Let's say you were trying to wean someone from their support of the DLC. Let's say that this person reads Bill Bradley's op-ed in the NYTimes and decides that building left-wing institutions is a great idea. Let's say that this person sends the article to Al From at the DLC. Let's say Al From replies by sending him Mickey Kaus' DLC-centric rebuttal. Let's say this person asks you what's right, and that they might communicate what you say to Al From?
How would you go about critiquing the DLC in a calm tone, in a way that doesn't make them close their ears to you immediately?
Because I'm trying to do just that. And I need your help in crafting an explanation & response. The articles and my responses are below...
The Bill Bradley op-ed, "A Party Inverted," lays out a plan to build Dem idea-incubators, message-distributors, and cultivate leadership:
FIVE months after the presidential election Democrats are still pointing fingers at one another and trying to figure out why Republicans won. Was the problem the party's position on social issues or taxes or defense or what? Were there tactical errors made in the conduct of the campaign? Were the right advisers heard? Was the candidate flawed?
Before deciding what Democrats should do now, it's important to see what Republicans have done right over many years. When the Goldwater Republicans lost in 1964, they didn't try to become Democrats. They tried to figure out how to make their own ideas more appealing to the voters. As part of this effort, they turned to Lewis Powell, then a corporate lawyer and soon to become a member of the United States Supreme Court. In 1971, he wrote a landmark memo for the United States Chamber of Commerce in which he advocated a sweeping, coordinated and long-term effort to spread conservative ideas on college campuses, in academic journals and in the news media.
To further the party's ideological and political goals, Republicans in the 1970's and 1980's built a comprehensive structure based on Powell's blueprint. Visualize that structure as a pyramid.
You've probably heard some of this before, but let me run through it again. Big individual donors and large foundations -- the Scaife family and Olin foundations, for instance -- form the base of the pyramid. They finance conservative research centers like the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, entities that make up the second level of the pyramid.
The ideas these organizations develop are then pushed up to the third level of the pyramid -- the political level. There, strategists like Karl Rove or Ralph Reed or Ken Mehlman take these new ideas and, through polling, focus groups and careful attention to Democratic attacks, convert them into language that will appeal to the broadest electorate. That language is sometimes in the form of an assault on Democrats and at other times in the form of advocacy for a new policy position. The development process can take years. And then there's the fourth level of the pyramid: the partisan news media. Conservative commentators and networks spread these finely honed ideas.
At the very top of the pyramid you'll find the president. Because the pyramid is stable, all you have to do is put a different top on it and it works fine.
It is not quite the ''right wing conspiracy'' that Hillary Clinton described, but it is an impressive organization built consciously, carefully and single-mindedly. The Ann Coulters and Grover Norquists don't want to be candidates for anything or cabinet officers for anyone. They know their roles and execute them because they're paid well and believe, I think, in what they're saying.
True, there's lots of money involved, but the money makes a difference because it goes toward reinforcing a structure that is already stable.
To understand how the Democratic Party works, invert the pyramid. Imagine a pyramid balancing precariously on its point, which is the presidential candidate.
Democrats who run for president have to build their own pyramids all by themselves. There is no coherent, larger structure that they can rely on. Unlike Republicans, they don't simply have to assemble a campaign apparatus -- they have to formulate ideas and a vision, too. Many Democratic fund-raisers join a campaign only after assessing how well it has done in assembling its pyramid of political, media and idea people.
There is no clearly identifiable funding base for Democratic policy organizations, and in the frantic campaign rush there is no time for patient, long-term development of new ideas or of new ways to sell old ideas. Campaigns don't start thinking about a Democratic brand until halfway through the election year, by which time winning the daily news cycle takes precedence over building a consistent message. The closest that Democrats get to a brand is a catchy slogan.
Democrats choose this approach, I believe, because we are still hypnotized by Jack Kennedy, and the promise of a charismatic leader who can change America by the strength and style of his personality. The trouble is that every four years the party splits and rallies around several different individuals at once. Opponents in the primaries then exaggerate their differences and leave the public confused about what Democrats believe.
