What is the ‘Democratic’ Vision?

The New York Times is often accused of being a liberal paper. I think that is an unwarranted accusation given its under reporting of this Administration’s failures. Those of you who know me will recall that I think it too often comes across as being an establishment paper, one that thinks its mission is larger than the news itself. The Times has, I think a completely unnecessary self-importance, especially in these days of reporting from the blogoshere [Note: I do not include myself in the reporter realm … I merely comment]. As a result of this pompous ‘above it all’ attitude the Times has been continually late in entering, or even noting, political discussion. This is despite the relentless partisanship of the past decade or so. Today’s NYT is a classic example. For a while now there has been a healthy discussion going on within the Democratic Party about the direction it should take now that the Republicans are withering under the weight of Bush’s incompetence, the rotteness of scandal, and the bankruptcy of their policies. Still it has taken too long for the NYT to report on this debate. Consequently any loyal Democrats who rely on it for keeping current with political developments would have been unaware of the renewed vibrancy in left of center thinking. Here is the NYT article: Optimistic, Democrats Debate the Party’s Vision

I suppose the news here is that at last the Democrats are awake from their comatose defeatism. We should all seek to contribute to, and feed off of, this new energy.

The political landscape of the past few years has been entirely shaped by the need to respond to terrorism and the complete lack of any checks and balances in daily Washington legislative life. These two facts came on the heels of twenty or more years of the steady drift towards the right that resulted in the ascendancy of the extreme wing of the Republican Party. Combined this was a potent brew. One that completely overmatched the Democratic leadership. The result was an inept response and total failure to articulate an alternative vision to that presented by the Republicans. Every time a Democrat opined the country yawned. There was a presumption that the right had won the ideological war and that Clintonian ‘trimming’ was necessary. After all if the country had indeed moved to the right, then to gain power the Democrtas had to join the trend or risk being a perpetual and irrelevant opposition. Clinton’s so-called genius was to stake out and win thgis middle ground, a trick his wife is now trying to replicate.

The problem is that it is hypocritical. Democrats, who see problems through a liberal lens, sound totally unbelievable when they try to dress in the clothes of rugged individualism, religiosity, corporatism, or militarism. Those are not natural liberal mainsprings, at least in their current guises. The much maligned average voter is canny enough to know the difference between a politician of conviction and a politician pandering to the polls. And the Democrats looked for a long time as caring only about the polls. They were punished for forgetting their roots.

I do not believe that the country has no room for traditional Democratic values. The rightward shift in politics here has been a natural swing away from decades of Democratic control. The Democrats had become tired. Their leadership was too familiar. There was little new blood. All the ideas seemed to be springing from right wing think tanks and zealous religious groups.

In contrast the liberal side of discourse was dominated by a cacophony of disparate and retropsective interest groups whose leaders had stepped straight out of sixties campuses. It was too easy for the average voter to be pursuaded that the left wing had become dominated by extreme ‘isms’ of various kinds: the great causes had spawned an array of feminists, pacifists, anti-segregationists, anti-corporatists, environmentalists etc none of whom seemed to care much about the average Joe or Jane voter. And they all belonged to the Democratic Party. In contrast the Republicans appeared to be regular folks with a common touch.

People like Reagan and Bush, both elitist to the core, played to these contrasts. Nothing could possibly be more ironic than George W Bush presenting himself as a regular guy. Yet he did.

Now though the tide is changing once more. The Republicans are more easily seen as what they really are: divisive, class oriented, hypocritical, and war-mongering. There is a world of difference between being patriotic and being jingoistic. Between being for individual responsibility and being selfish. Between being respectful for religious beliefs and for proselytizing. Between building security and making war. The Republican right wing has carried their party way out of the center leaving a void yet to be filled.

I believe it can be filled by a renewed call for fairness. Not a fairness enforced by government: that was the sixties way. But a fairness balanced by government. There must be a renewed recognition that we are in this enterprise together which means that individual rights must be respected, but not at the cost of commonality and above all not at the cost of the weak. America was born out of liberal and tolerant sentiments and its constitution is a liberal document. It has been pursuaded recently by right wing ideologues that liberalism is somehow tainted, yet its very existence is a liberal triumph. As liberals we must re-awaken the voting public to the essential liberality that lies at the core of the country’s being: to walk away from liberalism is to walk away from the American ideal.

The tragedy of America today is that it stands on the precipice of abandoning its own reason for being. It is hurtling along a reactionary, intolerant, bellicose, uncaring, and class ridden trajectory. It is listless, leaderless, corruptly and incompentently led; and it is scared. The Democrats are at last realizing the enormity of the challenge ahead. And they are engaged in an internal discussion about how to retrieve the American ideal from the junk heap of Republican mismanagement. Liberal values like fairness are the lifeline America needs to grasp. We need to articulate the message quickly and forcibly, before the country is driven off the cliff. That is why the current debate is so healthy, and so urgent. It is surely newsworthy.

At last the New York Times recognizes that the debate is on. Perhaps now they will report the real choices America can make. Perhaps. Let’s see.