Horizon

From where I sit, this seems obvious: which strategy is more likely to get my vote? The problem with my analysis is that as a moderate, it's in my interest to encourage either party to move to the center...

But, Ben, while I do value you as a friend, I actually don't see why the Democratic Party should want your vote or try to get it. You're a Republican.

You're a Republican.

Guess again. I voted straight-ticket Democrat in 2004, and (as you know) for Nader in 2000.

But, Ben, while I do value you as a friend, I actually don't see why the Democratic Party should want your vote or try to get it. You're a Republican.

This implies that Republicans are fungible, which is demonstrably untrue.

This bunch sends me off to my dictionary more than most. Care to explain your use of fungible in this sense, Alan?

Though I belive Martha's point doesn't apply to me, her larger point stands. It makes little sense for Democrats to shift their policy enough to attract Rove or Limbaugh -- amounting to a complete capitulation. What's frustrating is to see Democrats conflate moderates or swing voters with Republican hard-liners and give up on the lot.

Care to explain your use of fungible in this sense, Alan?

"Of such a kind or nature that one specimen or part may be used in place of another specimen or equal part in the satisfaction of an obligation --- used of things that can be counted, weighed, or measured and are consumed or alienated by use (as food, coal, oil, lumber)." Or, more coloquially, capable of mutual substitution - interchangeable. If Republicans were fungible then (one assumes) their personalities and principles would be identical, which strikes me as self-evidently absurd.

Hey, it's not as if the hard right doesn't do the same thing, and far more effectively, it seems to me. In fact, the US News article in particular struck me as taking far too much for granted about Democrats, following a lot of the recent rhetoric which identifies the democratic party as a whole with its more radical end.

To my mind, this whole issue illustrates the dangers of a two party system, though it seems almost pointless to mention it.

Hey, it's not as if the hard right doesn't do the same thing

Which thing? The absolutism that regards anyone who isn't a rabid supporter of Cause X as an opponent, or the willingness to present a more moderate face? It seems to me that the Republicans managed to get their extreme wing to keep their mouths shut after '98, largely by convincing them that it was to their benefit not to turn off moderates. Part of this may be due to better party discipline, part may be due to a different role the radical part of the core plays within the party.

Hm: you do vote Democratic? Apologies for the false assumption -- but now I'm even more mystified.

Hm: you do vote Democratic?

I do indeed, at least when it seems warranted. Last year was a special case, as I usually view straight-ticket voting as an abdication of civic duty, but I don't know of an election in which my ballot hasn't contained at least one check in a Democratic candidate's box.

Obviously, someone with strong opinions on both sides of the fence will face a delimma in the ballot box, and I have yet to cast a vote without a sense of dread at the compromise I'm making. Part of the reason I follow the Democratic soul-searching so closely is that it seems like any centrism gives me better chance for voting without such a sense of foreboding.

At any rate, the fact that I have been persuaded in the past is what makes the Democratic activist arguments that "we shouldn't bother persuading people who are just going to vote Republican anyway" so infuriating. But as I said, qui bono discredits me.

I'm even more mystified.

About?

Hey, it's not as if the hard right doesn't do the same thing

My pork butcher might do the same thing; that hardly makes it right, does it?

I'm mystified by a political situation in which Ben and I can hold down opposite ends of a fairly broad political spectrum in one conversation after another and yet have voted for the same people in the national elections. Seems to me it's a further indicator that the Democratic Party is already trying to include too many divergent political positions, to a point in fact that makes it difficult for the Democrats to form a national platform that is at all specific about anything.

My pork butcher might do the same thing; that hardly makes it right, does it?

Is that the only reason you can imagine I might point this out?

I'm mystified by a political situation in which Ben and I can hold down opposite ends of a fairly broad political spectrum in one conversation after another and yet have voted for the same people in the national elections.

