Scott Lemieux has a good time mocking Michael Lind's request that all Democrats stop being social liberals and focus solely on the butter, please:
So let's get this straight. Democrats can't win because "populists" don't like Democratic positions on abortion (odd, since the Democratic position on abortion is far more popular than the Republican one. Lind also has an interesting definition of "banned," which apparently means that "you can only be the most powerful Democrat in Congress if you oppose abortion rights.) Populists were burned by Clinton. The electorate was so upset about it that in 1996 Clinton won by 8 points, and in 2000 they voted for Al Gore by a margin of a half million votes.
Scott is, as usual, right. And Lind is fairly unprincipled for suggesting we give up on equality, choice, and everything else in order to win some votes. But there is a deeper, more interesting point lurking around his analysis: Democrats, as a party, are defined as much by our social stands (pro-gay, pro-civil rights, pro-abortion, pro-feminism) as we are by our economic stances. In large part, that's fine. What's peculiar is that we're not at all defined by our national security accomplishments. We're credited for the New Deal and the Great Society, blamed for abortion and gay rights, but never noticed for World War I or World War II. It's weird.
More, it's dangerous. The electorate swings on three issue areas: foreign, domestic, and cultural. Democrats continually win on domestic issues, and when foreign policy is absent from the election, as it was in 1992 and 2000, we win the elections. But mostly, we lose. And we lose because Republicans dominate two of the three areas, while we only control one. Cultural issues are less important than either domestic or foreign policy matters, but added to the Republican advantage on national security, they basically consign us to minority status. That needs to chage.
