Xenophobialand
05-01-2005, 02:54
I've been reading over the course of break between semesters, and one of the books I've read was a new one by Thomas Frank: What's the Matter with Kansas. In it, he goes through a breakdown of how the Republican party became so thoroughly entrenched in such a radical place as Kansas, once the bedrock of social protest against the industrial capitalism of the Gilded Age, and later the bedrock of unionist sentiment among farmers and industrial workers.
The argument itself I leave to you to discover (I highly recommed the book), but towards the end, Frank offers a concise and surprisingly cogent analysis of the problems of the modern Democratic party. I will present some of it, and hope that we can have a decent discussion over whether or not it does or does not present an accurate account of the fall of the Democratic Party over the last 30 years.
Who is to blame for this landscape of distortion, or paranoia, and of good people led astray? I have spent much of this book enumerating the ways in which Kansas voters choose self-destructive policies, but it is just as clear to me that liberalism deserves a large share of the blame for the backlash phenomenon. Liberalism may not be the monstrous, all-powerful conspiracy that conservatives make it out to be, but its failings are clear nonetheless. Somewhere in the last four decades liberalism ceased to be relevant to huge portions of its traditional constituency, and we can say that liberalism lost [his emphasis] places like Shawnee and Wichita with as much accuracy as we can point out that conservatism won them over.
This is due partially, I think, to the Democratic Party's more-or-less official response to its waning fortunes. The Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), the organization that produced such figures as Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Joe Lieberman, and Terry McAuliffe, has long been pushing the party to forget blue-collar voters and concentrate instead on recruiting affluent, white-collar professionals who are liberal on social issues. The larger interests that the DLC wants desperately to court are corporations, capable of generating campaign contributions far outweighing anything raised by organized labor. The way to collect the votes and--more importantly-- the money of these coveted constituencies, "New Democrats" think, is to stand rock-solid on, say, the pro-choice position while making endless concessions on economic issues, on welfare, NAFTA, Social Security, labor law, privatization, deregulation, and the rest of it. Such Democrats explicitly rule out what they deride as "class warfare" and take great pains to emphasize their friendliness to business interests. Like the conservatives, they take economic issues off the table. As for the working-class voters who were until recently the party's very backbone, the DLC figures they will have nowhere else to go; Democrats will always be marginally better on economic issues than Republicans. Besides, what politician in this success-worshipping country really wants to be the voice of the poor people? Where's the soft money in that?
This is, in dramatic miniature, the criminally stupid strategy that has dominated Democratic thinking off and on ever since the "New Politics" days of the early seventies. Over the years it has enjoyed few successes: the word yuppie, remember, was coined in 1984 to describe followers of the presidential candidate Gary Hart. But, as political writer E.J. Dionne has pointed out, the larger result was that both parties became "vehicles for upper-middle-class interests", and the old class-based language of the left quickly disappeared from the universe of the respectable. The Republicans, meanwhile, were industriously fabricating their own class-based language of the right, and while they made their populist appeal to blue-collar voters, Democrats were giving those same voters--their traditional constituency--the big brush-off, ousting their representatives from positions within the party and consigning their issues, with a laugh and a sneer, to the dustbin of history. A more ruinous strategy for the Democrats would have been difficult to invent. And the ruination keeps on coming. However desperately they triangulate and accomodate, the losses keep mounting.
Curiously enough, though, Democrats of the DLC variety aren't worried. They seem to look forward to the day when their party really is what David Brooks and Ann Coulter claim it to be now: a coming-together of the rich and the self-righteous. While Republicans trick out their poisonous stereotype of the liberal elite, Democrats seem determined to live up to the libel.
Such Democrats look at a situation like present-day Kansas and rub their hands with anticipation: Just look at how Ronald Reagan's "social issues" have come back to bite his party in the ass! If only those crazy Cons push just a little bit more, these Democrats think, the Republican Party will alienate the wealthy suburban Mods for good, and we will be able to step in and carry places like Mission Hills, along with all the juicy boodle that its inhabitants are capable of throwing our way.
While I enjoy watching Republicans fight one another as much as the next guy, I don't think the Kansas story really gives true liberals any cause to cheer. Maybe someday the DLC dream will come to pass, with the Democrats having movied so far to the right that they are no different from old-fashioned moderate Republicans, and maybe then the affluent will finally come over to their side en masse. But along the way the things that liberalism once stood for--equality and economic security--will have been abandoned completely. Abandoned, let us remember, at the historical moment when we needed them most.
