How did FDR do it and can Democrats defend FDR liberalism today? Maybe not by calling it FDR liberalism but they surely can and do when they have the courage of their convictions. The most prominent of these instances was the fight to save Social Security Faced with Media hostility, Republican demagogy and flat out lies, Democrats rallied to the FDR liberalism banner and crushed the Republican attempts to roll back the clock. FDR would have been proud of Democrats in that fight. No triangulation. Good old fashioned political populism won the day.
And that is FDR's lesson for Obama. Politics is not a battle for the middle. It is a battle for defining the terms of the political debate. It is a battle to be able to say what is the middle.
And I believe Hofstadter recognized this as well. Hofstadter understood what was liberalism's triumphs and how they were achieved and how they could be defeated. Hofstadter would have understood so well that the Republican triumphs since Goldwater are not ideological "ideas" victories but rather victories of the psychological paranoid style - the "What Is The Matter With Kansas" question.
FDR governed as a liberal but politicked like a populist. When LBJ rightly and to his everlasting credit removed one of the Dem pillars of paranoia - racism, the GOP co-opted populist racism, added the Jeffersonian notion of government and institutional hatred, throw in a dash of paranoid Red scare, now terrorism scare, and you get political victories.
The lesson of Hofstadter is to embrace liberal governance and understand populist politics. It may sound cynical, but you must get through the door to govern. Lincoln knew this. FDR knew this. Hofstadter knew this. I hope Obama can learn this.
The Netroots believes, imo, that wishing everyone played nice don't make it so. And this partisan warfare is what we have. TNR, so "muscular" and ready to support wars, has been at the center of Democratic political unilateral disarmament. It has been at the center of the Democratic political weakness because it did not accept the political world as it was. Jon Chait was quite guilty of that as well.
The other part Chait gets wrong is this:
Indeed, if there is a single thing that the netroots most admires about the right, it is its philosophical and political unity.
The philosphical unity part is simply false. And is contradicted by Chait himself in his article. He describes the Netroots thusly:
The second bond is a shared political narrative. This is not exactly the same thing as a shared ideology. The ideology of the netroots is, indeed, somewhat amorphous, as liberal bloggers themselves often point out.
So much for philosophical unity. And this belief that philosophical unity is a requisite for political unity leads Chait to this mistake:
This [DLC] veneration of centrism created an atmosphere in which Democratic unity was impossible. Democrats who unequivocally opposed the Bush administration's agenda were not, by definition, "centrists." And so, during the early Bush years, Democrats eager to preserve their standing as moderates often found themselves acquiescing to a conservative agenda that, not long before, would have been considered far outside the mainstream.
DLC Centrism is what Chait describes, not true Centrism. As I wrote above politics is a fight to define the middle. The DLC never fought to define anything. Instead it kept running right to stay in the "Beltway Middle." I think in may respects the Netroots has been vindicated by Stu Rothenberg calling the Democrats the moderate party. To me, that was a Netroots accomplishment. And a meaningful one.
And Chait understands this, making his earlier statement perplexing:
The netroots understand that this is not a fair fight. As Black (aka Atrios) has argued, you cannot sustain "a Democratic party in which all the leading Democrats are forever running against their own party. Triangulation can work for one man, but when every leading Democrat is constantly falling all over himself (yes, this is exaggeration) to get away from Those Damn Dirty Democrats, you have a party which is without foundation and where capitulation is confused with bipartisanship."
Finally, Chait understands what the Netroots, in matters electoral, is about:
For the netroots, partisan fidelity is the sine qua non. As Moulitsas told Newsweek in 2005, "The issue is: Are you proud to be a Democrat? Are you partisan?" What they cannot forgive is Democrats or liberals who distance themselves from their party or who give ammunition to the enemy. The netroots will forgive Democrats in conservative districts for moving as far to the right as necessary to win elections. But they do everything within their power to eliminate from liberal states or districts moderates like Joe Lieberman or Jane Harman, whose stances are born of conviction rather than necessity. This is precisely the same principle espoused by Norquist and other GOP activists. They will defend Republicans who need to demonstrate their independence from the national party in order to maintain their electoral viability. (As Norquist once remarked about Lincoln Chafee, "A Republican from Rhode Island is a gift from the gods.") But deviation by a Republican from a conservative state--say, Arizonan John McCain--is unforgivable.
Frankly, Chait tries to make this sound extreme when it fact it is merely political common sense. That he does not realize that and that TNR and others like TNR do not see that is mind boggling. And the funny thing is folks like Chait fail to grasp that politics is inseparable from policy. I had a similar experience with Peter Beinart:
Peter writes:
Where we part company is in our analysis of where liberals are more generally in the struggle against jihadism. After quoting me as writing that John Kerry lacked "a vision of national greatness in a threatening world, something liberals have not had for a very long time," Armando retorts "Sez who Mr. Beinart? Karl Rove?"
I don't know if Karl Rove is saying that, and I don't particularly care. One of the most self-defeating tendencies among liberals today, in my view, is this idea that if conservatives are attacking liberals for something, we have to deny we have any problem, so as not to play into our opponents hands. That's a great recipe for intellectual paralysis. In the late 1980s, conservatives said the country didn't trust liberals to fight crime. Bill Clinton didn't deny the problem. He acknowledged and solved it--not only defusing an issue that helped sink Michael Dukakis, but creating a "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime" synthesis that helped create safer cities.
Beinart makes a fundamental mistake in not caring about the politics (my Rove metaphor is about the politics) of national security. For it is the politics of national security which has hamstringed reasoned debate on national security not only among Democrats, but in the country as a whole. Why were the voices of principled Truman-like reason crowded off the stage in 2002, including by a large number of Democrats? Why was General Wesley Clark not heard? It is because of the politics of national security.
In any event, there is more to say about Chait's piece. In particular, I think Chait misses the failure of the Netroots to continue to see itself as pushing the Democratic Party, to places it needs to be, on policy and politically. The Iraq Supplemental is a prime example. But I don't have the time now to keep going with it. But one thing I do want to make clear - it is a very good, very interesting and, I think, a very important piece Chait has written. Read it for yourself.
