My Offer is This: A Very Small Amount

Jon Chait's reply to the "liberaltarian" proposal is both amusing and sound, including such crucial points as "wooing a small bloc with unpopular views is not a sound political strategy." He notes that "the politically fertile terrain seems to lie in the anti-libertarian direction" and that the Democrats' non-libertarian nature notwithstanding, there's a non-crazy case to be made that libertarians should vote for Democrats rather than Republicans anyway. In sum:

I think the spirit of my proposed arrangement was best expressed by Michael Corleone, who said, "You can have my answer now if you like. My offer is this: nothing." I don't blame libertarians for wanting more than the lesser of two evils. But, when your beliefs are wildly unpopular, supporting the lesser of two evils is about the best you can expect.

With that as a new baseline, I'm prepared to make some minor concessions. There are a variety of ways in which the status quo has the heavy hand of the state being deployed to further entrench existing wealth and privilege, notably certain aspects of intellectual property policy. Liberals have our own reasons for opposing such measures but, in practice, liberal politicians are often nowhere to be seen on these issues. What's more, there's a foreign policy aspect to these questions and I think I'm more eager than Chait to see the Democrats oppose senseless militarism. At the end of the day, though, I agree with this conclusion:

The most impressive Democratic performances in 2006 came from candidates like Bob Casey, James Webb, and Heath Shuler, who combined economic populism with social traditionalism. The ideological counterpart to this strategy would be to flesh out a kind of liberal-populist fusionism, rooted in fighting the ways that massive inequality and income fluctuation have undermined traditional family life.

That's where the real possibilities lie -- trying to outline a vision where progressive economic policy is seen as a better means of shoring up family life than is legal discrimination against gays and lesbians.

Comments

Know your coalition partners. If you want rural votes, I suspect you need to be willing to throw gay rights under the bus. I don't want that Democratic Party, and I prefer income inequality (at present levels) to increasing minority rights inequality. I'm not that surprised to hear that someone who works at TNR prefers the opposite trade-off; I'm a little worried that everyone else in the party seems to agree.

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | December 17, 2006 4:49 PM

The most impressive Democratic performances in 2006 came from candidates like Bob Casey, James Webb, and Heath Shuler, who combined economic populism with social traditionalism.

Arrgh -- social traditionalism combined with economic populism (what do we call that -- 'American Peronism'?) would have to be the combination least likely to attract my vote.

But it may be that no party really gives a damn about those few of us secular types who favor gay marriage, free trade, and an end to 'no knock' SWAT raids and the 'war on drugs'?

I can't even vote Libertarian, since the Libertarian party is such a bunch of nut-cases.

I guess the only positive is, whatever large and small disasters befall all of us, they won't be *my* fault ;)

Posted by Slocum | December 17, 2006 5:02 PM

If you want rural votes, I suspect you need to be willing to throw gay rights under the bus.

'rural' s/b 'elderly'

Posted by neil | December 17, 2006 5:14 PM

Tim: Supporting rising inequality won't get us any votes, it will get us corporate cash. And do you really not think that economic issues are important to minorities, or should we just only worry about the wealthy white educated minorities?

There is no reason that the national party needs to "throw gay rights under the bus" given our resounding victory in November directly after the legalization of gay marriage in NJ and the solidification of New England as a socially liberal congressional base. The new congress is far more socially and economically progressive. Which states could we have won in if we replaced our populists with gay-rights supporting tax cutters?

Posted by Sam L. | December 17, 2006 5:14 PM

And do you really not think that economic issues are important to minorities, or should we just only worry about the wealthy white educated minorities?

My education in this area is pretty spotty, but when I think of where populism has been most successful in the past, I think it's in the South. (I'm thinking in specific of politicians like Huey Long.) I'm sure that there are some people who believe that the South is the same area where minority rights were most protected; I'm just not one of those people. (I seem to recall that Long was better for African-Americans than I expected, though.) I think "populism" is the natural ideology of Micheal Lind's* white majoritarian party. Right now, that's the Republican Party, and cultural populism is what they run on. I'm not crazy about the idea of the Democratic Party racing to become a different flavor of white majoritarian party.

* I think I actually stole the populism-white majoritarian connection from Lind's discussion as well.