Now, hopefully this won't incite a torrent of "DEmoCrts suxor!" comments, as much as a question of whether you think he's right in his thinking: is the fall of the Democratic Party the result of the very things that people lauded Clinton for, such as triangulation? Or is it something else that is bringing about the collapse of the oldest political party in the world?
The argument itself I leave to you to discover (I highly recommed the book), but towards the end, Frank offers a concise and surprisingly cogent analysis of the problems of the modern Democratic party. I will present some of it, and hope that we can have a decent discussion over whether or not it does or does not present an accurate account of the fall of the Democratic Party over the last 30 years.
Who is to blame for this landscape of distortion, or paranoia, and of good people led astray? I have spent much of this book enumerating the ways in which Kansas voters choose self-destructive policies, but it is just as clear to me that liberalism deserves a large share of the blame for the backlash phenomenon. Liberalism may not be the monstrous, all-powerful conspiracy that conservatives make it out to be, but its failings are clear nonetheless. Somewhere in the last four decades liberalism ceased to be relevant to huge portions of its traditional constituency, and we can say that liberalism lost [his emphasis] places like Shawnee and Wichita with as much accuracy as we can point out that conservatism won them over.
This is due partially, I think, to the Democratic Party's more-or-less official response to its waning fortunes. The Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), the organization that produced such figures as Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Joe Lieberman, and Terry McAuliffe, has long been pushing the party to forget blue-collar voters and concentrate instead on recruiting affluent, white-collar professionals who are liberal on social issues. The larger interests that the DLC wants desperately to court are corporations, capable of generating campaign contributions far outweighing anything raised by organized labor. The way to collect the votes and--more importantly-- the money of these coveted constituencies, "New Democrats" think, is to stand rock-solid on, say, the pro-choice position while making endless concessions on economic issues, on welfare, NAFTA, Social Security, labor law, privatization, deregulation, and the rest of it. Such Democrats explicitly rule out what they deride as "class warfare" and take great pains to emphasize their friendliness to business interests. Like the conservatives, they take economic issues off the table. As for the working-class voters who were until recently the party's very backbone, the DLC figures they will have nowhere else to go; Democrats will always be marginally better on economic issues than Republicans. Besides, what politician in this success-worshipping country really wants to be the voice of the poor people? Where's the soft money in that?
This is, in dramatic miniature, the criminally stupid strategy that has dominated Democratic thinking off and on ever since the "New Politics" days of the early seventies. Over the years it has enjoyed few successes: the word yuppie, remember, was coined in 1984 to describe followers of the presidential candidate Gary Hart. But, as political writer E.J. Dionne has pointed out, the larger result was that both parties became "vehicles for upper-middle-class interests", and the old class-based language of the left quickly disappeared from the universe of the respectable. The Republicans, meanwhile, were industriously fabricating their own class-based language of the right, and while they made their populist appeal to blue-collar voters, Democrats were giving those same voters--their traditional constituency--the big brush-off, ousting their representatives from positions within the party and consigning their issues, with a laugh and a sneer, to the dustbin of history. A more ruinous strategy for the Democrats would have been difficult to invent. And the ruination keeps on coming. However desperately they triangulate and accomodate, the losses keep mounting.
Curiously enough, though, Democrats of the DLC variety aren't worried. They seem to look forward to the day when their party really is what David Brooks and Ann Coulter claim it to be now: a coming-together of the rich and the self-righteous. While Republicans trick out their poisonous stereotype of the liberal elite, Democrats seem determined to live up to the libel.
Such Democrats look at a situation like present-day Kansas and rub their hands with anticipation: Just look at how Ronald Reagan's "social issues" have come back to bite his party in the ass! If only those crazy Cons push just a little bit more, these Democrats think, the Republican Party will alienate the wealthy suburban Mods for good, and we will be able to step in and carry places like Mission Hills, along with all the juicy boodle that its inhabitants are capable of throwing our way.
While I enjoy watching Republicans fight one another as much as the next guy, I don't think the Kansas story really gives true liberals any cause to cheer. Maybe someday the DLC dream will come to pass, with the Democrats having movied so far to the right that they are no different from old-fashioned moderate Republicans, and maybe then the affluent will finally come over to their side en masse. But along the way the things that liberalism once stood for--equality and economic security--will have been abandoned completely. Abandoned, let us remember, at the historical moment when we needed them most.
Now, hopefully this won't incite a torrent of "DEmoCrts suxor!" comments, as much as a question of whether you think he's right in his thinking: is the fall of the Democratic Party the result of the very things that people lauded Clinton for, such as triangulation? Or is it something else that is bringing about the collapse of the oldest political party in the world?