The New Triangulation

The Poor Man has a long and cranky (in several senses) post about how the Democrats conduct their elections:

Liberals are nice people, but we make shitty generals. Everytime we try make headlong charge and get slaughtered, we regroup, try to figure out what went wrong, and decide we just didn't charge hard enough. We convince ourselves that there's this big army of Deaniacs or young voters or whatever who are going to ride to the rescue, and we call that a strategy. And we lose the House, and we lose the Senate, and we lose the Presidency. We lose the Presidency to an unpopular, incompetent, illiterate, garble-mouthed, radical right retard. I'm not very sympathetic to arguments that we just aren't losing hard enough, and that we'll get 'em next time, slugger. I'm not six years old, and I'm sick of this shit. It is time to face reality. Reality is we're losing, and losing to some pretty sorry competition, simply because we'd rather choose rightness over reality. Fuck it. Fuck that tired old bullshit. I want to win.

Most of the post is noodling--not very convincing, I suspect because the author is not actually very convinced--on how to neutralize the anti-sexual-freedom voters by, to some degree, pandering to them. The key, to him, is that the Democrats can keep their purity, or they can be effective:

And I'm suggesting this despite the fact that I don't agree with it because I personally would prefer to win 80% of what I want rather than have another complete and abject defeat, which is what we have on our hands now.

I agree that 80% of something present and good is better than 100% of something completely absent.

Here's what I left in his comments a few minutes ago:

I agree with one of your premises: That it's vital to strip voters away from the Republicans by attacking the Republicans' hold on some key issues.

I disagree, however, that anti-sex is the right battleground. The people who think that abortion and gay marriage are the most important issues are the people who can least be stripped away into the D column.

There is a larger group. Taken together, the national security issues--that is, "the war on Iraq" and "terrorism"-- were the most important issue to far more voters than "anti-freedom moral values". If Kerry made a strategic mistake, it was in running on economic issues while assuming that on national security issues, he was tied with Bush.

I thought he was, but he wasn't. The Swift Boat Liars managed to keep him from capitalizing on his personal history of being a bad-ass war hero (which he really was), and his voting record on defense issues is not exceptionally good. It's not exceptionally bad--in fact, it's pretty solid--but if the Democrats want to neutralize the national security issue, they need to be able to point to an exceptional record.

Also, there are definitely people who decided that it was just not possible to change horsemen in mid-Apocalypse. But that can't last forever.

It appears to me that it will be both easier and more morally acceptable to try to reinvent the Democrats as the real party of national security than it would be to reinvent the Democrats as the party of sexual repression. So why take the latter tack?

If you want another issue that the Democrats could neutralize, they could abandon the Palestinians. The Religious Right have almost as big a hard-on for building Greater Israel as they do for policing other people's sexual practices. The Democrats would hardly be the first group to sacrifice the Palestinians for their own internal advancement.

Americans in general approve more of the policies of the Democratic party than of the Republican--they support welfare for the poor, support Social Security, support progressive taxation, support environmentalism, don't think that picking wars with people who haven't attacked is a good idea. Demographically, the nation is steadily moving towards Democrats' base. And we actually have the root of a coherent ideology: "Government should help the individual in need". This ideological coherence is in strong contrast to the Republicans, who fall into four sharply divided camps--to wit, "Government should do as little as possible" (libertarians); "The levers of government should be used to help the ruling elite gather more power and wealth" (plutocrats, or what Phil Agre calls "conservatives"); "Government should enforce Christianity" (theocrats); and "We're America! We're going to kick your ass!" (jingoists). I won't claim that the Democrats are outstandingly good at actually focusing government action towards its goal, but it's a worthy goal that I think is supported by far more people than any of the Republican core ideas, and is an ideal to which the Democrats have been pretty faithful through the last 72 years with frequent success.

It's not a coincidence that Al Gore ran pretty much exclusively on a "Government: protecting the people, not the powerful" campaign and won the 2000 election. And it's hard to find an issue better suited to protecting the people than national security. Note also that Clinton's end run around the Republicans on welfare reform worked politcally because it allowed him to defuse liberatarian and plutocrat criticisms of Democrats (by doing less), appeal to the theocrats (by making welfare look more like their idea of actual charity), and still remain in lip service to the Democratic ideal by focusing welfare on the "really needy". LBJ, on the other hand, squandered his huge success in 1964 by trying to appease to the jingoists with methods which involved killing a lot of (overwhelmingly poor) Americans to no discernable positive effect. The plutocrats were happy because of the growth of the war machine, but they and the jingoists both knew that the Republicans would be as much to their liking on this issue, and the liberals abandoned him over it.