In such a system, tactics trump strategy. Candidates don't risk talking about big ideas because the ideas have never been sufficiently tested. Instead they usually wind up arguing about minor issues and express few deep convictions. In the worst case, they embrace ''Republican lite'' platforms -- never realizing that in doing so they're allowing the Republicans to define the terms of the debate.
A party based on charisma has no long-term impact. Think of our last charismatic leader, Bill Clinton. He was president for eight years. He was the first Democrat to be re-elected since Franklin Roosevelt. He was smart, skilled and possessed great energy. But what happened? At the end of his tenure in the most powerful office in the world, there were fewer Democratic governors, fewer Democratic senators, members of Congress and state legislators, and a national party that was deep in debt. The president did well. The party did not. Charisma didn't translate into structure.
If Democrats are serious about preparing for the next election or the next election after that, some influential Democrats will have to resist entrusting their dreams to individual candidates and instead make a commitment to build a stable pyramid from the base up. It will take at least a decade's commitment, and it won't come cheap. But there really is no other choice.
The response by Mickey Kaus rebuts it by saying that the key is drop core constituencies:
It's a small pyramid, but perfectly formed: Bill Bradley's recent NYT op-ed was so well-constructed my immediate thought, like The Note's, was that he couldn't possibly have written it himself. But his prescription was all too familiar and, yes, a recipe for disaster! Bradley wants the Democrats to emulate Republicans and generate ideas from a stable, pyramid-like institutional base--with "Democratic policy organizations" engaged in the "patient, long term development of new ideas or of new ways to sell old ideas." Just plug in a candidate at the top of this institutional pyrmaid and ... victory!
The problem, of course, is that the Democratic party's most stable institutional elements are also its most problematic elements: 1) unions; 2) the civil rights and Latino lobbies; 3) the senior lobby (AARP); 4) institutional feminists (NOW); 5) trial lawyers; 6) Iowa-caucus style "progressives;" and 7) Hollywood emoters. If a national problem could be solved without trampling on the interests of this institutional base, Democrats would have solved it in the decades when they were in power. What's left are the problems that can't be solved--even solved in accordance with liberal principles--without trampling on these liberal interest groups: competitiveness, for example, or public education, or entitlement reform. If the Dems' permanent institutional base is what gets to "develop" and "hone" the ideas to be adopted by the party's presidential nominee, then the Democrats will in perpetuity be the party of union work rules, lousy teachers, mediocre schools, protectionism, racial preferences, unafforadable entitlements, amnesty for illegals and offensive rap lyrics! That winning collection gets you, what, 35%?
Currently, the Democrats' only hope is that once every four years a maverick candidate will come along who tells the party's permanent institutional base to shove it and actually fashion an appealing platform. The party's post-Vietnam presidential winners--Carter and Clinton--both fit this pattern. Bradley seems to regard Clinton's success as a failure because it wasn't replicated. But it wasn't replicated because people like Bradley sneered at it, and played instead to the party's reliable, pyramid-like base. ...Over the long run, of course, the Democrats' institutional problem may at least partly solve itself as the role of unions in the private economy asymptotically approaches zero. ... P.S.: Bush's problems selling his Social Security plan suggest that not everything generated by a mighty idea-honing institutional GOP pyramid succeeds. Crazy thought: Maybe the substance of ideas, and not the mechanism that produces them, is what counts.
Now, this is what I've written so far. Please comment on what is missing, what is inaccurate, what should be emphasized, etc. Because not only will this person read my response, but he may also pass it on. (Also, please pass this link on to others who would contribute well to the conversation. I'm afraid that my entry will scroll to the bottom of "Recent Diaries" rather quickly and be forgotten, and I'm looking for participation.)
I have a lot to say about your exchange with Al From and the articles by Bradley and Kaus--especially since I've been keeping up pretty regularly with a lot of online discussions about the Democratic party...
I think that the battle for the DNC Chairmanship illustrated what I feel is the main deficiency of the DLC. Al From sees the divide in the party as a substance issue--leftist vs. centrist--and that's the battle he fought over the DNC Chair (on the centrist side) in quite uncertain terms. But a lot of people not on K Street--specifically the netroots, the dedicated party activists coming in from the grassroots across the internet--see the divide in the party as a structural issue--reform vs. status quo. I believe that this is truly the discussion the Democrats need to have--indeed, are beginning to have, as evidenced by Dean winning the DNC Chair by a landslide--and it is precisely because the DLC continues to believe in the left vs. center divide that it is becoming less relevant.
