The Next Big Idea
Kevin Drum distills a thread begun by Rick Perlstein in the Boston Review and continuing on with Henry Farrell and Matt Yglesias. He summarizes it (and I distill it further):
Rick Perlstein: Democrats need to quit dicking around with “triangulation” and obsessive short-term poll watching, and instead pick a few big ideas and stick with them through thick and thin. People respect that. The actual nature of the big ideas that will revive the party is left as an exercise for the reader.
Henry Farrell: Perlstein is on the right track, but there’s a bigger point to make: Dems don’t just need to pick a few existing issues they can win with, they need to invent some brand new issues that aren’t even on the radar screen right now…. Dems need to invent some brand new problems that nobody even realizes are problems yet €” and then hammer away on them. The nature of these problems is left as an exercise for the reader.
Matt Yglesias: Henry Farrell is right: we do need to invent some brand new markets for our political product. And none of this “exercise for the reader” handwaving, either. Here are my choices: (a) economic insecurity and (b) how to combine work and family and not go crazy.
Thing is, Kevin doesn’t particularly think Matt’s ideas are all that new. Nor, sadly, is he he udner the “illusion that this is a breathtaking new idea that’s going to take the country by storm.” To which he poses this question:
OK, smart guy, so what are the big issues coming down the pike? And there I’m stumped. Issues of economic fairness and personal equality will (and should) remain important underpinnings of liberalism for the foreseeable future, and we need to keep fighting those fights. That’s pretty much the whole point of this blog, after all.
I have the answer. Okay, an answer, one posted over a year ago when I convened a round-table to discuss this very question at my former blog Notes on the Atrocities. The ensuing more than a year has convinced me that I was on to something. You can read the original post here, or a tuned up version below.
At the end of the 19th Century, American liberalism was but a tiny candlelight in the darkness of the Gilded Age. It arose as a reaction to the industrial barons of late century, who had more or less enslaved cities of immigrants to toil in their dim brick factories. This was an age of rudimentary €œequality,€ when women and nonwhites and the Irish weren€™t quite full people in the eyes of their countrymen and the law. Therefore, even exploratory notions about human suffrage€”the idea that women should be allowed to vote or that six-year-olds shouldn€™t be working an eighteen hour day€”were greeted with violent suppression.
The ideas, so ingrained in American culture that they now seem like moral positions, were truly revolutionary at the time: maybe economic and social justice shouldn€™t be reserved only for landowning white males.
Liberalism, dedicated to righting social and economic justice wrongs, had one hell of a century.
Some fine-tuning, particularly in the aftermath of Reagan-Bush-Bush, may still be necessary on the economic justice front. But it’s hard to argue that liberalism’s great challenge of the 21st Century will be economic. After women’s suffrage, the civil rights movement, and feminism, there are even fewer goals remaining for social-justice advocates. So is there anything confronting liberals at the dawn of the 21st century on par with those at the dawn of the 20th?
Two issues do: the instability of liberal democracies in the age of terror and the consequences of global warming–the latter of which is far more consequential than even the horrors of early factories. These create a nice twin approach for liberalism in the 21st century–domestic and foreign policy. Both rest on a complete reversal of neocon domination: interconnectivity in a globalized world.
We live in a world in which factories across the globe manufacture separate components and then ship them to another factory for assembly; one in which the words of leaders and actions of nations are broadcast in real time across the globe; a world in which pollution from US tailpipes affect monsoons in India. Now more than ever we understand that the world is an organism–we do not stand alone.
The global environmental system is particurlarly precarious. I’ve been surprised how this issue has become a front-burner issue in recent months; thanks to panic in much of the rest of the world, the reality is sinking in. There is a genuine imperative here, but also an enormous opportunity. Already we see the horizon of the oil economy (Kevin recently did a fantastic series on this).
It’s clear that fifty years from now the world will be powered by different forms of energy. The country to capitalize on those technologies will reap the earliest and largest reward. Further, the benefit of acting quickly averts the most catastrophic results of global warming–critical to our health, stability, and economy in the coming century. We can either be a world leader in developing these technologies, or trail along behind. The last the the world went through a technological revolution (computing), the US took the lion’s share; farting around protecting Bush’s big oil cronies is no way to capitalize on that opportunity.
