Oxfdblue has a diary on the rec list entitled: The Caving Diaries in which s/he deplores the left-wing "hand-wringing" "bitching" and "whining" that makes us our own worst enemies. S/he calls for rallying behind Democrats, any Democrats, in order to create a greater amount of power for our party, and implicitly suggests not only that the 2010 election results came about because of this kind of hand-wringing attitude, but that we are likely to see even more horrific electoral results later if we persist. Meanwhile, Oxfdblue's detractors are passionately criticizing Oxfdblue and the Democratic party on moral and policy grounds.
This is a very old argument, one that has been rehashed as long as I have been a Democrat.
I would like to propose a different, indeed a pragmatic, reality-based view. Why don't we look at what both the base and the Democratic party have done, and see--not whether Oxfdblue's philosophy is right or wrong, but whether that political philosophy, and political methodology, are working for us.
To begin with, I would argue that the base has been doing exactly what this diarist recommends for the past twenty years. Although there's been no shortage of bitching and whining, we have usually gone out afterward and worked and voted for centrist Democrats and, in many cases, gotten them elected. (Case in point, my donations to Jason Altmire, a Congressman who never voted my way on anything except making Nancy Pelosi Speaker of the House). Despite bitching and moaning, when push comes to shove and it's time for donations, labor, or votes, we have been following the New Democrat philosophy and methodology. And all evidence indicates that the Democratic party knows this, and believes the left wing will always be there to support it because we have nowhere else to go.
So, when it comes to actions and resources--the important part of politics, because what you do and the money you give is far, far more important than what you say--we have been doing exactly what Oxfdblue suggests.
We are now twenty years in from the invention of the DLC and the "New Democrat:" the idea that Democrats can and should be right-wing enough to be friends with big business and finance. We've been supporting that philosophy for twenty years.
So, how has the "New Democrat" philosophy done for us?
Well, first let's look at policy.
It looks to me like we've moved so far to the right that our Democratic president has offered to cut programs that are not only the highest achievements of our party, but also the most popular government programs in the history of our country. Remember that a few years ago, a powerful Republican president and Congress tried to destroy one of these programs to no avail. Even at the height of George W. Bush's power, we were unbeatable on the question of Social Security. Now we're offering it up, even though it has nothing to do with the issue we're being attacked on: the deficit.
That's how we're doing on policy: we've moved so far to the right that we're no longer willing to protect the highest achievements of our party: achievements that are greatly beloved by a vast majority of the American people.
Now let's look at politics.
This is where the rubber really meets the road, because the justification for the New Democrat position is that shifting to the right is necessary to win elections. If there is any place that the DLC option should prove itself the better methodology, it should be here.
So, how are we doing on politics?
It looks to me like our party is so weak that with 60 votes in the Senate and a huge majority in the House and a skilled President with a mandate unparalleled in the past 50 years, we couldn't hold on to our power for more than 18 months.
18 months. This is populist power that took, in some cases, all of 6 years to build, because, as most of us know, the Barack Obama campaign did not spring out of a vacuum like Athena from the head of Zeus. We built an unprecedented amount of political power, and the infrastructure in the states to sustain it. We had a political engine that could have given the Democratic party dominance of Washington for 12-16 years. Many pundits were saying, after the 2008 election, that it was another "Goldwater moment" for the Republican party, and that the Republican party was going to have to back up and re-evaluate all its philosophies and strategies.
And yet, all that was gone in 18 months. A year and a half after Barack Obama took office, and the Democrats took massive majorities in both houses of Congress, the Democratic party was on the ropes again: not just facing an ordinary swing back in an ordinary midterm election, but in serious danger.
We had elected centrists, the people who supposedly know everything about the pragmatic task of building and keeping political power, the people who are not idealistic, but are "in the know."
So, why did the unprecedented mandate of 2008, which had taken years to create, evaporate in their hands?
Party leadership has tried to blame their loss of power on liberals, either by saying the Democratic party had moved too far to the left on policy, or that the base had abandoned them and created an "enthusiasm gap."
The first charge can be easily dismissed by looking at the record of Obama's first year: the left wing got none of what it wanted on health care reform save Bernie Sanders' free clinics.
Were Sanders' clinics the issue that disgusted the American voter sufficiently to produce the swing to the right?
The left wing got little of what it wanted in the stimulus, in that there were far more tax cuts and far less overall money put into the stimulus than it wanted. In fact, some of the left wing's most cherished projects, such as energy efficiency funding and weatherization funding and other green energy projects, were cut in order to get the votes of Sen. Olympia Snowe and Sen. Susan Collins.
Was the mere fact of the stimulus' existence the issue that disgusted the American voter sufficiently to produce the swing to the right?
Was it the Lily Ledbetter Act? the early efforts of Pres. Obama to close Guantanamo Bay? the bailout of the Big Three in Detroit? the fact that the EPA was once again allowed to function?
Are any of these plausible reasons for the 2010 shift to the right? Is it plausible that any of these political gestures were high-visibility enough, and offensive enough, to enrage and disgust the American people to the point that they would throw the election to the Tea Party?
If anyone believes that the answer to that question is "yes," or that I am forgetting some left-wing policy the President or the Congress enacted, please let me know in the comments, and tell me which left-wing act it was that turned the American people against us. But I find the possibility extremely implausible on the face of it, especially since the American people were in the throes of the worst financial disaster since the Great Depression, and didn't have a lot of time to go into the details of policy, except perhaps on the issue of health care, which directly affects their survival. Nor do I think the American people are particularly preoccupied with ideology when they are losing their homes and jobs and their ability to pay their bills is at stake. It is the economy, stupid.
Finally, there is the charge that the Democrats lost because their base didn't work hard enough in the 2010 election cycle.
Personally and anecdotally-- I was working in MD, VA, and PA, and I did not see the base stop working. What I saw was people who kept working though they were dispirited. But, for a moment, let's assume they did stop working b/c they were dispirited and alienated from their party, and that their lack of labor is what created the conservative election results of 2010.
Pragmatically speaking, if a group of people is so important to your political success that alienating them will produce a complete reversal of your fortunes--for a more complete reversal of fortunes than the shift from 2008 to 2010 can hardly be imagined--wouldn't it make sense for a pragmatic practitioner of Realpolitik to make sure that those people were happy? Or if not happy, at least tolerably satisfied?
Shouldn't a pragmatic politician whose primary interest is in winning be smart enough to understand where his electoral victories come from, and protect the relationships that produce those victories for him? Isn't that the essence of politics?
I ran a campaign last year, a victorious one. In that campaign, the local Korean community was an extremely potent and helpful ally to my candidate.
Would it have made any sense for my candidate to publicly say insulting things about Koreans? To refuse to pursue their policy goals because those goals were deemed too naive and extreme? Is it intelligent, is it pragmatic to alienate a powerful stakeholder who could hold the keys to your next electoral victory?
Where has the DLC philosophy, the New Democrat methodology gotten us?
Is our party stronger and more successful now than it was 20 years ago?
Are we?