In the immediate aftermath of John Kerry's defeat, the two broad factions within the progressive umbrella (liberal-left and neoliberal-center) seemed to agree that Kerry's loss was not the other side's fault. This was a big switch from 2000, when dueling pollsters Stan Greenberg (liberal-left) and Mark Penn (neoliberal-center) released warring surveys, each blaming the other tendency.
Lately, though, the argument has opened up. I should note, of course, that one of the chief exhibits here is David Sirota's piece, "The Democrats' Da Vinci Code," posted on this Web site last week and running in the January issue of the print magazine. Arianna Huffington adored Sirota's article. But Ed Kilgore of the Democratic Leadership Council wrote a riposte to Sirota on his blog, and Sirota countered. Beyond that skirmish, there was the Al From and Robert Borosage debate on C-SPAN last Friday -- a largely decorous affair, but one from which key differences nevertheless emerged.
Sirota argued that corporate contributions to Democrats had ineluctably produced a mostly pro-corporate agenda (support for NAFTA, silence on mega-mergers that reduce workplace headcounts, etc.) that made it difficult for Democrats to distinguish themselves from Republicans in many cases. He pointed to a handful of Democrats -- who represent red states, or red areas of blue states -- as examples of people who win elections despite the cultural animus to the Democratic Party in their areas by putting forward an aggressively populist and anti-corporate economic agenda.
As the guy who said yes to publishing Sirota's piece, I should say that I found it interesting and mostly persuasive. But I want to emphasize, without in any way putting "distance" between Sirota (a valued contributor and a friend) and the magazine, that our running it does not constitute a 100 percent endorsement of its message. Many people think that's the case when a political magazine runs an article, but it is not. It's not an editor's job to publish only things he agrees with. In fact, it's a good editor's job to do exactly the opposite. In the same issue, we publish two more different takes on the question, one from Michael Lind and another from John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira. Readers can pick and choose, and that's the way a magazine is supposed to work.
But while I have a job as an editor, I also have my own views on the subject as an observer. And my chief view is this: Economics is important, and Democrats like to talk about it more than anything else; but among the three large issue categories -- economics, social issues, and foreign policy/national security -- economics is an extremely distant third in terms of how big a problem it is for Democrats.
I hope Sirota is right; I think he might be right; in all honesty, though, I can't really say I know for sure. But this much I do know for sure: What bursts out of Sirota's piece -- what's far more important than the specific positions he advises the Democrats to take -- is its vigorous conviction. He calls things as he sees them, he doesn't traffic in pusillanimous euphemism, and he's not trying to please people he's never going to win over anyway.
With that last phrase, you may have intuited why I decided to describe Sirota's piece with the above construction: It's exactly the opposite of the way the Democratic Party comes across. Democrats rarely call things as they see them; they constantly employ euphemism, usually the vaguer the better, so they can't be pinned down on what they actually mean or mean to represent; and they're forever trying to please people (big business executives being a prime example) who are going to vote Republican anyway.
As I said above, I don't have the answer to the economic puzzle that confronts Democrats right now. But I know this much: We live in an age -- after September 11, with the hopped-up macho culture of cable TV, and with the qualities that Karl Rove has persuaded a majority of Americans any true leader must possess -- in which conviction matters. And to too many voters, the Democrats don't seem to have any. So in some respects it may be that the end (economic populism) is less vital than the means (showing some unapologetic conviction about something, just so voters don't look at Democrats and see a group of invertebrates). Populist tub-thumping, for this reason, is probably worth a shot.
But: In fact, voters do see the Democrats as having some convictions. Fairly or not, they see Democrats as convicted (as it were) in their support of gay marriage and abortion on demand and sick things on prime-time television. Values represents a far, far bigger problem for Democrats than economics. Judis and Teixeira, in their piece in the upcoming Prospect, report on two visits they made to Martinsburg, West Virginia. What they heard more than anything else -- knocking on doors of mostly Democratic households, in which people explained why they were voting for George W. Bush -- boiled down to values stuff.
I know exactly what John and Ruy heard. I grew up in Morgantown, West Virginia. Let me describe this a little bit. When I was a kid, my county, Monongalia, was one of the most Democratic counties in one of the most Democratic states in the union. No Republican ever won anything there when I was little (except for Charlie Whiston, the sheriff, a terrific guy whom everybody knew because he went to every high school football and basketball game, and who had a capacious smile and the whitest teeth this side of Wayne Newton). In November, Bush won the state, as he had in 2000; and Kerry carried just nine of the state's 55 counties (all nine were small and poor), an appalling performance for a candidate who was supposed to do far better there than "tree-hugger" Al Gore. West Virginia is now a Republican state and will be into the foreseeable future. (And speaking of high schools: There's now a Christian high school in my hometown. This would have been almost as unthinkable when I was in high school in the 1970s as if we'd had, well, a gay and lesbian high school.)
There are a lot of reasons for the state's transformation, but one political explanation overwhelms the others, and it has to do with values. You don't need a poll to know this. Go walk down a street in Morgantown or Martinsburg and start asking people. Abortion looms incredibly large there, maybe even more so than gay marriage (guns matter, too). And many people, especially parents of young children, are at least put off and at worst terrified by cultural permissiveness, and it's in fact understandable that they respond to the party that purports to be sensitive to those concerns.
Democrats need to stand against discrimination, and they should support access to basic abortion rights. But beyond that, they have extensive soul-searching to do with regard to what social issues they choose to defend and how they talk about them, and they're going to have to reach some conclusions that the social-issue interest groups will find unsettling (please, please read Sarah Blustain's fantastic "Choice Language" from our December issue if you haven't already; a genuinely important essay). This is a far, far bigger problem than whether the party tilts left or center on economic questions. Not even remotely close.
Finally, even values may not be as important in the current world as national security and foreign policy. Here, too, the Democrats have some hard thinking to do. Peter Beinart kick-started the conversation with his New Republic cover piece; I don't share his enthusiasm for purging certain elements within the Democratic Party, but he's absolutely right in saying that the Democrats need to look back to the "Wise Men" of the post-World War II period and build a new set of ideas that respond to the realities of today's world as those thinkers and actors did in the late 1940s. (I wrote this myself two years ago in an essay called "Between Cheney and Chomsky" that appeared in the book "The Fight Is for Democracy," edited by George Packer of The New Yorker.)
I happen to think economic populism can work, especially in red areas that have been laid out by globalization. But it can work only on the conditions that progressives rethink at least their rhetoric on social issues, and that they fashion a fully credible strategy on national security and foreign policy. Progressives should engage the economic populism versus economic centrism debate. But they should do so constructively, and above all, they should remember that economics is only their third biggest problem, and it's a distant third at that.
Michael Tomasky is executive editor of The American Prospect.
