It’s a frustrating time to be in the Democratic party. We’ve won a lot of small victories, but it feels like none of them got us what we thought we were getting. The party (perhaps like always) seems always capable of letting us down at key moments. The President, while he’s been active on some issues, has been silent, or sometimes even counterproductive, on others. We got a health care bill, sure, but a watered-down one. We got Wall Street reform, but weakened. We got a drawdown in Iraq, but it seems hollow. The feeling of discontent, especially on sites like this one, is palpable. And there’s a lot of grumbling about staying home, or voting third party. There are people that feel that a short-term loss will lead to a long-term gain for the party.
I have a message for these people.
The way you get what you want isn’t by staying home. It’s not by going somewhere else. It’s not by conceding 2010 in the hopes of salvaging a better 2012 or 2016 or whatever year you’re shooting for. Letting the Republicans back into power will undo what small victories we’ve won, even if they weren’t the victories we wanted. More importantly to you, though, the message that the Democratic party gets won’t be the message you want (as always). Regardless of the reasons, regardless of the data, the message that the party establishment gets will be that they acted too quickly, too boldly. They tried to do too much. Their agenda was too liberal, too unpopular. So sorry, they’ll say. We won’t make that mistake again. We all know how it goes by now. Whenever the Democratic Party encounters defeat, they move to what they perceive as the center. Obviously this is not a good tendency, but we ignore it at our peril.
We have to all remember that the Democratic party, ideologically, represents a very wide, diverse, and sometimes incompatible spectrum of ideas and points of view. The gulf between, say, Ben Nelson and Tom Harkin (or Russ Feingold) is much larger than that between, say, Scott Brown and Jim DeMint. There are a lot of different, competing interests to satisfy just to get even common-sense things done. This is both a function of party philosophy (i.e. a conscious decision to be a big tent and allow extreme variation), and a result of the Republican Party's attempts at rigidly enforcing purity, as well. The current makeup of the party, at least, makes pushing the agenda that we all want, relatively difficult. This is a fixable problem, but it will take time. I do believe that a liberal (yes, liberal – I want that word back, goddamn it) agenda is A Good Thing. I think the things that most of us on this site want, are some of the best options available for the country, and are popular when people know what they actually are, instead of caricatures. I think there is a lot to be gained in the party not playing it safe like they always seem to do. And I think, in the end, we will all get most of what we want.
But the way we will achieve that change will not be quick or easy. It was never meant to be. As much as many of us (myself included) thought we really had a fighting chance to get things like single-payer or even a decent public option, or a stronger financial bill, or a better stimulus, or a strong energy bill...the fact of the matter is that change was always going to be incremental. It almost always is – our government is designed to frustrate change. Whether this is a good feature or not is in the eye of the beholder, but that isn’t important in the least. What is important is that it is what we have to deal with. It is the lay of the land. The upshot of this is that we will have to work at it for a long time. And therefore, the fact of the matter is that really, not voting, or voting third party, is the easy way to register your discontent. It doesn’t cost you anything. None of your time and money, none of your blood, sweat, and tears. It’s the safe choice, the moral victory choice. But it accomplishes frighteningly little. When people do that, the party never responds the way we would like; the Democratic Party would rather move right and chase independents and moderates, than move left to satisfy us - that is, unless we change the way the party works. And so, just as the party’s leaders inevitably fail when they play it safe and accept only moral victories, so does the left wing of the party. If we want a Democratic Party that does what we want it to, then we have to rebuild it ourselves.
So: given that, what we need to do isn’t to threaten to withhold our votes or go third party. The damage a Republican takeover of Congress would do is significant enough. But I’m not saying that the only thing for it is to just suck it up and vote Democratic and then do nothing, either. Liberals, progressives, and others – whatever you want to call yourselves – need to build a robust and muscular movement. We need to do more to dominate the internal party agenda. We need to be even more aggressive with primary challenges. We need to work to shift the spectrum of acceptable policy positions to the left. If we want single-payer to be seen as the "reasonable" choice (which it is), or for Reagan-style Voodoo economics to be seen as "unreasonable," then we need to exercise the power to make them be seen that way. We need to, in short, pave the way for a future, more liberal-friendly political climate. And this is not an easy task, nor one we can achieve in the short term. Movements are not built in a day. In Goldwater’s era, the religious conservative wing of the Republican Party was at best a sliver, a shadow of what it would become; it really wasn’t until the 80s (charitably) or the mid-90s that they had any serious sway, and arguably not until the last several years until they had the apparent full or near-full control of the Republican Party that we all seem so used to. They played it slow, and didn’t give up under any circumstances. Similarly, the Civil Rights Movement didn’t start with Rosa Parks or Dr. King; it started with people like Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey a couple generations before. It took a lot of work, and a lot of time, but ultimately there was victory. And victory can be there for us too.
Ultimately, if what we really want is a Democratic Party that represents our interests well, we must play the long game. It will be a tough, uneven, winding road, one upon which little will seem like victory until the final victory is won. It will seem hellish, but as Churchill said, "when you're going through hell...keep going!" We must work to get the victories we want. We must not be discouraged by what, compared to the arc of history, are minor setbacks. We have missed opportunities, and we have not gotten what we all wanted. We haven’t gotten an end to DOMA and DADT, we haven’t gotten the healthcare system we deserve, we haven’t engineered the help that the struggling and suffering need. We haven’t gotten the robust alternative energy packages we wanted, we haven’t rolled back as much of the Bush-era "security" farces as we might like, and we haven’t done a multitude of other things. But as we work for these goals in the long-term, we can’t sacrifice the short-term either. We need to salvage as much as we can out of 2010, hold the line in Congress, and then put our heads down and get back to work on building the Party we need, want and deserve. A better Democratic Party, one that will stand for the things the country needs it to, and that we want it to. So don’t go home, or vote third party. Stay in the fold, and let’s build our party together.