I think that suggests that voting decisions are, well, complicated: indeed, I think too much stress on policy misses the point about elections entirely, because relatively few people hold conscious and coherent political positions on anything much (Louis Menand wrote a devastating, and as far as I could see unassailable, piece about this in the New Yorker a little while back). The first step in understanding the behavior of the bulk of voters, Democrat as well as Republican, is to accept that they're not like you at all.

I'm mystified by a political situation in which Ben and I can hold down opposite ends of a fairly broad political spectrum in one conversation after another and yet have voted for the same people in the national elections.

I see a couple of possible explanations for this. The first is that you and I each had to make serious compromises when we cast our ballot, but that they were compromises in opposite directions — i.e. I wished the candidate were further right, you wished they were further left.

The second explanation is a bit more interesting. Although you and I have disagreed about all sorts of things, I cannot remember any time we've disagreed on the substance of an issue. We've argued about symbolism, ideals, language, aesthetics and all sorts of other generalities, but rarely over the specifics. In other words, even though I doubt the phrase "redistribution of wealth" gives you the same screaming heebie-jeebies it does me, we're both (probably) opposed to abolishing the estate tax.

I tend to think this sort of thing has implications for a party looking for a majority, and was heartened by Dean's pickup truck comment as it seemed to be getting at exactly that.

In July 2004, the Pew Center reported 33% of voters identified themselves as Democrat, and 29% as Republican, numbers roughly consistent since the mid-eighties. In the 2004 exit polls the parties broke even at 37-37. So for a significant segment of the electorate, party identity means nothing. Hence, the apparent need to appeal to the mainstream, to rule from the center.

The problem, I think, is that this center doesn’t actually exist. And if it does, it’s this mushy place that defies being handled and understood. I don’t see how one creates policy based on the politics of frankly-I-feel-strongly-both-ways.

As that New Yorker piece points out, a huge chunk of the electorate does not vote on issues. It votes on how it feels. I’m guessing that is what we mistakenly call the center, that mass of electoral goo that cast ballots with its guts.

Welcome back, Bobby!

I have no doubt that the sort of swing voter who makes decisions based on the weather exists, and outnumbers folks like me. Menand's piece is depressing, but pretty good. But I have a lot of trouble with Bobby's notion that "this center doesn't actually exist", or as Menand puts it:

Converse thought that they basically don’t know what they’re talking about, and that their beliefs are characterized by what he termed a lack of “constraint”: they can’t see how one opinion (that taxes should be lower, for example) logically ought to rule out other opinions (such as the belief that there should be more government programs).

I'll buy that when someone shows me how repealing the Assault Weapons Ban is inextricably linked to repealing the Estate Tax, and convinces me that opposition to one effort necessitates opposition to the other.

The notion that those of us who do not see a neat mapping between every plank on one party's platform and our own views are wishy-washy or incoherent is not only insulting, it also entirely ignores voters like pro-life Catholics who are opposed to both capital punishment and abortion, or libertarians, or Thomas Frank's Kansans.

Menand writes, "To an undecided voter, on the other hand, the person who always votes for the Democrat or the Republican, no matter what, must seem like a dangerous fanatic." That has sometimes been my opinion, but generally I view party voters with a sense of jealousy. How incredibly convenient it must be to have a candidate who agrees with you on everything! The world must appear very black-and-white for them.

Hey, Mr. Ben -- just wanted to pop in for a second while slacking at work... As one of the above-referenced lefty Dems, I'm wondering if maybe your time up there in Austin hasn't left you with kind of a skewed picture of the left side of the party -- I promise we're not all as doctrinaire as all that, honest, and some of us, myself included, do think that compromise with those to the right of us is necessary.

The problem, from where I'm sitting, is that folks with views like mine seem to continually be compromised out of the picture. It's the weirdest thing -- we get tagged as being "radical," even in articles like Barone's (as Alan Hogue mentioned above), and yet nothing we actually do as a party comes anywhere close. The misperception sticks, and that then provides fodder for pieces like "The Politics of Polarization."

