Weakness and Alito.
Kos has a really good post up on the Democrats' weakness and its (electoral) solution. The thing is that the weakness is not an illusion indulged by weak-willed Dems. It's not the manifestation of some inate spinelessness that infects people who choose to run for legislative posts under the Dem banner. The Dems look weak and act weak because they are weak, and frustrated by it. They're weak because they are a (by American standards) liberal party trying to make it in a country in which the electoral and governing process is oriented toward conservatives. And because they haven't yet figured out how to use their historially unprecedented levels of ideoligcal cohesiveness (and relatively low levels of overt self-hating, something for which Reid and Pelosi should be thanked) to dominate an election season on their own merits.
It's all come out in the Alito business. It was probably smart for Kennedy and Kerry to wait until near the vote (scheduled Monday; update: Tuesday) to make their open push for the filibuster, but the fact that waiting so long was smart just gets at the heart of the problem. What was missing was the less overt, longer-run push for the basic idea that the Dems might choose to filibuster as something more than a response to "the call of liberal interest groups" for grand symbolic gestures (as TNR put it). Instead, the Party essentially waited for the New York Times' editors to lay the groundwork for them. In the meantime, we've witnessed a lot of the weird passive-aggressiveness that the Dems always bring to these sorts of definitive moments, with lots of reports of grumbling "discontent" on the Senate floor, speculation on what Harry Reid really thinks, and Senators speculating or opining on television about whether a filibuster would be a good idea.
The problem isn't that there is disagreement over what to do, or how much of a commitment to make to moderate liberalism; the Dems would have blocked Alito in committee had they had the numbers to do so, no fuss, no muss. The problem is that once Alito made it to the floor and the story went public, the Dems found themselves fighting a battle they knew they were doomed to lose but still had to fight. They couldn't make the public noises and feed the media line that they're decisive, that they're fundamentally oriented toward some ideological-judicial-theory pole, that somebody's in charge of choosing what stands to make. They can't do that because they're still scared -- and probably rightly so -- of what the electoral consquences of a minority liberal stand will be in a conservative country, against a far-more-confident opposing rightwing (not to be confused with conservative) ideology. And probably they also worry -- as I do -- about what it would be like to lose yet another couple of Senate seats in 2006.
That's a big problem. I get spoiled following Canadian politics, from my Party's leadership making shrill, decisive, ideologically confident rhetorical commitments to liberal ideology, even in a losing cause -- the Liberals campaigned as if what they actually believe about civil society was the only thing that could save them. The Dems are just the opposite: a party that figures that what its members really believe is its biggest liability. A liberal party that doesn't believe in liberalism -- not just on the merits but also on the ground -- is going to face an uphill battle, the sort of long-run uphill battle we've been seeing for the last decade in the US.
Update: Akaka of Hawaii has come out against the filibuster. Even if Salazer is still on the fence, that makes cloture.
It's all come out in the Alito business. It was probably smart for Kennedy and Kerry to wait until near the vote (scheduled Monday; update: Tuesday) to make their open push for the filibuster, but the fact that waiting so long was smart just gets at the heart of the problem. What was missing was the less overt, longer-run push for the basic idea that the Dems might choose to filibuster as something more than a response to "the call of liberal interest groups" for grand symbolic gestures (as TNR put it). Instead, the Party essentially waited for the New York Times' editors to lay the groundwork for them. In the meantime, we've witnessed a lot of the weird passive-aggressiveness that the Dems always bring to these sorts of definitive moments, with lots of reports of grumbling "discontent" on the Senate floor, speculation on what Harry Reid really thinks, and Senators speculating or opining on television about whether a filibuster would be a good idea.
