Tue
Apr 3 2007
08:26 am
By: R. Neal
David Sirota has this must-read, thought-provoking look at "personality politics" that explains a lot about why we have Democratic candidates who are all over the map on issues (and why the GOP would take Fred Thompson seriously as a candidate):
Obviously, the Democratic Party did not engineer the original rise of personality politics. That happened as part of a broader political evolution that took place in the era of infotainment. But a political party's active efforts to prioritize personality politics over any core ideology unifying the party is something very new, and something that changes the definition of political party in fundamental ways. If one of the objectives of a political party is to shun any core agenda, then the political party ceases to become a political party, and becomes something akin to a gang: an entity that is concerned exclusively with power and money and that sees anything like convictions, conscience or ideology that might get in the way of those assets as a mortal threat.
His prescription: Populist campaigns built around issues instead of personalities. I could not agree more wholeheartedly.
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But a political party's
This explains, or at least characterizes, two recently observed phenomena:
1) We were watching Sen. Kerry on TDS last week and wondered how such a smart, articulate (if wordy), decorated war veteran lost an election to a dim, inarticulate, draft dodger. (Rhetorically, that is; we KNOW why. Matthew Dowd, the architect of portraying Kerry as a flip-flopper, has flip-flopped and admits Kerry was right on things like Iraq.)
2) Joe Scarborough had a panel of fellow conservatives on last night to stress the point that Bush is a total bust as a true conservative. But did manage to fawn over Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy and his SCOTUS picks (the ones who can be counted on to virtually always vote Bush's way).
Machines
Actually, the GOP used to have the problem of putting up personalities (Eisenhower, eg) in lieu of a coherent agenda. The Goldwater-inspired conservative movement essentially ended that, getting politicians of all levels of charisma to adopt the "conservative movement" agenda. Ronald Reagan was able to add charisma to the mix, but the party took strength as much from the conservative movement agenda as it did from Reagan's personality. For the next couple decades, the GOP just nominated a reliable pol to advance the conservative agenda, the candidate himself needing only minimal levels of charisma (think of the Bushes). But now, the conservative movement is in shambles as its own leaders simultaneously betrayed its small government ideology and mutated it into a narrow sectarian religious agenda. Also, the very cynicism about government at the heart of the conservative movement revealed itself in the incompetence of Republicans with respect to governance itself. Add to the mix a messianic neo-conservative foreign policy based on a warped version of late Cold War Reaganism ("Everybody LOVES freedom!!!!!!") and you have the modern GOP. The conservative brand is tainted, with all the movement types declaring like the Communists of old that the modern Republican Party isn't "truly conservative." 2006 marked the electorate's first fundamental rejection of conservatism as a governing philosophy. What does the GOP have left then? Personalities and rhetoric.
As for the Democrats, they used to have a coherent agenda based around the New Deal. But, like with conservatism today, New Deal liberalism revealed its internal contradictions with the explosion of urban violence, deindustrialization, government debt and bureaucracy, and stagflation. And just like today, it took a failed foreign war to make painfully apparent for the electorate the failures of New Deal liberalism. After 1968, the Democrats sought personalities (Clinton, Carter) or interest-group acceptable pols who catered to the surviving elements of the New Deal coalition. The result was ideological incoherence and electoral frustration. Democrats who veered either to the right (DLC) or to the left (Ted Kennedy) seemed to be either eating the crumbs of the Republicans or the Democratic past.
The modern progressive movement of which Sirota speaks is the first major attempt by Democrats since the New Deal to fashion an ideologically coherent agenda that pulls voters and politicians together. Some of its ideology draws from New Deal liberalism, but much of it is strikingly modern. I suspect that if Obama wins the nomination the Democrats will have found their Reagan - a charismatic leader able to convey the new progressive agenda to the wider electorate. At that point Democrats will be able to cement the demise of conservatism and the rise of the Democratic Party and progressivism as a positive force in national politics. After Obama it will possible for Democrats to plug-and-play acceptable politicians who advance the progressive agenda in lieu of a charismatic reinvent-the-agenda man.