We lost the House and most of our Senate majority in the election this past November. There’s a school of thought that we did something wrong that allowed this to happen. Maybe the administration should have left health care reform for another day and focused much more intensely on the housing and unemployment crises. Maybe we paid insufficient attention to selling our accomplishments. Maybe we made too many compromises and wound up with a product that was unpopular on all sides. We can debate what went wrong, but what we shouldn’t do is argue that our primary responsibility was to retain our majorities. We had to make concrete progress while we had the power to make it. The Obama administration took bold action and that created a robust backlash. It is unlikely that we could have avoided a major backlash without eschewing bold action.

Most of the debate among Democrats is really between those who think we just finished an enormously successful Congress and those who are much more focused on all the seats we lost and how we can no longer compete in large swaths of the country. The most prevalent view in the blogosphere (i.e., among highly educated white progressives) is barely a blip on the national radar. That view is that the administration wasn’t bold at all, that it was actually quite timid, and that we lost many seats because our product was insufficiently progressive (or populist).

That doesn’t mean that the blogosphere is wrong, but I do think that the general attitude is detached from the reality facing anyone responsible for getting Democrats elected. There is a tendency to see a policy as sensible based on empirical evidence, and then to find some poll that shows that a policy is actually quite popular when viewed in a vacuum that doesn’t have to deal with the right-wing’s mighty media wurlitzer, or the challenges of campaign financing, or the divisions within the left-wing coalition. Something can be quite popular in the abstract but wind up being less popular than the plague after the corporate world gets done sending it through the media and political wringer. Too often, progressives fail to realize the challenges facing any politician who takes up their banner.

One way of putting this is that someone could have probably correctly predicted that the Democrats could pass health care reform but that it would cost them the House. It wouldn’t really matter how strong the reform was, it would still cost us the House. If we knew that in advance, we might choose to push for a stronger reform, figuring we should get the best possible policy in exchange for our loss of power. But, in reality, no one could be certain what would happen. I do, however, think this is a more plausible way of looking at the recent past than arguing that we would have done a lot better in the polls with an even stronger set of reforms. I think that’s wishful thinking.

Basically, I think there is a structural disadvantage for the left in American politics. We can occasionally get large majorities and make historic progressive change, but we can’t do it without incurring a massive backlash that quickly dissipates our majorities.

We just cannot compete in the media.

A side effect of this is that we have a permanent segment of the Democratic Party which is more concerned about keeping our majorities than it is in making progressive change. It’s a self-preservation kind of thing, and it has the advantage of attracting lots of corporate cash.

I don’t know how much we should hate this segment.

I think it’s short-sighted to have a complete indifference to maintaining our majorities. And that’s why I find myself equally disgusted by the DLC types and the holier-than-thou progressives. Neither of them places enough importance on something that is critically important. Power is almost useless if it doesn’t bring positive change. But it’s stupid to turn up your nose at positive change that is the best the system can produce at a given period of time.

What we need is a balance, but almost no one advocates for balance.