A liberal domestic policy would have at its core a deep and abiding interest in moving to new non-polluting energy sources immediately. JFK’s rallying cry was a trip to the moon. How about a liberal charge to be off the oil-burning engine by 2018?
Interconnectivity should be the guiding light in foreign policy, as well. In his Iraq misadventure, Bush inadvertently proved a critical point: terror arises not from the lack of a pure ideology, but from real factors that affect people’s lives. Under Saddam, Iraq was a terrible place, but it wasn’t a terror-producing place. There was stability. Now, in democratic Iraq, we have a terror-producing place.
Terror-producing countries are those that are isolated, repressed, where the populations are uneducated and poor. In these countries, options for citizens are few and resentment is high–a prescription for terror. It’s not possible to invade all these countries, flash the vision of democracy in front of them, and hope they’ll turn into Belgium. But what we can do is engage a slow process of engagement. In our own hemisphere, we’ve reached out to our neighbors on trade, and for the most part, the Panamas and Nicaraguas have become more stable. Integration has also benefited Asia enormously.
But the best example is the European Union. When offered not only tariff-free trading, but direct access to the European economy, countries in Eastern Europe made serious strides to become more democratic. Emerging disconnected, poor, and repressed from the Soviet era, Warsaw-Pact countries could easily have slid toward destabilization and terror. Instead, they are struggling toward the kind of democracy George Bush pays such lip service to.
A liberal foreign policy that nurtured countries like the Ukraine toward democracy via a strongly carrot-based foreign policy akin to the EU’s (with, obviously, smaller benefits) would be a strong counterpoint to the neocon faith. (You could even steal a page from the Rove book and agree that the UN is a failure; instead, create a new multilateral body that admitted only democracies. The possibilities are broad.)
So there you go: environmentalism and a kind of New Wilsonian foreign policy. There are no policies or messages associated with them, but I think they form an elegant little vision–now even more than 15 months ago.
June 26th, 2005 at 8:51 pm
You want real big far-reaching issues for Democrats? In a mere three billion years the sun will have swollen and made the earth too hot for humans. In just four billion years the Milky Way will begin colliding with Andromeda. Obviously we need an urgent public works program to transport all human civilization to other distant stars for safety. This transcends divisive issues like race and religion. Help bring us all together now! On to safer parts of the universe! I’m sure this program will restore a Democratic majority in no time at all….
June 26th, 2005 at 8:52 pm
Solar is civil defense.
I have a homemade sticker on my backpack reading, “Solar is civil defense” right next to my Impeach Bush button and the two solar lights, a red flasher and a steady white light I use for visibility when riding my bike at night.
Technically it is now feasible to produce an LED reading light with a soalr rechargeable battery that is affordable around the world. Every child in the world should be able to have light to read under the covers. The developed world can jumpstart that market if we want to and illuminate the whole Third World - if we want.
A secondary effect could be a secular literacy education program for all, the worst nightmare of jihadists according to Jessica Stern’s _Terror in the Name of God_.
If people are interested, I explore these ideas more deeply on http://solarray.blogspot.com.
June 26th, 2005 at 11:49 pm
What’s wrong with class warfare as an issue?
Oh right… — Democrat party.
Incidentally your view of terrorists is a bit naive.
Terror-producing countries are those that are isolated, repressed, where the populations are uneducated and poor. In these countries, options for citizens are few and resentment is high€“a prescription for terror.
The 9-11 hijackers had on average a better education than the average American.
June 27th, 2005 at 7:47 am
“The 9-11 hijackers had on average a better education than the average American.”
Irrelevant. What counts is the population from which the terrorist is supported. And when a population is poor, uneducated, and repressed, the poor, uneducated, and repressed are not the whole problem: those who keep them that way are at least as dangerous. In many societies, poverty is in the same toolbox as terrorism.
But it is true that the link between social conditions and terrorism is not 100%. The Symbianese Liberation Army and Bader Meinhoff, for example, operated out of prosperous and free societies.
June 27th, 2005 at 8:36 am
Nice try. Your reasoning works when preaching to the choir, but I am not optimistic that these issues will turn any red states blue. Global warming has been thoroughly demonized by the right and a kinder gentler approach to preventing the creation of terrorists is no substitute to attacking ragheads where they live. This is exactly what Karl Rove was talking about last week, and it played very well with the base.
