Democratic Dilemmas: The Party and the Movements
Democratic Dilemmas: The Party and the Movements
In heaven, possibly, ideals speak for themselves. But on earth ideals require translation; they require action. If the world were logically ordered, politics would begin with ends—so Plato and Aristotle would insist. But a little experience demonstrates that the ends crash and burn without means. So, over time, human beings have learned that their ideals need means, vessels, escorts—and that’s where the trouble begins. The need for means is the terrible requirement exacted by an unforgiving world, and in this requirement, and the possibility it creates of a fatal mismatch between ends and means, lies the taproot of political tragedy. Ideals are the necessary motives of practical action, but ideals without wherewithal are empty dreams, and ideals yoked to the wrong means are likely to turn into nightmares.
In democracies, the people who either bear the ideals or bury them, or both, are politicians. And organizations of politicians—parties—are the indispensable means of political power. But parties are impure vessels. They consist, by definition, of people who aspire to political power, along with staffs whose members also possess personal ambition. They win public support by making promises, but they lead you to a compromised land. They may originate in passions; they insist that their sojourn in the compromised land is only short-term, but parties end up in the hands of insiders, and insiders have interests. Officeholders like to retain their offices, toward which end parties are helpful.
Most Americans, by contrast, are less than attached to parties, even the ones they vote for. With good reason, they think that parties stink of corruption; that even at best, parties are the property of professionals while they, the citizens, are only amateurs—and like it that way, for they have private pursuits, a pleasing luxury of liberal societies. And for the most part, except during fundraising spurts, or in those retrograde zones where remnant machines deliver the equivalent of Thanksgiving turkeys, the parties return the favor: day by day, they offer citizens next to nothing. In the United States, national parties scarcely exist. Walk the streets of any American city and you will be hard-pressed to find a party office, let alone a meeting.
A crucial asymmetry has opened up in the relationship between parties, focused on interests and power, and movements, focused on ideals. In the early 1960s, the conservative movement set out to take over the Republican Party, warts and all, to convert it into a conservative party. Over the next decades—with the decisive enthusiasm of the Christian right—the movement succeeded. For the most part, the party welcomed its activists. They were energetic, reliable cadres, graced with assurance. They were well organized, with access to social settings where weekly meetings were natural: churches, Sunday mornings. They turned out to canvass and they turned out to vote. Despite continuing tensions, the Republican Party became, and continues to be, a splendid conduit for idealists of their stripe. Theirs was a long march, proceeding in fits and starts—a grand success in 1964, with the nomination of Barry Goldwater, followed by his apparently calamitous but actually fruitful defeat; the regrouping in California under Ronald Reagan; Reagan’s narrow failure to wrest the presidential nomination from Gerald Ford in 1976; his triumphal comeback in 1980—and steadily, steadily, the Christian right’s commitment to turn the Republican Party to its use, to reap a host of resentments and recoup the ground lost in the barbarian sixties.
The relation between movement and party is always a tense collaboration. The tension is inherent in the structure of the relationship. The party is beholden to big money, the movement prefers purity. The party belongs to professionals, more or less, while the movement consists largely of amateurs.
On the right, movement-party collaboration was not a foregone conclusion. From Ronald Reagan to George Bush the Younger, leadership finesse has always been crucial. A politician less adroit than Reagan might not have succeeded in brokering a deal between social and economic conservatives that both sides could live with in their common drive toward power. Under Bush the Younger, economic conservatives—ostensibly rational—had to swallow their own objections to swollen federal government in the interest of satisfying a venal base with “earmarks” and other material privileges. Meanwhile, movement conservatives of a religious bent had to accept a long-term strategy for limiting abortion (via legislation banning “partial-birth abortion,” and statewide bans) rather than go for broke with a probably doomed constitutional amendment.
Despite their grumbles about the intractable sluggishness of Washington, D. C., however, the conservative movement has been for the past forty years safely locked into the world of Republican power. The party is its institutional haven, its world of networks and money, its employment agency and mobility ladder, the Elysian Fields of its pleasures and sweet corruptions. It is also, decisively, the home of conservatives’ highly practical hearts. They threaten, but they do not bolt. They harbor no Ralph Nader. (The most they could muster for a breakaway was Pat Buchanan in 2000.) After Goldwater’s defeat in 1964, when purist conservatives spoke of leaving the Republicans, one of their chief funders, Walter Knott of Orange County, California, gave them a wise old uncle’s talking-to: “I think that you have to work through a [mainstream] party. . . .[I]f you don’t, you would be pretty ineffective.” Pretty ineffective is what the conservative movement was not willing to be. The movement knew its fate was inseparable from that of its party.
