I know it’s frustrating to have conservative Democrats serving in Congress. I know it’s a drag that Colin Powell’s endorsement counts for something, or that no one seems to question it when Chuck Hagel campaigns for Joe Sestak in Pennsylvania. What are these people doing in our party? Can’t we have a party just for ourselves?
Well, actually, no. No, we can’t. Not if we want to keep the crazies at bay we can’t, anyway. It’s hard to define the Obama coalition, and people make the mistake on focusing on only one element of it (e.g. the anti-war movement, the youth, people of color, disillusioned Republicans, fickle independents, people tired of the bickering). I don’t know what unites all these people other than a belief in what I’d call ‘core American values’ that we established from the onset of the New Deal to the conclusion of the Cold War. I don’t mean the development of the national security state or the exact parameters of our economic system, because people disagree about that stuff. What brought together Obama’s coalition wasn’t anything specific as much a sense that Bush and Cheney had taken us off a well-trodden path. And that path might have had its flaws, but it was a good path that we needed to get back to. Some people never liked the path, but they weren’t the majority-makers.
When Obama won, he took the center-right with him. The center-right are part of his coalition. They didn’t make the majority alone. Obama also attained spectacular base-turnout and brought in all kinds of new voters. Taken together, these groups put him over the top and wiped out the last vestiges of the Republican Party in New England (in the House, anyway). Obama didn’t win a mandate for progressive change, although he did have many progressive elements in his platform. He won a mandate for responsible governance in the mold of presidents past. And, because his majority was made through both the incorporation of the reasonable right and the newly engaged left, there was a built-in contradiction that he couldn’t avoid when he went about his policy decisions.
A lot of Republicans were loath to admit it, but they knew the country would be in safer, saner hands with Barack Obama than with John McCain. The selection of Sarah Palin confirmed this for the center-right, although most had made up their minds prior to that. I’d be interested to know how centrists like Andy Card actually voted in 2008. Card served as Bush’s chief of staff and had no success in moderating his administration. He even joined Alberto Gonzales at John Ashcroft’s hospital bedside. But Card is a prototype of the Yankee Republican that has died out in recent decades, and it’s no surprise to see that he feels that Newt Gingrich’s deranged, racist rantings about the president are unhelpful. I think I know how he feels about seeing Republicans like Lisa Murkowski, Robert Bennett, Bob Inglis, Charlie Crist, and (perhaps) Mike Castle get run out of the Grand Old Party. He’s probably as appalled as former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson.
This midterm election could still go a couple of different ways, but it’s already clear that people like Powell, Hagel, Crist, and Castle are more at home in the Democratic Party. Yes, that means that the party moves to the right, which progressives like myself will find immensely frustrating. But it also is our final bulwark against the tide of xenophobic, ultra-nationalist, know-nothing radicalism of the Tea Party movement.
And this is how I’ve seen things since at least August 2009. We’re dealing with a real danger now. We don’t have two governing parties anymore. We have a party filled with people who want to dismantle the post-war structures of the government, overturn the rulings of the post-war Courts, and tear up sacrosanct legislation and amendments to the Constitution. And then we have the Democrats for everyone else. We make a mistake, perhaps a perilous and deadly mistake, if we let our frustration with the condition of our party get in the way of opposing this new incarnation of the Republican Party.
That doesn’t mean that the progressive project needs to be put on hold. I see no problem with supporting more progressive candidates against less progressive candidates. There’s no reason not to lobby your elected officials for more progressive policies. But we have to keep our eye on the enemy and not sow needless division among ourselves. We should be able to see how the massive divisions in the Republican Party are hurting their chances in the midterms. We often delude ourselves that we achieve progressive change by doing something similar to the Tea Partiers. We think we can win legislative battles if only we make our party purer. The truth is that we have won our legislative battles precisely because our party grew to majority-size through the simultaneous incorporation of the reasonable (Establishment) right and the newly-engaged left.
Only half of that equation makes progressive change easier. The other half makes it harder. As we wind down to the midterms, success hinges on keeping the center-right in our camp, which is actually made easier with every outburst of craziness from the Beck/Palin/Gingrich crowd. We also have to prevent apathy and disillusionment among those newly-engaged voters who came out in 2008 or are newly-eligible to vote in 2010.
As I’ve said for a while, I don’t think the progressive blogosphere has been, in the main, engaged in the right battle. I hope that this changes over the next month and a half. Our country’s future depends on the left getting this campaign right.