The right has turned liberal nuance and reason into weakness, we need issues that show conservative certainty and rote ideology to be mean and dishonest. I believe that the federal budget is the ideal issue to highlight this flaw.
Another way would be getting K Street into mainstream vernacular. Political junkies know exactly this means but only when little old ladies and garage mechanics and Hank Hill know how the interaction of lobbbyists and legislators exposes the true Republican agenda will we be able to compete in red states.
I don’t think we need to invent issues, the enemy has created them for us.
June 27th, 2005 at 8:36 am
So the Democrats are going to be the Nuclear Power and Unlimited Free Trade Party? I could get on board with that, probably faster than, say, a John Edwards supporter could.
By the way, your preview function is beautiful!
June 27th, 2005 at 8:40 am
Democrat party
Whoops. Republican Talking Point Troll Alert.
June 27th, 2005 at 9:59 am
Your reasoning works when preaching to the choir, but I am not optimistic that these issues will turn any red states blue. Global warming has been thoroughly demonized by the right and a kinder gentler approach to preventing the creation of terrorists is no substitute to attacking ragheads where they live.
The foreign policy issue is the difficult sell, but the environmental one is a cakewalk, for four reasons:
1. Republican myth-making has begun to undermine the party’s credibility, and no more than on this issue. Something like two-thirds of Americans believe global warming is happening. If Bush can convince Americans Social Security is in jeopardy, Dems can sell global warming. But not if they fail to offer hope.
2. Tackling global warming shouldn’t be pitched as some kind of massive public-works boondoggle. Far from it; the economic effects of producing technologies that create and use clean fuel sources would be a huge boon to the economy. It’s a double winner: you tackle an issue Americans are genuinely worried about AND you jumpstart the economy. It steals back the lost business constituency (or part of it).
3. Businesses now believe that globa warming is a reality and are already acting on that information (more info). This is a key credibility-builder, particularly among red staters.
4. Christians are leading the charge in environmental activism. A new issue among evangelicals is global warming, and they’re finding a hard go in the oil-dominated GOP.
I agree that environmentalism seems like an offbeat way to appeal to rural red-staters. But remove the culture war aspect from the dynamic and you’ll find broad-based agreement. In the 70s the GOP went looking for a similar issue and found God. By giving lower-income people a new political identity (they went from labor voters to “morals” voters), the GOP stole vast swaths of FDR democrats. The Dems need to figure out a way to redefine that electorate so that they forget about Terri Schiavo and start thinking about a real vision for the future.
June 27th, 2005 at 3:35 pm
Global warming is the big one. U.S. intransigence on this issue will ruin our foreign relations, make our industry obsolete, condemn us to energy dependence and, as individuals, poverty when we buy energy, and condemn our children to lives of misery.
Almost everything we do in trying to deal with global warming will repay us tenfold- twentyfold if we do it early. And face it, the global warming deniers are not big contributors to the Democrats. They give a little, to keep the party alive as a punching bag. For the Democrats there is no downside to being firm and farseeing on this issue.
June 27th, 2005 at 3:43 pm
Looking for an issue?
How about standing up for America rather than China, India, Mexico or whatever country someone says needs to be ‘lifted out of poverty’?
How about standing with Americans who love this country and work for a living rather than with multinational CEOs who don’t give a damn about this country and would rather boost the value of their stock options by investing in communist China?
How about denouncing free trade and outsourcing for what it is: the replacement of well-paid American labor with low-paid foreign labor, and the betrayal of the American middle class by corrupt CEOs who don’t want to pay American wages and are eager to sell out American values for 30 pieces of silver ?
You can find red-staters to line up behind this platform right now. I know, because I got them to do it.
June 27th, 2005 at 9:46 pm
far as i can see, there is currently one big issue: — the present siege and occupation of the planet by hyper-rich illuminati who are out to kill the econotypical hordes that surround them. they are using war, hunger, homelessness, public relations, cyber-voting, and whatever their money can buy to do it. and no, i am not joined at the hip with the democratic party. and i would prefer the candidate who honestly disagrees with me, thank you, to the one who gives me disingenuous lip service.
July 12th, 2005 at 5:26 am
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