As noted below, I'm going to be a panelist on CP's "Winning the Battle of Ideas" panel. The basic questions, as I got them in e-mail, seem to be:
How do progressives turn the tide and start winning the battle of ideas? To what extent do we need to rethink fundamental priorities, and to what extent is the real challenge to strengthen the message? Which messages and communications strategies should we pursue? What can todayâs progressive leaders learn from young people about these challenges?
For those who can't be there, here's my basic answer: we're screwed. For a little while, at least. Who's the last Democrat elected to the presidency? Bill Clinton, ushered in moments after the Soviet Union collapsed and thus in that rarest of electoral instances where foreign policy was largely absent. Before him? Jimmy Carter, a direct consequence of Nixon's lies. Behind him? Johnson, who ripped the party apart in Vietnam, kneecapped Hubert Humphrey, and gave rise to George McGovern.
The story of the Democratic party's ascendance was economic despair, and the tale of its decline has been monsters abroad. The list of great Democratic accomplishments from the past century always includes the New Deal and the Great Society, but rarely mentions World War I or II. When we discuss how to rebuild a progressive majority, we mean a majority for progressive economic reform, hence our reliance on organized labor. Where Republican means low taxes and strong defense, Democrat just means safety net.
Our single-mindedness, however, worked in the 30's and worked in the 60's, there's not a whole lot of working left for it to do. We've got a welfare state. Could it be strengthened? Sure. But with Medicaid and Medicare, employer-based health and government-guaranteed pensions, the safety net's holes aren't letting a majority slip through. If Democrats were really calculating, we'd push through the roughest, most vicious privatization scheme we could taunt Bush into pushing. Thirty years from now, we'd have a guaranteed sweep.
