Give Americans the right cause, and they will rise above their differences. It’s part of our legacy. Now, the Democratic Party might have figured out how to reclaim that legacy.
Thomas Jefferson “had the strongest Anti-Federalist instincts of any eminent American.” He thought the Constitution was too “aristocratic.” Still, he supported the Constitution “to save the union,” as did many Anti-Federalists once assured of a Bill of Rights. Because they did so, we have a country.
FDR made deals with Southern Democrats, avowed racists in his day. Those deals haunt us still. Without them, though, four decades of prosperity never would have happened, a large middle class never would have arisen, and an uglier country would have emerged from the Great Depression.
Single-payer healthcare was lost due largely to “Blue Dog” Democrats. Yet, with some of them, enough of them, we got the Affordable Care Act.
Coalitions are messy things, even ugly at times. But given a cause, a message, and a good candidate, coalitions will form naturally. How much better, then, if we work at it. I don’t know how we find and field good candidates, but history and today’s news can give us the cause and the message.
Writing in Commentary Magazine, Penn Kemble noted that the Democratic Party long had been tasked with “drawing together a variety of potentially hostile racial, economic, cultural, and regional elements into a more or less united front against the vast power of corporate conservatism.”
Matt Stoller has noted that “the central tenet” of the New Deal “was distrust of concentrations of power and conflicts of interest in the economy.”
Those concentrations of power still are with us and are grasping for more power. Today, a campaign against inequality and “the vast power of corporate conservatism” still is a natural message for Democrats.
It also is the Achilles heel of Republicans, but that matters only if we aim for their heel. Yes, they’ve found religion and abortion. They’ve found gun control. They’ve found racism. We must counter these, but never forget that they are put out there by Republicans as cover for what remains the soulless essence of modern American conservatism: unrestrained corporate power and an aristocracy of wealth.
These are the twin sources of conservative indifference that thinks nothing of condemning tens of millions of Americans to lethal cuts in health care. These are the dual cynicisms that deny climate change for short term gain. They are the foundational, malevolent mores of American conservatism and of the Republican Party. We must make that connection in the minds of the people.
We won’t win arguments about guns or religion or racism. But we might convince a few, maybe enough, to set aside those differences to join a crusade for the average man. Show the resentful the rightful target of their resentment. Show the grievance driven where their grievances rightfully lie. Give them something bigger, more threatening, and real to hate. Then, give them something to fight for.
We will need to call out Republicans and conservatism, but we also will need robust policies that will make people’s lives better, economic policies that fight inequality, that promote the middle class, that help the poor, and, always, that bring jobs. That is, we will need old time, Democratic policies. We will need to take sides, leaving no doubt who and what we stand for: raising up people of all races with economic freedoms that make their political freedoms worth something.
Axios reports that Democrats, after 40 years in the neoliberal wilderness, might have figured that out. “The Better Deal“ is the most hopeful sign I’ve seen from the Democratic Party in at least that long. It’s due out on Monday, July 24.
It won’t be perfect. It won’t appeal to everyone. Given the necessary and appropriate divergence of opinions represented on this site, it will be rejected out-of-hand by some. That would be a mistake. If the Axios report is right, it looks like the vehicle for a discussion that we all, eventually, can unite behind.
We are running out of time. We need to break through in 2018 in either the House or the Senate. We cannot afford to argue over demographic strategies or to exclude people we don’t like. We need every hand, every vote.
No one has to agree on everything or on most things if there is consensus on opposition to Republican plutocracy and to an American aristocracy of wealth. All will win some; all will lose some; but none will lose what we all now stand to lose – everything.