The Bradley article says a lot of what the party reformers across the board are saying. There is a lot of frustration with the poor quality or outright lack of structured policy and message formulation in the Democratic Party. For example, Democrats as a party have not honestly put together a compelling platform for national security issues, going by ad-hoc poll-influenced positions rather than a cohesive set of principles and programs--which ends up contributing to intraparty chaos and the awful stereotype of Democrats as having no principles and/or being weak on security. (I'm not saying that Dems should start supporting war; I'm saying that there's not been a serious policy forumlation and messaging.) During Kerry's campaign, there was an attempt to remessage "family values" as being pro-worker, pro-safety net--a good attempt, but it didn't work because the Dems just didn't have the message cohesion and distribution that Bradley talks about. It never caught on. The terms of debate have been well-crafted by a Republican policy and message machine--"death tax" being the prime example among many I could list, wherein Republicans took an old idea and got traction for it through structured effort to reshape the argument. Conservatives have not changed substance for over thirty years--during that time, they went to work to build an infrastructure.
The problem with the DLC is that it is increasingly seen as an intraparty bomb-thrower at a time when Democrats' only remaining power is unity, and also when the Democrats are trying to articulate their core principles. The DLC gives the impression that it believes the core ideas are just plain wrong. The Kaus article that From sent you says:
"If the Dems' permanent institutional base is what gets to "develop" and "hone" the ideas to be adopted by the party's presidential nominee, then the Democrats will in perpetuity be the party of union work rules, lousy teachers, mediocre schools, protectionism, racial preferences, unafforadable entitlements, amnesty for illegals and offensive rap lyrics!"
Doesn't this strike you as entirely off base--and moreover, doing the GOP's dirty work for them? First of all, there are many Dem proposals out there that are trying to address all theses issues, for example making entitlements affordable (see healthcare and risk-shifting, or simply not raiding the Social Security trust fund and leaving massive debt). A big obstacle is that the network of think-tanks and leadership training and message-honing and media outlets doesn't exist to work on these proposals in concerted ways that make them both cohesive in principles and appealing message-wise.
Moreover, this characterization of the Democratic party is crass and full of pejorative connotations, if not just plain wrong. I haven't heard of Dems asking for amnesty for illegal immigrants. Union work rules? This seems like a deliberate mischaracterization of other efforts, such as fighting for paid overtime (see recent overtime legislation, as well as recent WalMart and other business investigations)? And if you want examples of protectionism, I would direct you to Bush's enacting of steel tarriffs and continuing Republican insistence on agricultural subsidies. And the jibe about offensive rap lyrics--that should be a red-flag that this is a wild-eyed screed; what the hell does that have to do with the party???
To be honest, a lot of Democrats are truly seeking to throw off institutional drag of old-guard methods and ideas. But they are not trying to jettison unions or civil rights lobbies. Rather, they know the key is to reformulate their policies and messages for a changing world while remaining true to core principles (see for example Senator Obama). For example, there is beginning to be a shift from pro-choice to pro-choice + prevention, wherein Dems are coupling their stance on abortion with sex education and prevention measures--due to the perception that Dems have been unconcerned with abortion in favor of a hardline feminist agenda. Likewise, look at recent victories in Montana and Colorado where Dems in traditionally Republican areas have had lots of victory with a "midwestern" strategy--straight-talking Dems that rework structure while remaining on principle, all with a dash of libertarianism (for example, gaining the support of hunters (i.e. gun) groups for environmental preservation). Principles aren't what's changing: it's style and structure.
The fact is, the DLC believes that the principles need to change, and its proposed solutions are seen to be largely business-friendly and consciously, actively against the Dem base. This is no doubt partly due to fact that sources of funding for the DLC are from large businesses. It's also due to the fact that the DLC is very much inside-the-Beltway and connected to the institutional system of political consultancy and patronage, whereas more netroots party activists are less connected to this system and perhaps more connected to their local constituencies. Democratic principles--key amongst them the emphasis on alleviating the volatility/ill-effects of the US economic system--are not unpopular.