"The resurgence of liberalism and the Democratic Party, when it comes, will necessarily be grass roots as well as intellectual or professional. A new generation of think tanks and message machines can help, but in a democracy, the ultimate test is whether a program animates voters. Democratic candidates will shed their temporizing not when a linguistic expert gives them better packaging but when voters demonstrate that a muscular progressivism that addresses the plight of the common American is a winning politics."
Robert Kuttner has a really good article on why we are losing to the Republicans. The reason is, he explains, that the right is a movement, 30 years in the making. That movement has spent time and money creating a central easy-to-summarize ideology that the movement members agree on. This is tied to a set of public relations channels that send the most important part of the ideology to each group who desires that particular element of the ideology.
"there's something for everyone. The businessman gets it from The Wall Street Journal editorial page. The soccer mom has FOX News. The 24-year-old beer-drinking guy has Rush [Limbaugh]. The religious right can get the word from Pat Robertson."
Tied closely to this is that the movement ideology is the set of mechanisms that creates unity. "Despite schisms, the right is simply more disciplined. The discipline is reinforced by new forms of patronage -- tax breaks for the elite, godliness for the base. Worldly sinners among Wall Street Republicans may smirk at the fundamentalists in their governing coalition, but are happy to share the bounty. They may privately oppose the immense budget deficits, but the heavily Republican Concord Coalition, so publicly alarmed at the (Republican legacy) deficits of the 1990s, is today prudently silent. Conversely, social conservatives may wince at the antics and views of Rudy Giuliani and Arnold Schwarzenegger, but the coalition holds. Genuine Republican moderates, meanwhile, have been coerced or co-opted into near silence. The resulting legislative unity is also unprecedented."
Then there is the Iraq war, "a conveniently permanent one. The right manipulates fear of terrorism into public and media acquiescence for a politics that would never prevail in normal times."
Dealing with this involves 1. mechanics, 2. ideology, and 3. leadership. "the rightÂ’s movement ideology was able to mature into a strategic political force precisely because it had plenty of well-nuanced institutions that could work through a common agenda rather than differentiating themselves for donors. Still, if it is easy to agree on the need for more strategic resources, the quest for a common ideology is daunting. "
Kuttner then identifies the methods that liberals and democrats can use to develop a counter argument ans system to that of the Republicans.
"There are basically two stories on what liberals and Democrats need to espouse. Either might conceivably produce a majority movement and party. Both cannot; the competing messages simply cancel each other out. We saw the effects in 2000 and 2004 of Al Gore and John Kerry trying to take a dollop of each.
"In one story line, liberal interest groups have disproportionate influence, leaving the Democratic Party with a message too left wing for the country on both social issues and national defense. On economics, New Democrats want a modernizing party committed to fiscal responsibility, globalism, and market-like strategies for social problems such as health care and education. This is said to be "pro-growth," though its detractors view that as a code for pro-business. The Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), initially cheering Gore-Lieberman as just the ticket, became progressively disillusioned the more populist Gore sounded. In a DLC postmortem, Joe Lieberman declared that Gore's economic populism stuff was not the pro-growth approach. It made it more dificult for us to gain the support of middle-class independent voters who don't see America as "us versus them."
"The opposite view -- whose exponents include Tom Frank, Robert Borosage, and David J. Sirota -- holds that by failing to run as progressives, Democrats allow Republicans to use cultural issues as a proxy for class issues. Frank, sifting through the ashes of the Democrats' 2004 defeat, wrote recently in The New York Review of Books: "Conservatives generally regard class as an unacceptable topic when the subject is economics -- trade, deregulation, shifting the tax burden. But define class as culture, and class instantly becomes the blood and bone of public discourse". Workerist in its rhetoric but royalist in its economic effects, this backlash is in no way embarrassed by its contradictions."
[...]
"In theory, either recipe could produce a governing coalition. But a resurgent Democratic Party built on progressivism would be more worth having."
A problem up to now is that Democratic consultants, depending on polls instead of ideology, tend to shift Democratic candidates to more of a right-wing message on the assumption that America is becoming a more conservative nation. A second major problem is that when a potential candidate goes to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee to seek financial help the first thing that they are asked is whether they have several hundred thousand dollars available. This results in eliminating almost any candidates who are not independently wealthy.
To counter these problems, Kuttner describes how a coalition of labor, environmentalist, civil-rights, pro-choice, and other grass-roots groups has started the Progressive Majority. This is an organization that recruits progressive candidates for office and provides some help with money, media, message, and training.
I suspect that this is an area in which the blogosphere can also play a big part.
This article is the most comprehensive description of the situation liberals and Democrats now find themselves that I have seen. It ties up a lot of loose strings and offers a framework for a coordinated reorganization of the Democratic Party that just might work.
With luck, we will begin to see some favorable results in the 2006 elections.
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