With Democrats facing potential disaster in the fall (and for the foreseeable future if the Supreme Court decides to let state legislatures determine election outcomes), the intensity of the intra-party vitriol is rising. Which has me trying to puzzle through a bit more what *is* the Democratic Party. A few points below, while I try to organize my thoughts on this in a more coherent and comprehensive fashion.
Some notes in search of a thesis:
1) political science, generally speaking, has long observed that American political parties are weak in comparison with those in Europe, for example. How? European political parties, particularly the traditional labor and social democratic parties didn't just spring to life during election season to organize campaigns. They were fully integrated social and cultural structures, with local clubs of various kinds, their own media and an entire ecosystem for forging and reinforcing party loyalty and identity year round. American political parties aren't like that. They're vehicles for political office-seekers, not nurseries for cultivating future leaders and building sustained communities of adherents and activists (in the United States, unions have historically played some of these roles, but they’re been cut down to size in dramatic fashion since the 1970s). Parties spam our inboxes with fundraising appeals, but they don’t organize a socio-cultural network that structures a person’s life. European political parties aren’t really like that anymore, either. But the point is that that’s been one way to think about political parties in the past.
The Republican Party itself isn’t very different, but the broader conservative *movement* has forged a much more comprehensive and affiliated network of affinity groups than have liberals. For all the talk about liberal higher education, to take one example, Christian universities are more coherent ideological inculcators of a specific partisan-informed worldview than are any liberal universities. Bethany Moreton’s book, To Serve God and Wal-mart, depicts in detail how the retail behemoth’s owners converted their wealth into an array of more and less formal educational institutions that propagate a vision of how American fundamentalist Christianity and “free markets” reinforce one another. They did this as one front in a sprawling campaign to reshape political power in the United States. Other big businesses might donate lots of money to the Democratic Party, but they’re not engaged in this sort of deeper cultural project. In this sense, American political parties, but especially the Democratic Party, are weak.
2)further on that point, Josh Marshall has an insightful discussion about the Democrats’ relatively heterogenous coalition of constituencies and why that poses challenges the Republicans don’t have (at least to the same degree):
Many people talk about satisfying or addressing the needs of the Democrats’ base. But the Democrats don’t have a base, at least not in the sense that Republicans do. Probably 60% to 70% of Republicans’ base is made up of white, Christian conservatives. As big societal groupings go that’s a highly coherent and ideologically and ethnically homogenous group. The closest Democrats have to such a group is African-Americans, but they make up somewhere between 20% and 25% of the party’s voters. To the extent the party has a “base,” it is made up of African-Americans, white liberals, Hispanics and other ethnic minorities, cultural/sexual and religious minorities, women (especially single women) and other historical out-groups. This “base” doesn’t actually think or want anything because it is made up of a handful of groups that are quite distinct and often want different things — or at least, do not all want the same things.
In addition, other groupings, including big corporate interests whom Democrats have embraced much more enthusiastically since the 1980s, and you get a party, in Marshall’s words “whose leadership has [been bred and selected] for a general timidity.” This is an enormous problem for liberals and progressives, obviously. But the solution to it, Marshall suggests, is not as simple as Democratic leaders developing better character. As Will Rogers is quoted as having said, “I’m not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat.” These dynamics impede the prospects of seeing through a coherent, comprehensive agenda.
3)A few weeks ago, I quoted from Tom Frank’s famous passage in What’s the Matter with Kansas?, about the Republican mobs who screamed for cultural blood and got tax cuts for the rich in return. Frank turned out to be wrong about this, of course. The GOP and its Supreme Court have delivered the biggest prize of all, the end of a constitutional right to an abortion. Part of what explains that outcome is something a friend pointed out to me after I wrote that post - that a lot of that mob Frank evoked are now not just political activists. They’ve ascended to political office, as state legislators, members of Congress, governors and judges. That progression, from activist to office may sound like part of a master plan organized from the top. But in important ways, it was much more organic than that. Of course, Koch money, Adelson money, Coors money, the Federalist Society and so on have mattered enormously. But grassroots conservative activists have pursued more single-mindedly and comprehensively than liberal ones a vision for winning votes to seize political power. Republican leaders have both helped lead this campaign and adapted to it. But this particular success story has many authors, from local school boards, to state legislative campaigns, from churches to community organizations, to talk radio and FOX News. They may have gleefully mocked the “community organizer” Barack Obama, but the American right has created a well-financed, multifaceted, sprawling, and unrelenting movement, from the community level to the national corridors of power that has reshaped American politics.
4)Gore Vidal once said that Democrats and Republicans represented two wings of the property party. He’s not wrong! Our country’s political economy is skewed to favor the rich in every imaginable way, evermore so since the end of the New Deal era, around 1980. One party is a full-throated cheerleader for that, even if its leaders throw occasional hissy fits targeting specific businesses because those businesses aren’t sufficiently culturally intolerant. The other is, depending on your point of view, either an ambivalent participant in abetting the pro-rich skew, or a much more willing one, its public rhetoric notwithstanding. Regardless, a growing, if still small share of Democratic officeholders are more comfortable arguing for systemic criticisms of American capitalism in recent years, reflecting a larger constituency clamoring for that kind of approach. And it may be that, as the generally more liberal - indeed, socialist-identifying - younger millennials and Generation Z occupy more political offices, a more serious shift in debates on our political economy could happen.
All of which is to say that, even for those who view the deck as particularly stacked in favor of wealthy interests (and I agree), it’s not a given that it will always be that way. But unless you’re a revolutionary, in the sense that you do not think any serious change could happen within the broad confines of our current institutional arrangements, it is a virtual certainty that the only viable vehicle for a more serious challenge to our economic arrangements will come through the Democratic Party, however the contest over what it is and what it could be it ultimately plays out.
5)Of course, when we think about parties, we think first and foremost about its highest profile officeholders. For the party that holds the presidency, that means the President himself. Many will also think about the party’s own formal structures, for example, the Democratic National Committee. But if we are going to understand the nature of political power in our country and, therefore, how we want to shape and transform it, we need to have a clearer understanding of its constitutive parts beyond those formal structures and high profile officeholders, including the potential points of contention and malleability within parties, more broadly understood. I don’t presume, by the way, that everyone reading this has the same ideas about what change or transformation should like. But whatever your desired ultimate destination, taking stock of what political parties do and don’t do is important.
This is an initial, scattered attempt to think that through.