Progressive World Review

Digby has an excellent post today that explains a lot about the behavior of the Democrats.  Following up on Glenn Greenwald’s post, ‘The baseless, and failed, “move to the center” cliché‘ where Greenwald lays bare the absurd notion that Democrats have to play follow the leader to the Republicans over “security” and “terrorism,”

In 2006, Rep. Johnson was challenged by a 31-year-old Democrat, Chris Murphy, who ran on a platform of, among other things, ending the Iraq War, opposing Bush policies on eavesdropping and torture, and rejecting what he called the “false choice between war and civil liberties.” Johnson outspent her Democratic challenger by a couple million dollars, and based her campaign on fear-mongering ads focusing on Murphy’s opposition to warrantless eavesdropping
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The result? Johnson was crushed
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Johnson’s final margin of defeat was 12 points. Despite continuing to represent a tough, split district, Rep. Murphy — as he runs for re-election for the first time — recently voted against passage of the FISA/telecom amnesty bill, obviously unafraid that such Terrorism fear-mongering works any longer.

That pattern has repeated itself over and over. In the 2006 midterm election, Karl Rove repeatedly made clear that the GOP strategy rested on making two National Security issues front and center in the midterm campaign: Democrats’ opposition to warrantless eavesdropping and their opposition to “enhanced interrogation techniques” against Terrorists. Not only did the Democrats swat away those tactics, taking away control of both houses of Congress in 2006, but more unusually, not a single Democratic incumbent in either the House or Senate — not one — lost an election. (emphasis original)

So why then, do the Democrats repeatedly capitulate to the Republicans?  “Conventional wisdom” has it that the Democrats need to distance themselves from their fringe base and “move to the center” in a bipartisan effort to “get Washington working” again.  But what moving to the center really means is giving in to the right.  The vast majority of Americans feel this country is moving in the wrong direction so how does it make any sense for Democrats to move at all to the right?  American voters have rejected Republican “values” and have handed over the reins of Congress to the Democrats, Bush’s approval ratings are at an all time low, clearly voters want change and yet with this mandate Democrats have yet to accomplish a single significant thing.  The war rolls on, impeachment is off the table, warrantless eavesdropping on Americans and retroactive immunity for lawbreaking telecoms is poised to become law, the Democratically controlled Congress is hardly any different from the Republican one.  And that, as Digby points out, is essentially the point.

Once considered the party of the working class, Democrats have been successfully labeled as elitists by the Republicans.  It’s extraordinary that the party of the ultra rich has managed to sell themselves as the party of the people but that in fact, is what has happened, beginning with Nixon and reaching full force with Reagan. Democrats have been on the run ever since and in a desperate and self loathing attempt to reestablish themselves as “regular people” have managed to repudiate the liberal ideals that once defined them,

Repudiating liberalism is a symbolic gesture required of Democrats by the political establishment to prove that they are not elitists. And it goes beyond mere posturing on gay marriage or abortion. The national security challenge is always not to appear to be “an appeaser.” The way you prove that is by refusing to appease the Democratic base. The economic challenge is to walk very carefully on taxes because it “costs jobs” for the hard working man and the struggling businessman alike who are in this thing together against the liberal elites. The cultural challenge is to not appear to be too friendly to blacks or too unfriendly to socially conservative religion in order to prove that that you are not beholden to the “extremists.” The entire construct is based upon Democrats distancing themselves from their most ardent supporters (which is quite convenient for Republicans.)

What Democrats have completely failed to understand however, is while people may have bought into the Republican’s smoke and mirrors for a time, the complete failure of the Republicans to effectively lead this country has, momentarily at least, broken the spell.  Voters may not be jumping on the liberal bandwagon as yet but if the Democrats were to truly lead this country instead of playing into the Republican’s hands, Americans would give them the chance to prove that their vision for America can work.  That is if they still have the vision.

–Paul Wilden

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