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | December 17, 2006 5:35 PM

Are you going soft on the "It was really a victory for conservative democrats! Heath Shuler, Heath Shuler, Heath Shuler!" crowd?

Posted by William Burns | December 17, 2006 5:35 PM

Not only do I not think there's any need to "throw gay rights under the bus," but in the long run it's counterproductive. Like civil rights 40 years ago, and women's rights 30 years ago, equality for gays is nearing the point of mass acceptance in most of the country. While I think individual candidates need to find their own comfort level with this one with respect to specifics (e.g. marriage v. civil unions), the broad Dem stance should be that gays are people like everyone else, and we're going to treat them as fellow human beings, and not like creatures who have some sort of disease we're ashamed of and have to be locked in the attic lest they scare everyone by holding hands in public.

Then we stand back and accept the reality that different parts of the country are moving at different speeds - that Connecticut may well have gay marriage before Missouri OK's civil unions (or even before Virginia repeals its We Hate Heather Poe laws), but we'll keep nudging things along in the right direction.

The way we should approach economic populism isn't to combine it with the monstrous policies the not-very-Christian Right calls 'pro-family,' but to make the point that economic populism IS pro-family in and of itself. Decent wages mean parents don't have to choose between working overtime or a second job to support their kids, and actually being with their kids in the evenings. Universal health care means parents don't have to agonize over choosing between medical care for themselves and their kids, or the rent money. And so forth.

Speaking of overtime, this society should put a healthy premium on parents' spending a certain amount of time with their children. And this means that an employee's time should only in very limited circumstances be a free resource for the employer. But the fact is that millions of Americans aren't eligible for overtime pay, which means that after the first forty hours, they're working for free.

In a situation like that, the employer's economic interest is to get as many hours out of the employee as the employee can be coerced into working. Unless one has a very high base salary (six figures, at least) or is in a profession whose calendar doesn't fit the usual mold (e.g. teaching), one's overtime should not be free; it should be more expensive than the first 40 hours each week.

No one should be forced to give away their time to an employer.

Posted by RT | December 17, 2006 5:51 PM

I don't know about the "you have wildly unpopular views" argument. It seems to me that libertarians are much more likely than the average person to actually know the policies of the person they're voting for, instead of voting for them based on their haircut or their vague rhetoric. Therefore, a politician could subtly change the actual policies he supports to get the libertarian vote, but continue to do the meaningless campaign drivel to get the vote of the rest of the people.

Posted by Cryptic Ned | December 17, 2006 6:13 PM

Are you going soft on the "It was really a victory for conservative democrats! Heath Shuler, Heath Shuler, Heath Shuler!" crowd?

Sing it, William Burns! Let us not forget people like Jon Tester, apparently pro-choice on libertarian grounds, and Claire McCaskill. John Yarmuth, pro-choice and pro-affirmative action in Kentucky. Carol "100 percent pro-choice" Shea-Porter was probably the most impressive upset. And we could probably go on.

Posted by Matt Weiner | December 17, 2006 7:30 PM

I may not regularly comment on this blog, but I'm going to disagree with you, Tim. I think economic inequality is the most pressing problem of our age (apart from global warming, but going anti-environment isn't going to get Democrats anywhere). I'm more than willing to settle for civil unions in blue states in order to put the corporations in their place and get national health insurance. Anyone else?

Posted by SFG | December 17, 2006 8:10 PM

Re: If you want rural votes, I suspect you need to be willing to throw gay rights under the bus.

Not under the bus, but firmly on the back burner. Say “No” to gay marriage, but “Maybe” to civil unions (the GOP gets away with this after all). And other than marriage (and a few special case things, of which service in the military is the largest, and some state level things like adoptions) gay rights are pretty well achieved. No one is proposing overturning Lawrence or Romers after all. And the sorts of judges a Democratic president appoints or a Democratic Congress affirms won’t be doing those things. So I don’t think us gays (yep, I’m one) have too much to worry about if the Democratic party does not genuflect in our direction daily.
To be blunt, I’d rather gay marriage was postponed until I’m on my death bed and beyond if we can have universal healthcare and no more preemptive wars.

Posted by JonF | December 17, 2006 8:17 PM

In what sense is James Webb a "social traditionalist"?

