The Big Tent

Barack Obama's in trouble because of his association with Donnie McClurkin, a black Southern preacher who vilifies gays. This has of course angered gays and lebians, who now want Obama to disassociate himself from McClurkin who is loved by vast numbers of South Carolinian black voters, who are key to Obama's electoral plan to beat Hillary.

Obama has repudiated McClurkin's bigotry, reaffirmed his absolute support of gays and lesbians, but has not spurned McClurkin. And now he runs the risk of alienating not only gays and lesbians, but liberals who have always suspected Obama wasn't liberal enough. This may all be academic, because until he does something dramatic, Obama remains the 30-point underdog with no chance of winning.

But there is something worth noting here, because this dynamic is prevalent throughout Democratic politics. We liberals hold two simultaneous, conflicting values that we haven't ever had the courage to examine closely. On the one hand, we think we are the open-minded altruists who welcome everyone into our big tent; on the other, we are a coalition who value fidelity to our issue(s) above all else. So we want everyone in our big tent until they don't agree to back our issue, and then we're not so high on the big tent, anymore.

The single-issue folks have been ascendant since the 70s, and when candidates run for office, they must make a big show of bowing to each of these calcified interests lest they find themselves the target of a bitter crusade. The single-issue focus seems like a good way to accomplish those ends, but it has been a big loser for environmentalists, social justice activists, abortion rights activists, etc. In ignoring (or worse, targeting) other potential coalition partners, Sierra Club, NARAL, unions, and so on have made themselves a yappy minority, of no more consequence to the German Shepherds of the GOP than a dachshund.

So now the Obama coalition splinters. A helluva way to get a guy elected.

Stones, Political PTSD

Weird. Kevin Drum and Andrew Sullivan were both thinking along the lines I was this morning. How does that happen?

Kevin:

In the 90s, Democrats were still fighting the countercultural backlash of the 70s and needed ways to demonstrate their willingness to abandon old orthodoxies. Hanging with the DLC was a terrific way of signalling to both the press and the public that the party had reinvented itself....

But it's not because the average Kossack is to the left of the average DLCer. The real difference is that the average Kossack is obsessed with Democrats having the stones to stand up to the modern Republican machine.

No one's talking about rolling back welfare reform. No one's proposed a healthcare initiative even half as comprehensive as the 1994 Clinton plan. All three candidates continue to claim they're personally opposed to gay marriage. Their rhetoric on guns and abortion is much more muted than in the past. They mostly agree that some of the Bush tax cuts should be allowed to expire, but not much more. They want to get out of Iraq, but that's a thoroughly mainstream position, and none of them are willing to commit to a complete withdrawal in any case.

And Andrew:

Clinton is from the traumatized generation; Obama isn't. Clinton has internalized to her bones the 1990s sense that conservatism is ascendant, that what she really believes is unpopular, that the Republicans have structural, latent power of having a majority of Americans on their side. Hence the fact that she reeks of fear, of calculation, of focus groups, of triangulation. She might once have had ideals keenly felt; she might once have actually relished fighting for them and arguing in thier defense. But she has not been like that for a very long time. She has political post-traumatic stress disorder. She saw her view of feminism gutted in the 1992 campaign; she saw her healthcare plan destroyed by what she saw as a VRWC; she remains among the most risk-averse of Democrats on foreign policy and in the culture wars.

I wonder if this is more than just a coincidence. Maybe last week's Obama-Clinton scuffle will get the ball rolling on Democratic courage.

Finding Their Morality

We are living through one of the most corrupt times in American politics. Corruption in turn breeds incompetence, and the two breed, among voters, cynicism. In response, the Democrats, to everyone's astonishment, don't seem to be able to find their voice. They waffle, equivocate, and fall back on politicalese. Last week's spat between Obama and Hillary about foreign diplomacy was the most recent case in point. Why this has happened seems clear, but first, it's relevant to deconstruct recent Republican rule to see how we got here.

The process by which the GOP managed to consolidate power included a strong moral argument: government as an institution is corrupt and malign--witness the travesties of Roe and welfare. Morality is a potent weapon; it allows you to distinguish your position from the mire of politics as usual while simultaneously identifying your opponents as that mire. The Democrats did the same thing in the 30s and carried it through the civil rights movement. With social issues and "small government" on their side, Republicans turned the tables in the 80s.

The power of this identification (GOP=morality) becomes the standard position. In any debate, voters and--to a far larger degree (quite bizarrely)--the media assume the GOP are right. So even though Bush lied his way through a war, bogus tax cuts, a phony social security debate, ad infinitum, the assumption has been that this is still the moral position. Even over the weekend, as I listened to the debate about Alberto Gonzales play out on the talk shows, there was an instinctive mistrust of the Democratic position despite overwhelming evidence that Gonzales is a toady, a liar, and a bum. (Media position: "yes, Gonzales appears to have lied, but aren't the Democrats still only interested because it gives them partisan advantage?")

Corruption, of course, resulted from the connections to K Street, the motivation of most of the GOP to rule, not govern, and a sense that reality didn't matter--there was no catastrophe that couldn't be spun to implicate the Democrats. Voters, who by nature have only a dim understanding of politics, don't know how to sort all of it out. The party of morality seems to be corrupt, and the other party--the chumps--don't know their asses from a hole in the ground. So cynicism prevails.

So why are Democrats so lame? I think they have a kind of Stockholm syndrome. It's not only the media and voters who genuflect to the moral authority of the GOP; in a certain sense, the Dems to it reflexively, too. (Unlike Republicans, who turned "liberal" into a profane description, Democrats regularly refer to "solid conservatives" as those with principles, as distinct from the cancerous Abramoff/Bush wing.) They naturally mistrust the politics of spin, and being the wonkier party, default to policy discussions rather than emotional appeals. What results is a timid, equivocating party that almost never speaks about policy in the language of morality. And, even when they do, they take a very mildly heterodox position that seems to undermine the very moral point they're making.

The "third way" politics of the DLC contain a deeply structural fault. While it may have been a successful wedge politics for the middle of the GOP era, it is by design without morality: it splits the difference. To a certain extent, all Democrats currently labor in Clinton's shadow, and his damnable DLC politics.

At some point, an overarching politics of morality is going to have to emerge that buoys and animates all their arguments--and which abandons the third way. Liberals actually believe government is good: it regulates to keep markets healthy and competitive, it redistributes to give all Americans a chance, it offers justice so that no citizen is greater or lesser before the law, and it offers security through competent foreign policy. The GOP has so profoundly dominated the politics of morality, that even to suggest that government is an agent for change seems not only unutterable, but wrong. But in fact, in every liberal democracy besides the United States, that is the default view and the unquestioned morality of politics.

If the Democrats find the courage to express this morality, 2025 might feel a lot like 1945, when those values went unquestioned. If they don't, we may be in for years more of political gridlock, polarization, and cynicism.