What is to be done?

A survey from the Democratic National Committee asked me what the Democrats should do in the future. I gave the following answer:

We are facing crises in domestic policy that will hit the country big-time in the next decade. Three things in particular must be addressed: the federal budget, social security, and Medicare/Medicaid. We must be the party willing to address these issues head on. We must be the party with the courage to ask citizens to make sacrifices for the sake of our country and our children. In the past, neither party has done so. Mondale's experience, saying he would increase taxes, and G.H.W. Bush's loss after he did the same, are not encouraging for those who think that taxes should be increased. Yet the country will soon begin to feel the effects of the burgeoning deficits. The people will turn to the party that tells the truth about them and convinces the American people that it can both raise taxes and, in effect, reduce the benefits expected yet safeguard the future. If our party doesn't do this, it can expect not simply to lose elections, but to help increase the number of those disaffected from the political system. That can have unexpected, potentically disastrous results.

I have in mind a cold-eyed examination of the costs and benefits of the current system designed to provide us security in our old age. I doubt, in truth, that either party can provide one. Nor do I believe that either party has the courage to propose the policies that we make the sacrifices that we will have to make. The truth is, however, that we will either make some sacrifices now, or our country will make them, compounded, in a generation.

Missing the Dialectic

In today's Washington Post, Tom Boswell, one of its sports columnist , wrote:

As soon as we lose respect for the complexity of other people, it's suddenly easy to dehumanize them. That's how polarization, which may be the poison of the age, sinks its first roots. [...] Above all else, your foe is a person like you so you treat him as you would wish to be treated yourself. There's some "rule" along those lines. But it's easy to forget.

Indeed, it was evident in the recent campaign and, indeed, in most political commentary in recent years, that this poison has become ubiquitous. Not only people, but ideas are viewed in the simplest terms. That was part of Kerry's problem, certainly. Consulting with the UN became, for example, in the hands of Republican propagandists and the minds of voters opposed to him, simply handing our foreign policy over to the French and the rest of the Security Council. But the Democrats did the same thing, as FactCheck.org and SpinSanity.com made clear. Democratic voters were no less simplistic in their view of Republican positions than their Republican cousins. (And both sides got issues affecting the Federal budget grievously wrong; more about that later--in the meantime, see Peter G. Peterson, Running On Empty: How The Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It [New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004]).

The truth is, that there is virtue on both sides, in both the people and the ideas they expound. Politics in a democracy is a dialectic, where any outcome, in elections, in policy, combines elements from all sides. A monistic democracy, where outcomes are the pure incarnation of one side or the other, cannot last.

What Now for the Democrats?

This year’s defeat was devastating for the Democrats. It made it clearer than it has ever been that there is no clear path to victory for the minority party. It is much like the position the Republicans found themselves in from 1932 until about 1980, when the Roosevelt coalition dominated American politics.

It is a party out of touch with much of the country. It is not a party that evangelical Christians can be comfortable in, and with which much of America seems uncomfortable. In the eyes of much of America, it seems, it is the party of the rich, of the social avant garde, of California at its most flaky, of New England at its snobbiest.

I must confess to share its bewilderment.

But who do the Democrats attract? As for much of the 20^th Century, the party of the new century attracts those who are out of the white, Protestant mainstream. In some respects, this was less true in this election. While the Democrats maintained their majorities among Hispanics and Jews, more in both groups voted Republican this time. Catholics, once resolutely Democratic, are now firmly Republican. On the other hand, blacks remain a solid part of the Democratic base. Gays, of course, are a newer element in that base. The unions, still a bulwark of Democratic strength, are a much weaker force than they were two and more decades ago.

Paul Krugman, writing in The New York Times, was right that there are elements of the Republican’s coalition that the Democrats cannot attract and should not try to. Democrats will never be the pro-life party, nor can they ever prove themselves more anti-gay than the Republicans.

So who are the Democrats?