He's more pro-choice and pro-gay-rights than any senator in Virginia history, and no less liberal on these issues than almost any other Democrat in the Senate.

It was his relative cultural liberalism (as well as the unlikely prospect that Independents would turn out to vote) I thought would doom his candidacy. Of course, I was wrong.

* * *

I could say this whole thing has been cyclical, but that wouldn't be nuanced enough. "Less government" has tended to be code for certain things to certain people at certain periods of time.

Reagan obviously ran on some kind of "libertarian" platform in 1980, and - you know - won, but even if the broad center of the electorate was comforable with if not supported a certain amount of deregulation and opposed the repeal of the 1960s they didn't want to see social security abolished or heroin legalized.

Maybe it is the case that at any given time a certain cluter of issues is synonymous with libertarianism. The reason that Democrats may now be able to grab that mantle is that civil liberties are at the heart of that cluster of issues today much as they were during the Second World War, and the anti-war party tends also to be the party of civil liberties (as the Republicans were in the 1940s).

Posted by Linus | December 17, 2006 8:41 PM

I don't get it. I thought the main accusation against TNR, the DLC, et al. was that they wrongly consider themselves to be liberal only because they're pro-choice, pro-gay, and liberal on other social issues, while at the same time they sell the party down the river on economic and (esp.) foreign policy issues. Now I'm hearing that it's not surprising TNR is inclined to focus only on economic liberalism while selling the party down the river on social issues.

I've come to hate Marty Peretz as much as the next guy, but let's get our story straight at least. There's a real Eastasia/Eurasia problem lingering beneath the surface here.

Posted by JP | December 17, 2006 9:07 PM

In what sense is James Webb a "social traditionalist"?

He's very much a celebrator of military virtues and military culture. I think this can fairly be viewed as "socially traditionalist". I fully understand that present-day grassroots liberalism is actually very openly pro-military (or, more precisely, pro-soldier) both in its rhetoric and its substantive views. But this wasn't necessarily the case a decade or three ago. It's sort of a new development and I don't think it's unreasonable that a lot of observers haven't internalized it yet.

Posted by JP | December 17, 2006 9:13 PM

JP: I won't say I'm the most reliable judge of the DLC/TNR/Liebertrayal crowd, but as far as I can tell, they are pro-choice, pro-gay equality, etc., but they don't think the Democratic Party can win if it's willing to stick up for those beliefs.

Similarly, at least for a lot of DLCers, on the economic stuff: they believe in universal health care and a stronger safety net, but they still haven't recovered from the pounding they got in 1994, and live in fear that if the Dems stand up for these things, they'll get similarly hammered now.

OTOH, some of them actually seem to buy into the whole "whatever's good for the GDP must be good for Joe Sixpack" fallacy.

A similar division seems to hold on Iraq. Some of the centrists would have preferred that the Iraq issue had never come up, so we wouldn't have had to invade, and Dems wouldn't have been forced to take a stand. Because as they see it, even if the war was a bad idea, Dems still have to look 'tough' on foreign policy, and fighting wars is how you avoid being a girly-man.

Other DLCers quite clearly believe even now that we should have gone to war with Iraq, and we would have won by now if the Bushies weren't such incompetents, but we should give it One Last Try to win the war.

They all wind up in the same place with respect to their advice to the Democratic Party, right down to their need to shoot down anyone more than infinitesimally to their left. But they're a bit schizoid, since they really are lefties on social issues, but don't think that's a tenable position for the Dems. However, most of them are amenable to at least part of the progressive economic agenda. Even guys like Lieberman are for a minimum wage hike, for instance. But they're afraid to go too far.

Posted by RT | December 17, 2006 9:34 PM

JP:

Roughly what RT said in the first paragraph, including the caveat about reporter reliability. The one place where TNR and the DLC touch is a mortal terror of what they (or others, perhaps) might consider "identity politics." At least for TNR, that's a pretty longstanding attitude, and not one particularly chargeable to anyone who arrived in the last decade.

SFG, JonF:

I'm more than willing to settle for civil unions in blue states in order to put the corporations in their place and get national health insurance.