Really, when you get down to it, what has the far left side of the Democratic Party managed to accomplish? Sadly, not much. We'll be in Iraq 'til the Republicans decide it's politically necessary to advocate a withdrawal (and I think they will, eventually, because they seem better at going whichever way the wind blows and making it seem like they were headed that way all along), the Bush tax cuts are still firmly in place, we now have NAFTA and CAFTA, with a possible Mideast agreement on the way, the Pentagon budget's insanely high, we still execute people, and I don't see a glimmer of universal-coverage healthcare lurking on the horizon. We were only able to get the Senate to agree that torture was bad because senior Repubs like John McCain fought for it. At this point, we're lucky to still have reproductive rights intact, at least in law...

Pretty much all of the long-range goals of the left are still pending. And it's not the fault of the Republicans -- only a handful of Democrats in Congress are willing to consider stances like the above, much less fight for them. They're not even a part of the national platform...and yet the left edge of the party is somehow making the Democrats too "radical"? How on earth are liberals the "largest bloc" of the party, and yet we can't actually push forward a comprehensive fight for equal rights for gay people within our own house? Why can't us war-hating liberals -- who, according to Galston and Kamarck, are also the "public face of the party" -- get our Congresspeople to line up and demand that the U.S. get out of Iraq by the end of next month? Beyond that, if liberals are the dominating force in the party, how did we end up with Kerry and not Dean, Kucinich, Sharpton, or even Edwards as our 2004 candidate? Did we just not bother to exercise our supposedly-massive voting power during the '04 primaries? Were re-runs of Will & Grace on UPN that night or something?

"Politics of Polarization" strikes me as being very close to all the DLC harrumphing I heard back during the '04 primaries. Just as Dean's popularity seemed to be at an all-time high, when he seemed like a decent, straight-talking candidate who wasn't afraid of the opposition and had tapped into some serious discontent, out came the DLC crew to snipe at him and other candidates as being too far from the center to win, although they had zero proof to back it up. They're tarring the majority of the Democratic Party as being "too liberal," just like O'Reilly and his cohorts routinely do, while the Democrats we elect seem a lot closer to the center or even the right (on defense issues, in particular). The Galston/Kamarck paper seems to be setting up the left side of the Democratic Party as a straw man for all its failures, when it's the centrists who still hold the reins (okay, Howard Dean excepted).

And really, I'm not so sure the DLC and allied centrists like these guys have done such a hot job. They lost Congress in '94 and beyond, lost the 2000 elections, and didn't help to pick up any lost ground in '02 -- I read one piece (can't remember where, unfortunately) that described them as "professional losers," and the tag seems awfully appropriate. The DLC came into power in the '90s for one reason: Bill Clinton. I didn't agree with everything the guy did, but he had charisma, he was intelligent, and he could talk like a down-to-earth human being. One of the things that bugs me about the DLC is that it always makes it sound like the centrists in the Democratic Party were responsible for the Clinton years, when they weren't; Clinton was.

I'm digressing a bit. At the end of the day, I don't think the problem with the Democrats is that we're "polarized," with the left pulling away from the moderates. Granted, that may be the case in Austin, but hey, that's Austin -- they're wacky that way. The problem, I think, is actually one of marketing. The Republicans out-market the Democrats every single time. Why? In part, it's because our politicians are so afraid of upsetting those oh-so-fickle swing voters that they avoid saying or doing anything. That's how we got to where we are today, as a party. We're stuck between doing things we actually believe in and this fear that nobody'll like us once we do them.

I actually heard an interview with Democratic Senate contender Barbara Radnofsky back in January or so where somebody asked her what her stance was on a particular issue and she said that she didn't know yet, because she was still "exploring" what the voters wanted. She's a nice lady and all, but frankly, that strikes me as nuts. From what she said, she either doesn't know what she thinks, because the voters need to tell her what to think, or she's scared that what she actually thinks will turn people off, so she's going to ignore her own beliefs in favor of some kind of mass consensus. Is that how this is supposed to work, with our politicians being empty vessels to be filled with the averaged-out ideas and thoughts of their constituents? Unfortunately, that seems to pretty much sum up the political will of the Democratic Party these days. Contrast that to the GOP, where they're electing people like Sam Brownback or Rick Santorum -- they didn't get to office by promising to be everything to every voter, but instead by promising to uphold their own personal beliefs, which happened to dovetail with what their constituents wanted.