The problem isn't that there is disagreement over what to do, or how much of a commitment to make to moderate liberalism; the Dems would have blocked Alito in committee had they had the numbers to do so, no fuss, no muss. The problem is that once Alito made it to the floor and the story went public, the Dems found themselves fighting a battle they knew they were doomed to lose but still had to fight. They couldn't make the public noises and feed the media line that they're decisive, that they're fundamentally oriented toward some ideological-judicial-theory pole, that somebody's in charge of choosing what stands to make. They can't do that because they're still scared -- and probably rightly so -- of what the electoral consquences of a minority liberal stand will be in a conservative country, against a far-more-confident opposing rightwing (not to be confused with conservative) ideology. And probably they also worry -- as I do -- about what it would be like to lose yet another couple of Senate seats in 2006.
That's a big problem. I get spoiled following Canadian politics, from my Party's leadership making shrill, decisive, ideologically confident rhetorical commitments to liberal ideology, even in a losing cause -- the Liberals campaigned as if what they actually believe about civil society was the only thing that could save them. The Dems are just the opposite: a party that figures that what its members really believe is its biggest liability. A liberal party that doesn't believe in liberalism -- not just on the merits but also on the ground -- is going to face an uphill battle, the sort of long-run uphill battle we've been seeing for the last decade in the US.
Update: Akaka of Hawaii has come out against the filibuster. Even if Salazer is still on the fence, that makes cloture.
2 Comments:
LWC,
Spot on analysis regarding the Democratic weakness in Congress. However, I wouldn't call the Dems a liberal party; they are a left-of-center coalition, as the Reps are a right-of-center coalition. I suppose that's our price for only having two dominant parties; much of our government building is internal to the parties.
While they are politically weak due to numbers, though, you are giving them too much of a free pass on campaign weakness. The popular image is that Dems are punching bags during campaigns, and there is evidence that too many don't know how to 'bare-knuckle brawl' with the right. People want someone who will fight, argue, and generally act like they believe in their cause.
On the issue of whether liberal policies are a vote loser at election time, I can only say: Who knows? It hasn't been tried in my adult life, and I'm pushing 40. Lyndon Johnson was certainly liberal, as was McGovern in 1972. McGovern's loss was blamed (I think incorrectly) on his supposedly extreme liberalism instead of on his campaign's egregious errors and Nixon's dirty tricks team. Since then, the Dems have bought into the conventional wisdom that an 'extreme' platform is a loser. Well, the Reps have proven THAT cannard wrong; clearly right-wing extremes can win. Why NOT put out a platform that marks clear differences, that is not ashamed to be the working class' party?
nightshift -- you're right. Thanks. "they are a left-of-center coalition, as the Reps are a right-of-center coalition" is exactly the right way to describe it.
I guess I argue other places and in general that the parties are less like coaltions than they used to be, that they're actually becoming much more like parties (like parliamentary parties) as time goes on. With the end of Republican moderation and of the Dixiecrats; you can see it in the ADA ratings, for instance, and the gradual pealing off of mods of both sides in Congress.
I'm not sure I think liberalism is a vote-loser (though I would have described Kerry as quite liberal, despite his rhetoric, and I think that perception cost him, and perhaps also Mondale, though his was a fairly strict interest-group liberalism as I understand it.) In 2000, on the exit polls, 43% (!) of voters responded to the question about ideology that Gore -- who is not liberal -- was "too liberal" for them. What people think when they say "liberal" though is debatable.
I also think much of the Dems' "abandonment" of the working class is actually pretty sincere. The Atari Dems and Clinton Dems certainly believed in free trade and probably bought into the post-union New Economy talk, at least to some extent. I guess one of my points is that, on a lot of issues, liberals confuse general "conwardice" with the fact that the party actually disagrees with them on what works, both as politics and policy. For instance, when the Canadian Liberals ran an election on a liberal roar, it wasn't because they had more guts, but because up here we really think liberalism works as a campaign strategy.
On the other hand, I do think the Dems' basic refusal to defend government, defend regulation and taxation and public life/ public goods in general is I think a big problem for the party, because it allows all those concepts to erode in the popular conciousness over time.
Thanks for the comment.
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