The Fighting Faith
News this morning that the Democrats are “united in opposition” to Bush’s agenda and promise a “year of confrontation and resistance.” (link courtesy of Kos). That’s all well and good. Rule number one when you’re in a hole is stop digging! The quaint notion of bipartisanship, aptly and gleefully described by a Republican operative as “date rape,” has become shorthand for spinelessness and compromise. If you’re going to get beaten, at least go down fighting. Then someone may respect you for it at least.
But determined opposition at the national level, where Democrats dangle by a frayed thread over a yawning pit of irrelevancy, is the easy part. Saying no to Bush simply means asserting common sense and widely-held values. The flip-side of the Democratic challenge is to rebuild trust in their positive agenda. In my opinion, this takes more than words. It takes hard choices and actual leadership.
After the election, there was a brief flurry of “Blue State nationalism,” typified on this blog by my November 4 post, “United We Fall,” and by The Stranger’s excellent article on the “Urban Archipelago” and the “United Cities of America.” While it’s not surprising that the fires of angry secessionism driven by the shock of Bush’s victory have ebbed somewhat in the cold light of day, the basic idea put forward in those angry moments remains worth a look. There are areas – both geographic and sociological – where liberals retain influence, and there are good ideas we still own. But precisely because we own them, we must take responsibility for their care and maintenance.
So what is the liberal agenda? Briefly stated, it’s the belief in the affirmative power of government to provide for the common good, in the rights of all Americans to participate fully in society, in cultural expression, and in international cooperation as a way of solving conflicts, with force as a last resort. I firmly believe that the march toward fulfillment of this agenda and America’s embrace of these ideals from 1933-1980, and again during the Clinton years, contributed directly to America’s rise to global prominence.
At the same time, during liberalism’s years in power, many of the principles became tarnished with corruption and self interest. Others came into conflict, and liberal leaders showed themselves unable to set priorities and say no to key constituencies as a way of resolving the contradictions within their own program. This created an opening for conservatives. Unable to reverse the tide of liberalism from the standpoint of basic ideology, they cleverly substituted an anecdotal recitation of the most spectacularly-ridiculous contradictions of liberalism as their critique. This made for bad logic but great politics. People who may have been generally sympathetic to the ideas of government-run anti-poverty programs and unionism nevertheless reacted negatively to the concepts of “welfare mothers” and “corrupt union bosses,” because there were enough actual examples in the system.
This effort continues to the present day. Bush and Rove have raised it to an artform. The whole bogus concepts of “Social Security Reform,” “Tax Simplification,” the attacks on the UN’s tainted oil for food program, and so on down the line, use tactical failures of liberal institutions as a proxy for systemic failures. It allows conservatives, who are hostile to the entire liberal enterprise, to pose as “reformers,” while forcing progressives to defend the most egregious examples of their program as if they were typical of the entire ideology. You can hardly blame the Right for this. It’s an extremely effective tactic, largely because it is built around a kernel of truth at the center.
It doesn’t have to be this way. A Democratic party built on pragmatic rather than ideologically progressive principles could, should and would take ownership of these issues and take responsibility for making them work. Bill Clinton realized this and built his presidency around the idea.
In short, it’s like this: those Democrats who believe in big government should be the ones working hardest to make it work right, not defending its excesses. Internationalists should be the ones most vocally outraged if the UN leadership is corrupt. When liberal ideals such as minority rights come into conflict with others like equality of opportunity, we should be the ones trying to resolve those contradictions. By turning our heads, trying to please everyone all the time, and constantly defending the indefensible, we cede the field to those who would use these problems as a lever to overturn the entire liberal state, with calamitous consequences for America at home and in the world.
It’s understandable in a way to be outflanked at the national level. To put it gently, the uneven distribution of sophistication from state to state makes it more challenging for liberals to articulate their principles in the face of typical GOP tactics of distortion and emotionalism. We have a ways to go before we get the message right. What’s inexcusable, however, is that we’re getting outflanked on these issues in our own back yards.
Take New York City for example. One of the great principles of liberalism going way back to the 19th century is to make urban spaces more livable. In this respect, the last Democratic administration to run New York City, under David Dinkins in the late 1980s and early 90s, failed miserably, in part because it was so thoroughly in the grip of special interests. A city with upwards of 80% Democratic registration, that consistently delivers huge landslide numbers to the national party, has voted for Republican mayors in the last three elections, and may do so again next year. Why? Because rather than face up to the issues that mattered most to citizens – crime, city services, overall livability – New York Democrats pandered to special interests and ethnic constituencies, abdicating both political and moral authority. A good friend of mine, who is a big wheel in the NY Democratic party, said that if Mayor Bloomberg (a Republican – at least that’s what it says on the party ticket) succeeded in outlawing car alarms and ice cream truck bells the way he’d reduced traffic noise by ticketing horn-blowers, he’d vote for him in a heartbeat.
In another example, the most powerful union in California is the one representing prison guards. As I’ve written previously, this poses problems because it pits good jobs and representation rights against social justice. More prison guards get jobs the more people are in jail, so the union is militantly against sentencing reform, liberalization of senseless drug laws, and any measures that would introduce sanity into a broken criminal justice system. The prison guards union was also the largest contributor to the campaign of recalled Democratic governor Gray Davis. It took Arnold Schwartzenegger, of all people, no friend of either unions or the unfairly imprisoned, to cut this Gordian knot.
When Democrats succeed in resolving contradictions, they succeed at the polls. One of the great unheralded achievements of the Clinton Administration was putting to rest once and for all the idea that there is a tradeoff between environmental responsibility and economic growth. The Clinton record on the environment wasn’t perfect by any means, but it was definitely a huge step forward from what came before and after. And yet, except in a few pockets of the economy (such as the logging industry in the Pacific Northwest), there have been few instances indeed of dire conservative predictions of job losses from stricter regulation have come to pass. Republicans who continue to press this line are whistling in the wind, and voters seem to know it.
However, when Democrats refuse to offer solutions to problems of their own making, voters rightly question the ability of the party to lead, even when they generally agree with the goals of liberal government. In days past, there was an institution known as the Republican party, home to good government reformers, go-a-little-slower progressives, and people with sensible alternatives to the excesses and contradictions of Democratic policies who, nevertheless, did not advocate the complete reversion of America to the McKinnley era or the Dark Ages. Alas, that institution seems to have passed from this earth, except in a few urban outposts.
Now, Democrats have only themselves to look to for solutions on the issues that matter most to them, since snouts and sharp fangs are poking out from the fleecy cloaks of today’s would-be GOP “reformers.” It’s not enough to oppose at the national level, where Democrats have no influence and can afford to take easy positions. In Blue America, where Democrats still have a base and a voice, it’s time to stop giving away issues to the opposition. If we believe in government, in public education, in diversity and urban dynamism, we need to be the ones to make it work. That means confronting failure, confronting obstinate constituencies, and resolving contradictions. That’s what Clinton did. It’s called leadership, and it’s remarkably compelling at the polls. Today’s Dems should try it some time.
10:15:24 AM 
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