There is one more reason that I think that moving to appease the theocrats by moving against abortion or homosexuals is a losing strategy. Of the four groups which form the Republican coalition, the theocrats are probably the second-most unreachable. The plutocrats cannot possibly be moved towards the left; they are the walking definition of the right wing. The jingoists don't care who's in charge as long as we're kicking ass--note that during the Viet Nam police action, the jingoists supported the Democrats' war while hating the hippies for not being loyal enough to their president. The libertarians have always been the most Democrat-leaning parts of the Republican coalition. The natural tension between the libertarians and the theocrats and plutocrats far to their right is a tension that the Democrats should be exploiting, and taking a more anti-sex position isn't going to help at all on that score.

Think of politics as war conducted by other means, and let's indulge in a metaphor. Democrats have more troops, better terrain, and better weapons, but we're getting slaughtered because the Republicans have better communications and morale. The right-wing noise machine is an amazing thing, and holds their party together far better than our organizations hold ours. The thought which has been running through my mind for the last few days: "Amateurs discuss strategy. Generals discuss logistics." I'm not sure if I'm thinking of strategy or logistics yet. We need to think logistics. We need the new triangulation--but we need to keep building on what we accomplished in 2004.

We fought smart. We need to fight even smarter.

No surrender.

Bruce Baugh: Like Unto a Sage

Which means he's tasty on roasted meats.

Bruce Baugh is an sf and rpg fan and writer who has been, for many years, an online friend and one of the people in my mental catalog of "proof that not all libertarians are moonbat assholes". (The not-quite-exhaustive list also includes Jim Henley, nancylebov, and Greg Costikyan, and my college roommate Michael Grubb.)

In a short essay some time ago (sorry, no link readily to hand) Bruce was responsible for introducing me to the concept of "regulatory capture", about which I hope to write more soon; it's one of the few concepts of politics to which I was introduced by libertarians which strikes me as both terrifically important and not obvious. In short, regulatory capture is the process in which an industry which is regulated by the government will eventually traduce the regulatory scheme and turn it to the industry's advantage. Obvious recent examples are the consolidation of the broadcast media thanks to subversion of the FCC and the $600 billion big pharma boondoggle known as the Medicare Prescription Drug Plan.

So imagine my surprise to learn that Bruce has abandoned libertarianism. Imagine my pleasure to discover him writing the words in my head:

This is where I break most decisively, I think, with the idea that the big priority is to work for a reduction of state power. I agree that it would be well to have a smaller, much more tightly bounded and governed state. But I also think that the way the state operates matters: the sort of social stability that Hayek describes as crucial for the useful operation of markets calls for honesty, consistency, competence, and other virtues in government. The thing is, making that happen requires serious, detailed engagement with the operations of government. You have to find representatives interested in the subject, and staffers who can do the job right, and there are volunteer positions that gotta be staffed, and oversight, and a whole lot of things that can't be done by people who are standing aloof casting aspersions on the whole thing.

Thanks for saying it so well, Bruce. Thanks for being here, now.

(Pointer courtest of Electrolite. I read Bruce's blog, but I hadn't realized he'd updated recently because the BlogLines read of his RSS feed is flakey.)

Because one cannot talk politics all the time: Book virus

Grab the nearest book.
Open the book to page 23.
Find the fifth sentence.
Post the text of the sentence in your journal...
...along with these instructions.

(Notice that the instructions do not include identifying the book.)

Let me emphasize that my theory is intended to cover only the area from which the myths I quote are drawn--not, for instance, China, Central America, or the Indus Valley--that any statement here made about Mediterranean religion or ritual before the appearance of written records must necessarily be conjectural; that I regard my intuition as by no means infallible; and that if anyone can make a guess that rings truer than mine I shall be the first to applaud it.

More thoughts about the fragmentation of the parties

My longish post from yesterday has continued to echo around my head and aggregated more thoughts.

