SALON
TUESDAY, OCT 20, 2015 01:45 PM EDT
The Democratic Party is in deep trouble: The big question that Bernie Sanders is at least trying to answer
Aside from holding the White House, Democrats are struggling nationwide. Here's the reason why—and what they can do
TOPICS: BERNIE SANDERS, MATT YGLESIAS, ED KILGORE, ORGANIZED LABOR, LABOR RIGHTS, EVANGELICAL CHRISTIANITY, RELIGIOUS RIGHT, NEOLIBERALISM, EDITOR'S PICKS, ELECTIONS NEWS, MEDIA NEWS, NEWS,POLITICS NEWS
Much of the American left is currently focused on the Democratic Party’s presidential primary in general, and the contest between Hillary Rodham Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders, in particular. But according to Vox’s Matt Yglesias, this laser-focus on the White House is a big mistake.
Democrats have been lulled into a kind of “complacence,” Yglesias warns, by a combination of President Obama’s late-term successes and the spectacular dysfunction of the Congressional GOP. In spite of being weaker on the state- and local-level than it’s been since perhaps the 1920s, the Democratic Party has “nothing at all in the works to redress [its] crippling weakness down the ballot.” It is one presidential election away from handing Republicans “the overwhelmingpreponderance of political power” in the U.S.
For anyone who believes the Republican Party today is “an insurgent outlier” that’s become too ideologically extreme and comically inept to wield absolute power, Yglesias’ article is a rude awakening. And, in fairness, some have argued that his vision of the future is overly grim. (Ed Kilgore, for example, says that holding the White House, as Democrats seem well-positioned to do, is “pretty damn important.”) Still, it’s hard to imagine how the left makes real progress with the presidency alone.
Yglesias’ post is more about diagnosing the problem — and spurring Democrats and leftwing activists to pay it more attention — than offering a solution. Which is fine; the first step toward fixing something is recognizing that it’s broken. But if the Democratic Party wants to truly be relevant in American politics, from top-to-bottom, it’s going to need something that it lacks but which the GOP has in abundance: A vibrant, energized, and well-organized activist base.
Yglesias talks about Republicans being more ideologically “flexible” than they’re given credit for, citing their willingness to downplay their social conservatism when campaigning in traditional Democratic strongholds like Maryland or the industrial Midwest. But I’m skeptical of that explanation. I don’t think the hangup for Democrats is that “No U.S. state is so left-wing [that] business interests are economically or politically irrelevant.” Ironically, the problem is both more and less complicated.
Simply put, while Republicans have big money at the top, they have passionate rank-and-file support at the bottom, too. They have corporate overlords like the Koch brothers, sure. But they’ve also got “boots on the ground” to make calls, knock on doors, and pass around campaign literature. They’ve got rank-and-file NRA members, whose passion and single-mindedness is legendary. And they’ve got millions and millions of evangelical Christians and other religious conservatives, all of whom approach political contests as if they were spiritual crusades.
Not everyone within the GOP is the same, of course. And as the struggles between Tea Party extremists and Chamber of Commerce conservatives show, Republicans’ internal divisions can get mighty nasty. But even when they’re at each other’s throats, most Republicans on every side think of themselves as conservatives. They generally want the same things: the maintenance of a “traditional” social order, fewer regulations and, above all else, low taxes. When they differ, in other words, it’s usually not about ends but rather means.
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