Still, at times, its members yelp that the party leadership is selling them out. Reagan negotiated with the evil empire and actually seemed on the brink of tossing away nuclear weapons. Bush père betrayed his promise and raised taxes. As for Bush fils, he bulked up the federal government with new entitlements, budget deficits, and debt as steep as the eye can see. His tax cuts were, for most people, skimpy, his anti-abortion actions sketchy. Far from abolishing the Department of Education—a longtime conservative hope—he stuffed it with new functions, not least the national tests mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act. For some conservatives, his version of the global “War on Terror” masked the “nation-building” that he campaigned against in 2000; for others, it masked reckless empire-building.
Now the Republicans are driving wedges among themselves as they used to drive wedges into the Democrats. On immigration and stem cell research, their divisions are serious. Many conservatives thought Bush went overboard in Iraq. One of them, Jim Webb, is running for a U.S. Senate seat in Virginia—having won the Democratic primary. Another, Mark Parkinson, quit the Kansas Republican Party, of which he had been chief, and is running for lieutenant governor there—also as a Democrat. Parkinson decries the GOP as “fixated on ideological issues that really don’t matter to people’s everyday lives. What matters is improving schools and creating jobs. I got tired of the theological debate over whether Charles Darwin was right.” This in a state that, despite its Democratic governor, Thomas Frank assured us, was doomed to stay red unless the party rejoined its economic populist roots. And just this past May, Richard A. Viguerie, the Republican direct-mail tycoon and longtime conservative guru, wrote in the Washington Post: “The current record of Washington Republicans is so bad that, without a drastic change in direction, millions of conservatives will again stay home this November . . . . I’ve never seen conservatives so downright fed up as they are today.”
Liberal idealists and movement activists do not control the Democratic Party. Many disdain it as fatally corrupted by corporate financing. The movements have gone their own ways for decades, fighting their own issue campaigns. “The left establishment,” as the peerless political reporter Thomas B. Edsall puts it in his new book, Building Red America, “has placed a far higher priority on specific, narrow legislative and policy goals, on grassroots demonstration projects, on ad hoc victories, and on culturally inflammatory initiatives that expend moral capital, than on building political power through Democratic Party victories.” This is not the mentality of an army, but of an assortment of militant interest groups.
Liberals and other Democrats (as well as disgruntled Republicans) had to stare long and hard at the reign of George W. Bush to start coming to terms with the party’s impurities—impurities that they might strive to minimize but that would surely not disappear. In many states, the party apparatus is threadbare and impoverished. The national Democratic Party has been a ghost. In 2005, Howard Dean became chair of the Democratic National Committee on a platform of putting national organizers to work in all fifty states in an effort to make the party nationally competitive. Astonishingly, this was an innovation precisely because many states, including swinging Ohio, up to that moment, lacked a single organizer. And although, at this writing, Dean has succeeded in implanting at least two organizers in every state, as a national organization the Democratic Party cannot be said to exist except insofar as its entities (the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee) raise money for candidates. The Democratic Party is largely, in other words, a bank—and one that is open only occasionally.
With this half-apparatus, half-phantasm, many professional liberals cannot be said to have even a love-hate relation. It is more like tolerate-hate.
In June 2005, in a Washington hotel ballroom, at what was probably the largest gathering of liberal activists in the country, the Take Back America conference, I heard Kim Gandy, the president of the National Organization for Women, declare, “The Democratic Party can’t seem to decide whether it wants to be Republican Lite.” She named her bêtes noires of the day: former Democratic Party presidential candidate John Kerry, who had said the Democrats needed to elect more anti-abortionists; the left evangelical Reverend Jim Wallis, the previous speaker, who supports “faith-based” initiatives; and U2 lead singer, Bono, who “crossed the line” to seek collaboration on Africa with pro-lifers. “If this is what it means to be a big tent,” Gandy declared, “then I say let’s keep the skunk out of the tent.”
Jesse Jackson, Sr., weirdly declared that progressives are “the third rail of American politics.” The two rails, he explained, are the two parties. The third is “a strong independent force”—like abolitionism at a time when the two parties disagreed on how far to accommodate the slaveowners. The reverend’s choice of metaphor was unwittingly revealing. Third rails may carry the power, but they are also lethal. Gandy and Jackson both drew standing ovations.
On the left, in other words, liberals pride themselves on principle—and hope that if they stand foursquare on principle, the people will come around. Idealists passionately desire a public good and are ever on guard against the shenanigans of figures who stand in their way. Insofar as they have some acquaintance with history, they sense the inescapable truth that the realization of their hopes depends on politicians who are not idealists; who are sometimes defiantly not idealists; and who tend to strike them as phony, smarmy panderers, connoisseurs of euphemism—who, moreover, have other fish to fry.