First thought: This was posted today in another friend's Ljournal. Said friend friends-locks all hir posts, so I won't say who it's from. If I had seen this yesterday, I would definitely wanted to incorporate it into my post.

"...if a political party does not have its foundation in the determination to advance a cause that is right and that is moral, then it is not a political party; it is merely a conspiracy to seize power." --Dwight D. Eisenhower, Remarks at Fourth Annual Republican Women's National Conference, March 6, 1956.

(This is the second germaine Eisenhower statement here in the last two days--in a comment, calimac referred to Eisenhower's coinage "the military-industrial complex" as an exemplar of regulatory capture. It isn't, quite, but it's definitely closely related.)

Second thought: I'm sure there are other elements in the Republican coalition besides the four I identified. The neocons, for instance, are not exactly plutocrats and not exactly jingoists, but they have deep sympathies towards both camps.

Also important on the electoral level are the racists. For this purpose, I'm using a sense of "racism" to mean "supporters of the entrenched racial inequalities in the US". There are other senses, obviously, but that's the one which is poltically important. As long as the Democrats are the party which wants to use governmental power to support the weak against the powerful, the racists are not reachable. Racists are sort of low-class plutocrats, and again are subsumed by Phil Agre's sense of the word "conservative", which, as Burke coined it, meant "supporter of a political system which elevated fixed groups above others". For the plutocrats, the aristocracy is that of inherited wealth; for the racists, the aristocracy is a skin color. Many people believe that racists are not a significant voting block, but I've seen evidence that makes me believe that a lot of lower-class whites vote against Democrats because they associate the party with support for lower-class blacks. The only way to convince a racist to vote Democrat is to make her stop being a racist, or at least to stop voting as a racist. I have no direct ideas on how to defuse racism as a voting issue, although I think that direct appeals to white self-interest on issues of economic redistribution might be a good start. Americans need to stop thinking of "welfare" (specifically, the AFDC, WIC, Medicaid, and food stamps programs) as something that whites give to blacks and start thinking of welfare as something which primarily goes to working lower-class whites. Fortunately for this reframing, it's true; that doesn't make it trivial to promote, but I think it will help.

What other groups are there in the Republican coalition now?

And am I missing something? Is there a unified idealism holding together the Republican coalition, or is theirs purely a marriage of convenience, a reactionary huddle with the only glue a common hatred of Democrats?

Third thought: I don't really have a good sense of what groups there are in the Democratic party and what tensions there are which would drive groups away from what I stated were the core ideal of the Democratic party (as articulated previously, "Government should help the individual in need").

I mean, I understand that there are tensions in the coalition. There are always subgroups jockeying for influence, trying to pull the party this way or that; there are people who think that the environmental issues are more important than the anti-poverty initiatives, or vice versa; and there are disagreements over what particular moves would best result in a stronger party and stronger America.

But I look at the Democrats and I see a lot of groups which are all pointing towards the same goal. The identity-politics groups, the unions, the New Dealers, the greens--they all share an agreement that the government should be harnessed to ameliorate the privations that the individual is exposed to. What tensions pull people out of the coalition?

The last major defection from the party of which I'm aware was the "Scoop Jackson Democrats" moving over to the Republicans and becoming the neoconservatives (who are neither neo nor conservative). What drove them from the Democrats was the belief that the Dems were not taking serious the conduct of the Cold War; what drives them now is the belief that the Democrats are not serious about the conduct of the "war" on "terror". Obviously, they managed to attract enough Democrats away at the polls to give Bush his narrow popular vote victory this week. That's why I think that the Democrats need to concentrate on looking serious as ass-kicking defenders of America; that's a pose completely consistent with the Democratic ideal. What could be more important in the cause of protecting the individual than keeping him alive when other governments are trying to kill him?

Okay, there's another defection--the Naderites in 2000. The Naderites were, I believe, mostly Democrats who thought that the Democrats were insufficiently ideologically pure. Unlike the libertarians (who map badly to the right-left spectrum), the Naderites are definitely like the Democrats but more so; there are very few specific policies of the Naderites as expressed in their official party platform for 2004 which are incompatible with the 2004 platform of the Democratic party, let alone with the stated ideal. The Naderites were also electorially insignificant in 2004, and I think they will continue to be so until such a time as the Democrats have started winning again.

So. What fault lines are there in the Democrats, and what binding ideology is there for the Republicans?