If that's all it takes, I'm happy to do the same. Hell, I'm happy to do so for substantially less than national health insurance. I just don't believe that's all it will take. As I said above, I think those votes are going to the white majoritarian party, and such a party just feels creepy to me. If we're able to bring them in without selling everyone else out, fantastic. I think people are way overestimating how much we'll get from tweaking our self-presentation.

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | December 17, 2006 9:47 PM

small request: more NBA, less politics :) boston celtics in the house!!!

Posted by chet snicker | December 17, 2006 10:58 PM

I've always thought, abortion issue aside, that Gary Bauer would be an organizer for UAW or the Steelworkers. Other people who think this way sometimes decide we need to "solve" the abortion debate, with "solve" meaning we make it harder for women to have an abortion. I don't think that's the right remedy. Maybe Jim Webb has the right remedy.

Posted by benton | December 17, 2006 11:07 PM

I won't say I'm the most reliable judge of the DLC/TNR/Liebertrayal crowd, but as far as I can tell, they are pro-choice, pro-gay equality, etc., but they don't think the Democratic Party can win if it's willing to stick up for those beliefs.

I understand your point, but it doesn't sound exactly right to me.

For one thing, I don't think there's a "DLC/TNR" crowd. I shouldn't have thrown the DLC reference into my initial comment. While both groups may have equal status as liberal-blog bete noires, they're pretty different.

The DLC is made up of people who believe in good government, pragmatism, etc., both substantively and rhetorically. They think that Democrats should run on a platform of let's-put-aside-the-partisan-bickering-and-get-things-done. On both foreign policy and social issues, they tend to be difference-splitters. It's the Third Way.

TNR isn't like this at all. For TNR, no matter what the issue, they approach it with hammer and tongs. Sometimes this causes them to attack Republicans. Sometimes it causes them to attack Democrats. But they aren't difference-splitters on any particular issue. Years ago when I actually used to read Mickey Kaus, he had a tagline on his TNR link that said "Left on Welfare, Right on Warfare." That isn't exactly correct but it's on the right track - it should be more like Left on Abortion, Gay Rights, Health Care, and Balanced Budgets, Right on Warfare, Racial Issues, and Some Other Stuff. This might very well add up to being as bad as or worse than the DLC, but it's not the same thing. And while I haven't read TNR very much since it put most of its stuff behind the paywall, I don't remember ever reading anything other than a full-throated defense of abortion rights and gay rights in a TNR article.

Posted by JP | December 18, 2006 11:14 AM

White majoritarian party? I suppose, though the region of the country that liked segregation was the South, and we didn't make any gains there. What issues in particular do you think we'd need? I'm not against enforcing immigration laws: more workers means lower salaries, after all, or throwing NAFTA down the well. (What do you mean that was years ago? It can always be repealed!) Yes, I'm sure many people who hold these positions are David Duke types, but I don't think it's unreasonable that a country should look after its own citizens.

Posted by SFG | December 18, 2006 12:56 PM

The current progressive alliance is centered in the following highly successful combo:
* social libertarianism (let me have whatever sort of family I want, don't lock my kids up for trying drugs, don't spy on me, let me have guns if I want, let me have contraceptives if I want, let me have religion or not as I want, etc.)
* economic populism (tax the obscenely rich and big corporations, help everyone else)
* environmentalism (don't fuck up my air and water or poison all the birds, please)

(Of course, there's also honesty and accountability!)

This is really mostly a traditional liberal combination, but with a more libertarian tone to it. Successful candidates may appear socially "traditionalist", but they're not: they're socially libertarian. The view which comes out if you push them "leave me alone, don't force me to have a traditional family or a non-traditional one." It's telling that Republicans have to constantly pretend that gays are "recruiting" in order to whip up anti-gay sentiment.

Posted by Nathanael Nerode | December 18, 2006 3:32 PM

I don't know about highly successful. The Democrats won because of Bush's screwup on Iraq and it's not clear if they'll be able to push any further than that.

Posted by SFG | December 18, 2006 6:24 PM

Remember it was beloved moderate Bill Clinton who signed the Defense of Marriage Act not the populist Ross Perot. Populism has always had an us versus them quality to it but there is nothing inherent in economic populism that leads directly to social conservatism. Populists believe in government remedies to inequality. I think all Dems could get behind that.

Posted by Cross of Gold | December 19, 2006 5:35 AM