message like Republicans, even if the more important short-term benefit is shoring up our party's ability to win national elections again.
To their detriment, the intellectual architects of the strategy of Clintonian co-optation overlooked and continue to overlook a basic fact about our party: We are not Republicans. And it is because of that fact that the DLC co-optation tactic has such a short shelf life. By acting like Republicans, DLC-type Democratic politicians may score some points with the center, but they simultaneously squander their credibility with the left, that is, with the ideologically committed, activist base of the party that is needed not just for their votes but to keep the party a vital, living force between election seasons. In the long run, moreover, they lose in the middle as well, by looking more and more like the spineless, unprincipled opportunists that they are. Even swing voters can tell the difference between cardboard cutouts and the real McCoy. The same may eventually be said with regard to those who adopt a moralistic rhetoric of progressive "values."
Much more than the Republicans, the Democratic Party is a party of political ideals, and Democrats have a powerful segment of the party base that is both a benefit and a burden: intellectuals. That includes not only college professors, but journalists, culture producers, and the visitors to this site. And if swing voters can smell a rat when it's put right under their noses, intellectuals, who are skeptics by nature and by training, can smell one from miles away. Nothing reviles them more than insincerity. Already, the studied disingenuousness of the Democratic Party has driven too many intellectual purists to the Green Party, whose irrelevance buys them the luxury of choosing to be perfectly earnest. Granted, the Bush Administration has driven a number of intellectuals back into the Democratic Party's ranks, but the (predominately progressive, bourgeois) movement behind Nader's candidacy in 2000 demonstrates just how precarious the party's hold is on this population. It's easy to write off the relative importance of this constituency, but the Democrats aren't in a comfortable position to write off any constituency, let alone one that includes the majority of America's official opinion makers.
It's become almost a cliché that Democrats speak of policy where Republicans speak of values, that Democrats offer well-reasoned analysis that nobody gives a shit about while Republicans offer kitsch. But there's a reason behind this discrepancy that is more fundamental than the Democrats' ineptness at crafting political propaganda. While Republicans merely need to appeal to the naked economic self-interests of their affluent benefactors while nailing a few reactionary planks to the platform for their philistine social conservative base, Democrats need to keep ideologically-driven, critical thinkers in their fold, people who read articles beneath the fold of the New York Times, and comment on what they read there on the Daily Kos. Unlike the Republican Wall Street Journal readership, these people actually care about the integrity of their party leaders' public pronouncements and not just about how big their tax cuts will be this year. Unlike the social conservatives, they demand those well-reasoned justifications for policy positions that we keep asking them to shut up about for the benefit of swing voters.
By jettisoning reasoned discourse for moralistic windbagging, the Democrats will only further alienate their intellectual supporters. Politics is not a debate club, of course, and sober argumentation will only get you so far, as John Kerry has proved beyond a doubt. But that does not imply that it no longer serves a vital purpose, at least for our side of the political spectrum. There are Democrats among us who actually demand that our leaders' positions make sense, and that they're able to explain why they make sense. (I'm sure there are a handful of Republicans left who feel the same way about their leaders, but evidently their voice in the party has been reduced to a whimper.)
Again, our preoccupation with messaging is a valid one, and framing our message in a moralistic manner can be a winning strategy. But doing so just the way the Republicans do is bound to further erode the tenuous credibility of Democratic leaders with the intellectuals who already hold their noses while voting for them. The key is to "frame" our message in a way that resonates emotionally with the kitsch-loving center, while still speaking the more rarified language of the Left. The key is also to learn to be bilingual, speaking to one audience the way John Kerry speaks to everybody, and speaking to another the way George Bush speaks to anybody. Distilling "the message" down to a single, inflexible jargon may work for the Republicans, but Democrats are not Republicans. We demand more of our spokespeople.
