Last week, William Galston and Elaine Kamarck, under the sponsorship of the centrist Third Way Organization, released "The Politics of Polarization," their much-awaited call for Democratic post-election -- or, by now, pre-election -- renewal.
Kamarck and Galston are an auspicious team, having penned and published the seminal 1989 think piece, "The Politics of Evasion," which argued that, in the aftermath of Michael Dukakis' defeat, Democrats had to discard longstanding shibboleths and self-deceptions and radically reform their party along moderate lines if they ever wanted to regain power. The report formed part of the rationale for Bill Clinton's candidacy, and his win cemented much of the mystique around Kamarck, who went on to work for the Clinton administration as head of his Reinventing Government initiative, and Galston, who became Clinton's deputy assistant for domestic policy.
Now, at another dark moment for the Democratic Party, Kamarck and Galston have surfaced with a sequel. Given their history, the piece was bound to make a splash, but the reception has almost certainly exceeded their expectations. The report quickly popped up in The National Journal, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Nation, The Dallas Morning News, and other outlets where pundits ply their trade.
The liberals thundered at the report's centrism, the centrists applauded the report's moderation, and Noam Scheiber at The New Republic found support in it for a bizarre bargain in which liberals get universal health care and moderates get to attack North Korea. The report, in short, became a Rorschach test for the punditocracy.
All of which goes to show that the chattering class loves talking about itself, because what Kamarck and Galston have really produced is fairly banal. After all, who hasn't called for Democrats to adopt "a coherent foreign policy," "tolerance and common sense" on social issues, or a "modernized social safety net"? This stuff's the bread and butter of progressive policy platitudes, and while those who are not yet stuffed are certainly invited to dine some more, there's little reason to focus on it.
More interesting is the article's basic argument that, in a country that's been 20 percent liberal, 33 percent conservative, and 45 percent moderate for the last 30 years, playing a game of base mobilization will result in certain Democratic defeat. Indeed, those calling for red-meat strategies would be well advised to chew on this: In 1976, Carter won the presidency with only 77 percent of registered Democrats and 72 percent of self-described liberals; while in 2004, Kerry lost the election with 89 percent of registered Democrats and 85 percent of self-described liberals. The 2004 election was, in fact, a mobilization game, with both sides rising up in defense of their candidate and Bush's side proving a bit bigger.
But all is not gloom and doom. One of Kamarck and Galston's problems is that, in fact, Democrats haven't been doing that badly. Since "The Politics of Evasion" came out, Democrats have won the popular vote in three of four presidential elections. That's not the sort of record that suggests deep-seated, systemic problems afflicting the progressive coalition. And Bush's win was by no means a rout.
Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter by 9.7 percent in 1980, tromped Walter Mondale by 18.2 percent in 1984, and watched his successor, George H.W. Bush, defeat Dukakis by a shade less than 8 percent. For the Democratic Party, those were three massive defeats in a row. In contrast, the recent Democratic record has Clinton beating George H.W. Bush by 5.6 percent, dispatching Dole by 8.7 percent, seeing Al Gore get 0.5 percent more of the vote than George W. Bush (a total held down by Ralph Nader), and then watching John Kerry lose to George W. Bush by 2.4 percent. That's not such a discouraging record. Which is not to say that Democrats don't have problems articulating and updating their ideas, connecting with certain swaths of voters, overcoming cultural stereotypes, and attaining credibility on matters of national security, but we're not dealing with the sort of deep-seated rot that led the pre-Clinton Democratic Party to lose decisively in three consecutive elections.
Further, Kamarck and Galston's reliance on self-reported ideologies proves a bit problematic, particularly as the those numbers have remained steady for 30 years while presidential election results have fluctuated wildly. What does it mean to call yourself a liberal? A conservative? A moderate? Potentially nothing if your votes land all over the spectrum. Galston and Kamarck make much of the fact that Jimmy Carter got 29 percent of the conservative vote while Kerry received only 15 percent. But the more interesting stat is that 15 percent of self-identified conservatives voted for a "Massachusetts liberal" like Kerry -- and 13 percent of liberals voted for Bush!
And that's in a remarkably polarized, stark election. But to those crossovers and their brethren, it's not clear that their ideology means much at all. For the conservatives, government-run health care may be a compatible position when they support it and an atrocity when they don't.
Indeed, the Pew Research Center's typology project found broad, nationwide support for raising taxes to create universal health insurance. Sixty-three percent of pro-government conservatives, 59 percent of social conservatives, and 23 percent of "enterprisers" (otherwise known as small-government conservatives) would make the tradeoff. None of these folks found their support for such a traditionally liberal position contrary to their ideology, which calls into question the way we're using the word "ideology."
All of which is to say that the politics of polarization are complicated. Partisanship has increased without a corresponding jump in ideological fealty, and, while four years may seem a long time, it's a historical blink, and each recent blink has seen a fairly substantial shift in voter preferences from the last. So I'm skeptical of pronouncements that we've entered some new era of intractable polarization or Republican majorities.
When Kamarck and Galston wrote their last report, there was a pattern of Democratic losses to lock into. This one, however, is just a hijacking of natural, post-election demoralization. Last time, Democrats had a variety of assumptions and rationales that Kamarck and Galston were right to make them question. But this time, it's Kamarck and Galston who might want to do some searching. It's one thing to say the sky is falling when the heavens lie smashed around you, as was the case in 1989, but it's fully another to buttress the chattering class's gloomy storylines on Democratic chances when President Bush is under 40 percent in the polls and Democrats have won the popular vote in three of the last four presidential elections.
Ezra Klein is a Prospect writing fellow.