The idealists insist that the party see things their way. When the party of politicians fails to oblige, they clamor, in full prophetic voice, against the self-seeking insiders who have brought the hacks, dopes, and, worst of all, moneychangers into the temple. And the party, composed of no-nonsense professionals, replies that the outsiders are naifs, ignoramuses, strangers to “this town,” grandstanders, or worse, uncompromising wreckers who haven’t the faintest idea how things work. So offense inspires defensiveness, which in turn generates more offense.
This is not to say that the idealists have all the arguments. The party elite are tested, after all, in the exacting laboratory of popular politics. They say that they’re down in the trenches while the idealists build castles in the air. Proudly or wearily, aggressively or with pathos, they point out that parties are the engines that turn the wheels that move the government that, in turn, moves things in the real world. Far be it for them to claim that the party is a splendid institution brimming with saints or a fully fair or fully equal prefiguration of justice incarnate. They know the party is more humdrum than that—the sort of imperfect human contrivance built to obtain the cooperation that a complex society needs to get its work done. Parties collect disparate elements with disparate interests, and the disagreements have to be brokered. They assemble human beings who maneuver, combine, conflict, recombine, and compromise. Politics is their livelihood. You may dislike this fact of political life, as you may reject the law of gravity, but there it is.
The principle that democracies need parties and that political power does not develop without them applies to partial, withered, and corrupted democracies as well as to fully developed ones. Parties may be corrupt, fatally riven, degenerate, or stupid, and if they are badly enough so, they die. (A case in point: the American Whigs before the Civil War, torn apart by the single unignorable issue of their time, slavery.) In those cases, other parties arise—and they are not perfect either. There are parties for sale, parties that are nothing but personal vehicles for bosses and celebrities, parties that devolve into hereditary machines. Many are the possible distortions of good democratic practice. But even a bad party does not depart the scene unless a critical mass of its partisans feel strongly enough about its failure that they break away in favor of a new or transformed vehicle for political power—another party, that is.
A realistic case can be made for idealism, too. It starts with the recognition that there is more, much more, to politics than parties. Today, in a time of rampant disillusion with politics, parties are incapable of replenishing themselves. In the old days, they included self-perpetuating machines that thrived because they offered material rewards; today, the inside-the-Beltway apparatus of staffers, campaign consultants, managers, fundraisers, and so on are the enduring components. But this is not enough. Parties that rest on blind ambition alone are doomed—in democracies as in one-party states.
Parties do not move themselves. They need fuel—they need popular energy which, as it is organized, produces movements. Movements agitate and mobilize. They flow; they are liquid; they may evaporate. They may also solidify into establishments of their own—become parties or parts of parties.
Since the fabled sixties, the left-liberal movements and the Democratic Party have often been at odds. There is no space here to track this tortuous story; it is enough to say that the Democrats since 1968 have only been able to win the presidency when a Southern Democratic governor recouped some post-civil rights losses, especially in the white working class, by crossing liberal-conservative lines. No other Democrats have succeeded. The party’s most reliable and energized constituency groups (labor, African Americans, Hispanics, feminists, gays, environmentalists) couldn’t measure up to the Republicans’ core groups (evangelical Christians and anti-tax partisans).
In these terms, what happened to liberal activists in 2004 was that many movement types, used to thinking like a movement, decided to think like a party. They founded liberal 527 groups (named for the relevant provision of the tax code) as channels for soft money. They campaigned for their favorite candidate in the primaries, usually Howard Dean; and when Dean went down to defeat, they switched to John Kerry for the sake of electability. During the summer and fall, they campaigned for Kerry in swing states, where they collaborated more or less happily with local Democrats, often working-class, often Catholic, often pro-life. (I wrote about one such collaboration in “A Gathering Swarm,” Mother Jones, Jan.-Feb. 2005.) In the sequel to Kerry’s defeat, a fair number of liberal activists stayed active in party-building activities. One such, Jackie Grumbacher of rural Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, where she is vice chair of the county Democratic committee, told me, “What is progressive now is what used to be the center.” (The local chair is a former Republican who left the party in 2004.)
The better part of wisdom, as we try to dig out of the Bush disaster, is to think of the Democratic Party as the ensemble of all those who, whether they belong to liberal movements or not, understand that the right-wing Republican Party is the enemy of everything they hope for. If they want a sustainable energy policy and a foreign policy that works better than raw military power; if they want health care and decent wages; if they want some right to abortion (and even to contraception); if they take their Christianity from the Sermon on the Mount and not from Pat Robertson or if they’re steadfastly secular; if they want a balanced budget or don’t care about that so much, then they must evict the Republicans from the seats of power. If the Democrats are to investigate the executive crimes, lies, malfeasances, abuses of power, and thunderous errors of recent years, they must isolate the Republicans as the party of the radical right and embrace the Democrats as the party of everyone else.
