What does the Democratic Party stand for?

"Here's a riddle: what is a swing voter? More and more, it is an American who thinks like a Democrat but refuses to identify as one."

"... once these independents are assigned the party they are closer to, Democrats enjoy a 13 percent advantage over Republicans."

Kevin Drum invited Rick Perlstein (author of "Before the Storm," a history of the growth of the American conservative movement) to write about what the Democrats have been doing wrong.

Perlstein points out that Clinton practiced “triangulation.” That means that he was ignoring his own base and moving to attract the swing voters to support his initiatives, on the assumption that his base had no place else to go. It frequently worked, but the cost was very high.

The cost of those short-term wins was that the identification of what the Democratic Party stands for was intentionally made less clear. Since party identification by voters depends on their identification with what the party stands for, this left a lot of voters who did not understand what the Democratic Party was about.

The result was that even though their values were closer to those of the Democratic Party than to those of the Republican Party, these independent voters saw no difference between the two parties except that the Republicans seemed to have something they believed and the Democrats did not. The choice is to go with the Party that clearly stands for something, even if often wrong, or identify with the party that doesn’t stand for anything.

Clinton, brilliant politician though he was, is not entirely responsible for this muddling of the identity of the Democratic Party. Jimmy Carter did very little to develop the Party and a great deal to weaken it. [The following four paragraphs are based partly on a discussion in “The Penguin History of the USA” by Hugh Brogan, pp. 674 – 676.]

Carter had several major successes. One was the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel. Another was the controlled evacuation of American control of the Panama Canal that has left the canal in good hands and kept it useful to the US without requiring us to invade Panama and fight an insurgent war in Central America. But Carter had little respect for the Democratic Party.

He was elected as the last Democratic President to win the South, largely because of his southern identification and the collapse of the Nixon Presidency. But Carte3r didn’t care much for party politics. He was a politician in the tradition of southern populism which had long opposed the regular Southern Democratic Party, so he did nothing to build the Democratic Party. As a result, he was rather indifferent to the effects of his foreign policy successes on the Democratic Party . Many of the Democratic Senators who voted for the Panama Canal Treaty were defeated in 1978 and 1980.

Another major problem for the Democratic Party was its failure to effectively deal with the stagflation of the late 1970’s. A major support for the Democratic Party had been the fact that under Democrats the Depression was ended, the economy grew rapidly and the middle class enjoyed a rapidly expanding standard of living. The gas crisis, inflation and higher unemployment suddenly threw the Democratic management of the economy into question.

The inflation was pushing middle class workers into higher tax brackets, while (especially in California) immigration was threatening the jobs of lower income middle class workers. With inflation increasing the value of real estate and increasing the taxes on homes, all of this hit the middle class hard. The California tax revolt was one result, and the California Republican attacks on illegal immigration was another. Then the Iranian Hostage Crisis made Carter and the Democrats look incompetent in handling threats to American security. The result was to make the main supporters of the Democrats, the middle class, start looking for other solutions and other political allegiances.

Carter appointed Paul Volker as Chairman of he Federal Reserve in1979, and he promptly increased interest rates. This caused the recession of 1981 – 1982, but it wrung inflationary expectations out of the economy and set up the conditions for the American economy of the late 1990’s after the Cold War expenses were taken off the economy by the 1989 collapse of the USSR. Note that this was part of Carter’s intelligent governance without regard to the political needs of the Democratic Party. Reagan got the credit for ending inflation, but Carter was primarily responsible. The Democratic Party was left with a reputation for not being able to deal with the major domestic or international problems America faced.

The Democrats were also left with a reputation for not standing for anything. There are no well-funded and heavily publicly active think tanks which are presenting sets of values that Democrats can circle around and use to support policies that resolve the problems the middle class face. The result is a party of very smart people who are attempting to deal ad hoc with each problem that jumps up to face us, but which does not seem to stand for any real basis rooted in core values.

Are there effective solutions to this set of problems? Yeah, there are. But first, we as Democrats need to agree what the problems are. That’s what I am trying to present here.