While I tend to think those people are lunatics, it's true, I have to admit a grudging respect for that. They believe for what they believe in, and if people agree, they vote for them. Why can't we do the same? Why can't we believe what we believe, even if it's something "radical" like universal healthcare or rolling back NAFTA? Even to me, as somebody who tends to pay attention to politics as best I can, our party leadership doesn't seem to believe in anything but getting Democrats elected or re-elected; what does that say to swing voters? It plays into the Republican frame of Dems as wishy-washy, as flip-floppers, and as corrupt autocrats. It's not going to change until we start taking stances distinct from the center-right that Congress has shifted to, and that's going to involve risking alienating people. I'd like to see more candidates and politicians be up-front about what they think and not back down or apologize, even when the criticism comes from within (since you mentioned Dean and the pickup truck...). When was the last time you saw a Democratic candidate get up and say "This is what I think on that issue. You're absolutely entitled to disagree with me, but this is something I believe in. If you're okay with that, vote for me; if you're not, don't"?

Galston and Kamarck pooh-pooh George Lakoff, I know, but I think they're missing the point: Lakoff's not strictly about language, but about making sure that your message and not the other guy's is at the center of the debate. What's the Democratic message right now? Do we have one? It's sad that I, as a Democrat, can list off the GOP's supposed precepts -- smaller government, less taxes, freer markets, stronger defense -- but I get all tongue-tied when asked to do the same for my own party. What Lakoff argues isn't that we need to prettify our language, but that we need to solidify the ideas and then present them better and more forcefully. Again, it's marketing. We have good, solid ideas, but we're godawful salesmen.

Okay, I've rambled for long enough (and I'm not even sure I got to the point of your question). I think, though, that both "Politics of Polarization" and Michael Barone's article need to be taken with several large grains of salt, especially since the underlying assumption it works from is that liberals are in charge of the Democratic Party. We ain't.

And for Mr. Barone's insinuation that "too liberal" Democrats somehow don't think America's a great country? Please. I love this country; it's my home. Just because I love it, however, doesn't mean I can't recognize that there are things I'd like to change -- I love the house I live in, too, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't bug the crap out of me when my A/C unit runs badly or the paint in the bathroom starts to peel. Barone's parroting the Republican "love it or leave it" line, and that discredits him right there, in my book. Personally, I much prefer the view outlined by comedian David Cross: Republicans love America like a child loves their mommy, and therefore nobody can say anything bad about mommy, because mommy's the best in the whole wide world; Democrats, on the other hand, love America like an adult loves their mother, where they care deeply about and admire her but can still recognize that not even parents are perfect or above criticism.

Wow. Man...that was even more long-winded than I thought it'd be. Sorry about that, folks.

Ben, what I mean by the center not existing is that it is so fluid and comprised of such differing elements that we can’t define it. I don’t think it’s a matter of it being wishy-washy (although I did suggest that) or being populated by boobs.

I wonder if some of us who believe we occupy moderate/centrist positions aren’t really outsiders. Opposing the repeal of the assault weapons ban while supporting the estate tax doesn’t make one a moderate – it simply means one doesn’t fit the political mold. I am pro-choice, but don’t support minors getting abortions without parental consent; I believe in free trade, but think industry should be heavily regulated. To my mind, these aren’t centrist positions; they seem more to me to be contradictory outsider positions. And if people like me (and you) are the constituents of the center, then I think the center is pretty meaningless as a political entity.

Then there’s luck. In April 2003, support for the war was the center position; today it’s not. At inauguration, Bush had an approval rating of 57%. At last look, I think it was 38%. I don’t see that Bush’s performance has changed one way or the other; but the mainstream view is that it’s gotten worse. It’s the mainstream that’s changed.