The Work Cut Out for Us (Page 2)

And so on, and on and on. Any nonrich, nonreligious person who has paid attention to politics since 1994, when the Goldwater/Gingrich Republicans took over Congress, and above all these past six years, has probably exhausted his or her capacity for indignation. The greed, the mendacity, the indifference, even hostility, to such notions as the common good or the public interest--the whole sorry record, reviewed in sickening detail by David Sirota and Mark Green, whose powerful books very much warrant their enraged titles and subtitles--have left many of us gasping.

We now have a bit of breathing space, thanks to the midterms. It's time to consider how the right got away with it and how to prevent it from happening again. The most useful of these books (along with Sirota's splendidly hard-hitting and extraordinarily well-documented Hostile Takeover) is Steven Hill's 10 Steps to Repair American Democracy. "To ponder the shortcomings of our political system is to court despondency," Hendrik Hertzberg observes in his foreword. The Electoral College, the Senate, the disenfranchisement of the District of Columbia, the two-party duopoly, the winner-take-all principle, partisan redistricting, 95 percent incumbent re-election rates, media concentration, Buckley v. Valeo, the K Street Project, voter turnout below 50 percent, shortages of voting machines and poll workers--this is a functioning democracy? If these travesties of logic and fairness promoted majority rule rather than prevented it, they would doubtless have been abolished long ago. Hill's recommendations, beginning with proportional representation and instant-runoff voting, invariably hit the mark, and each of them is accompanied by links to groups already on the case. Perhaps his most radical notion--as he says, it goes "to the very heart of our political system"--is that representation should no longer be based on geography. Because of partisan residential patterns, more and more election districts are noncompetitive even without gerrymandering. Tens of millions of votes in American elections don't really count; and, perhaps as a consequence, millions more are never cast. Making representation correspond to what voters think rather than where they live is now perfectly feasible, as Hill makes clear. When (if) the Democrats regain the electorate's trust, they should consider proposing that, procedurally speaking, the United States join the modern world.

Hill's book is a no-brainer--there's simply nothing in it to disagree with. Thomas Edsall's Building Red America is another matter. Edsall is a celebrated political reporter, formerly of the Washington Post, and the author of two influential studies: The New Politics of Inequality and (with his wife, Mary) Chain Reaction. His new book is a shrewd, well-documented analysis of conservative movement-building and Republican electoral strategy, particularly how they've exploited white male voters' resentment of the Democrats' association with affirmative action, feminism and gay rights. What will be, or deserves to be, controversial is his clinching chapter, "The Democrats: Two Sets of Problems--Ideological and Structural."

Thomas Frank, Jeff Faux and others have argued that the Democrats can become a majority party again by embracing economic populism. Edsall is not so sure. Populism, he points out, "requires a strong majority base of hard-working men and women who believe, with justification, that they are inadequately rewarded for their efforts, that they are personally demeaned, that they are deprived of their rights, and that their values are not honored by society." This, he claims, simply does not describe the contemporary Democratic Party's constituency. The party is an alliance of two groups, a "largely white, well-educated, professional class" and "the bottom third of the socioeconomic ladder made up of lowest-income whites, blacks, and Hispanics," fewer than half of whom are employed. The former group, who set the party's agenda, are cultural liberals. The latter are demoralized, disorganized and inarticulate. A party with this profile is an unlikely vehicle for an economic populist movement.

What's more, Edsall argues, populism is about other values besides economic fairness, as the right has demonstrated over and over again since the 1960s. To millions of voters, "traditional values of family, neighborhood, church, school, and the workplace are...'money in the bank'--they are what holds people together, providing security against a rainy day, making possible credit based on trust and familial cooperation in entrepreneurial endeavors...[they] give individuals the backing and the fortitude to meet their obligations and to fulfill their ambitions even in the face of setbacks. From this perspective, the liberal culture--the Democratic liberal culture--appears dangerous, encouraging social chaos, eroding kinship networks, and facilitating community breakdown. For many American voters--more than Democrats are willing to acknowledge--perceived social chaos is a strong political motivator."

Even the case for economic fairness is not a slam-dunk: "Core GOP ideology revolves around the virtues of competition, whereas the Democrats' core philosophy revolves around the virtues of cooperation. The virtues of cooperation have become increasingly hard to sell to the top half of the income distribution in a country as driven by consumption, the acquisition of resources and status, and the tradition of individualism as is the United States. This is even more true when the bottom half of the distribution is heavily minority and when the left coalition is committed to values frequently antagonistic to those of moderates and conservatives--attitudes toward the distribution of wealth, equality, the women's movement, codes of sexual conduct, religion, the business ethos, education, multiculturalism, and the rights of the unborn."

So what should progressive Democrats do? Wait for the rest of America to catch up with their enlightened sexual and multicultural attitudes, meanwhile losing elections? Or back off from affirmative action, gay marriage, unrestricted abortion and sexual harassment codes, settling for economic justice and counting on blacks, gays and feminists to recognize that Democrats' hearts are in the right place?

Edsall won't say. He's a reporter, he insists, not an advocate. But he does drop a hint: "When...Democrats look to see who in their party has won, especially in general election contests with large numbers of conservative voters, a relatively clear pattern emerges. The two Democrats who won the presidency since 1968...ran as moderates, each maintaining some independence from the traditionally liberal social agenda, both Southern Baptists supporting the death penalty, and both conveying certain cultural values through the cadence and rhetoric of southern vernacular."

In other words, fudge. (The technical expression is "triangulate.") Perhaps that's the responsible, realistic, savvy thing to do. Certainly most Democratic strategists, particularly around the Democratic Leadership Council, will agree. But in a democracy, if a large enough majority of citizens want economic populism plus cultural conservatism, isn't that what there ought to be? And if that's not what there is, then it's not much of a democracy, is it? What these truisms imply is that perhaps the right thing for progressives to do is not hire ever cleverer triangulators but, instead, first make sure American democracy works (for which, see 10 Steps to Repair American Democracy) and then get most Americans to agree with us.

• « Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• Next »

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 68 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.
• Reprint this article. Click here for rights and information.