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By Dylan Matthews
My former Prospect cube-mate, Daniel Strauss, sends along Michael Lind's infuriating article on how to create a Democratic supermajority. Lind has decided to dub the modern Democratic party the "McGovern party" (always a good sign). Why? Well,
The Roosevelt Party ran on economic issues, and didn't care whether voters were in favor of sex or against it on principle as long as they supported the New Deal. The McGovern Party, by contrast, has made social issues its litmus test. Economic conservatives have had a home in the McGovern Party, as long as they support abortion rights and affirmative action, but social democrats and populists who are pro-life or anti-affirmative action are not made nearly as welcome.I'm not sure how a party whose Senate leader is anti-choice doesn't make "pro-lifers" feel "welcome", and it's more than a stretch to dub the Rob Rubin wing of the party "conservative". But more fundamentally, this graf totally misreads the 1972 election. McGovern's defining issues weren't school busing and protecting women's reproductive rights (indeed, this was a year before Roe); they were ending the war in Vietnam and slashing military spending. If Lind actually bothered to take a look at the 1972 Democratic platform, he'd find economic proposals well to the left of anything Obama or Clinton proposed this year, ranging from a guaranteed minimum income to a single-payer (not just universal, single-payer) health system. This caricature of McGovern as some kind of economically conservative social radical is completely divorced from the actual campaign he ran.