For the hard plain, unblinkable evidence is that, for the foreseeable future, there are not enough liberals to elect a majority party; that is, a party capable of governing, or playing a sizable part in governing, or even effectively opposing the ruling party. As William A. Galston and Elaine C. Kamarck put it in their 2005 article “The Politics of Polarization” (www.third-way.com), “When American politics turns into a shootout between liberals and conservatives, conservatives almost always win.” The exceptions consist of the very bluest states. But there aren’t enough of those to win back either the Senate or the House, let alone the presidency, in 2008.
People who follow the numbers know that, consistently, when pollsters ask voters to label themselves liberal, moderate, or conservative, more than five call themselves conservative for every three who call themselves liberal. According to Galston and Kamarck, the average percentages, looking at presidential elections from 1976 to 2004, are as follows:
• Liberal: 20 percent
• Conservative: 33 percent
• Moderate: 47 percent.
The 2004 election was just about typical, with 21 percent calling themselves liberal, 34 percent conservative, and 45 percent moderate. It then follows, Galston and Kamarck claim (following their similar, influential argument of 1989, which helped promote Bill Clinton), that Democrats have to “appeal successfully to the center of the American electorate.” Now, it all depends, I suppose, on what the meaning of “center” is. As Mark Schmitt of the New America Foundation has pointed out, it may well be a matter of the right tone and the right candidates, not a particular, uniform brand of ideological moderation: “Democrats don’t need to move to the center so much as to find a sharp and unmistakable way to make clear that we are the centrist party even if we don’t change a thing. Ours is the party that wants the dynamic economy that only a strong safety net makes possible, that believes in the strength that can come from finding unity of purpose with other nations rather than pushing them away, etc.”
Another way these numbers might be prettied up, from a liberal point of view, would be to suppose that the center has moved leftward, so that to call yourself a moderate or conservative in 2004 means that you’re actually sort of liberal, but either because the term “liberal” is taboo, or because you’re unaware that your definitions are shifting, when the pollsters call up and give you only three choices, you choose one of the rightward two. Scott Winship, a graduate student at Harvard, probed the 2004 National Election Survey numbers precisely to see whether these things have been happening. (See his July contributions to www.thedemocraticstrategist.org.) His short answer is that, in 2004, there were, indeed, a substantial number of self-professed American conservatives who are, as he calls them, “operational liberals”—a full 13 percent of the whole electorate, in fact. They greatly outnumber those who are self-professed liberals but operational conservatives (5 percent of the electorate). Add up all the operational liberals and they are roughly equal in numbers to the operational conservatives. On economic and social policy, the country tilts to the left. A majority is well disposed toward progressive government. There’s the good news.
However (and this is a huge “however”), one issue and one issue alone in 2004 was so powerful in predicting how a voter actually voted that it drowned out positions on everything else—health care, job creation, even abortion, gay marriage, you name it. It was how you felt about Bush’s handling of the “War on Terror.” In other words, as long as terrorism is so salient to voters, Democrats are staggering uphill, though the latest polls as I write suggest that voters are finally ceasing to give Bush’s Republicans the benefit of the doubt here. Lacking other strong counters to the anti-incumbency mood, why wouldn’t the Republicans beat the terror drum as they did in 2002 and 2004? Because Osama bin Laden seems to prefer to see Republicans in power—is there a more convincing explanation for his last-minute intervention in the 2004 campaign?—the October surprises write themselves. This would be the GOP version of “nationalizing the election.” Beware.
It might still be that, despite the many advantages of incumbency—not least the Republicans’ control over redistricting and vote suppression in key states—the Democrats can overwhelm them in November. The news from Iraq is grim enough. The Democrats have some attractive insurgent candidates, even on the edges of the Republican base in the South, Great Plains, and Midwest. They’ve learned to raise money. They may be catching up to the Republicans’ technological database sophistication. They’re probably less allergic to values talk than before. Maybe they’ve learned to hit back when baited. Maybe the so-called netroots are a net plus for mobilization. With Republicans galloping away from a deeply unpopular president (whose approval ratings have been running under 40 percent for five straight months as I write), Democrats have some cheery numbers to point to.
In 1953, the barb-tongued Bertolt Brecht sarcastically urged the East German government to dissolve the people and elect another one. In 2003, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld reminded us that you fight a war with the army you have, not the army you wish you had. If I may take a moment out for a chuckle, Democrats and progressives have to learn to cross Brecht with Rumsfeld and conclude that you fight for political power with the people you have, not the ones you wish you had. Luck won’t hurt.
Todd Gitlin is a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University. This article is largely drawn from Uphill: Reflections on the Know-Nothing Presidency of George W. Bush and the Prospects for a Post-Conservative Recovery, a book to be published in 2007 by John Wiley. A few passages are drawn from his contributions to TPMcafe.com.
