THE LEFT'S TIME FOR CHOOSING (via Tom Morin)

The Democrats' brewing civil war: Deans, Greens and liberals say the party needs to scream the anti-Bush truth at the American people. New-Democratic centrists say Americans just aren't that left-leaning. The schism is wide, and it's going to get wider. (Michelle Goldberg, July 12, 2003, Salon)

Democrats on the left see Republicans winning by catering to their right-wing base and taking positions that are to the right of American public opinion, and they wonder why their party can't do the same instead of playing to focus groups. Why, they wonder, shouldn't their party coddle them in the same way that Republicans indulge the religious right?

The problem is that Democrats and Republicans aren't simply mirror images of each other. "When you give people the option of identifying as liberal, moderate or conservative, a majority of Republicans identify themselves as conservatives," says Kilgore. Liberals, though, make up only a slice of the Democratic Party. Kilgore quotes a Gallup poll showing that only 33 percent of Democrats say they're liberals, while 43 percent are moderate and 23 percent conservative.

No one really represents liberals, which many of them find intolerable. That's why there was an exodus to the Green Party, and that's why there's now so much talk among leftish Democrats of "taking back" the party. Even if Dean doesn't share all their views, he courts liberals rather than trying to marginalize them.

While the DLC sees the ghost of McGovern in this strategy, liberals have a different analogy -- Ronald Reagan.

"Elections create what is acceptable or what is the center," says Borosage. "When Ronald Reagan started running in 1980, he was widely dismissed even among Republicans as a nutcase. But he changed politics in America and created the conservative era we've been living in ever since. I don't think these things are a given. They are forged. The DLC tends to think polls are written in stone and people have specific ideas that can't be overcome."

Michael Franc, vice president for government relations at the conservative Heritage Institute, actually agrees with parts of Borosage's analysis.

In the short run, he says, liberal rage is good news for Bush. "In the long run it may not be bad news for Bush," Franc says, "but it might be bad news for a successor. The [Democratic] Party, in order to realign itself in the right direction, may need to undergo some self-examination and a reorientation of what it's all about. Republicans reacted very, very well to their 1964 loss to Lyndon Johnson. Even though Johnson beat Goldwater by an enormous margin, Goldwater had more people out on the streets working for him. It was an early indication of a nascent conservative resurgence that was possible with right kind of nurturing and direction.

"This conservative movement really grew out of that," he continues. "It took a while -- first we had Nixon to deal with -- but it finally led to Reagan's election in 1980. There was kind of a 16-year walk in the wilderness, where people who worked on the Goldwater campaign hung together and formed organizations, formed magazines and journals and helped develop foundations for what was to come."

Liberals, he says, are now walking in their own wilderness. "Getting the most passionate members of the party to do something about that is either going to be a death wish or the beginning of a resurgence, depending on how effectively they deal with themselves."

The biggest problem for Democrats in trying to engineer a Goldwater moment is that the Right is unified around a set of core ideas, while the Democrats--because, to their credit, they've not been a socialist party in the style of Europe's Left--are more of a coalition of groups who while they each demand expansive government of some particular kind, are not united in calling for simply big government. In fact, the goals of the distinct groups are often at odds with each other--why would black Civil Rights groups and unions favor the increased immigration that Hispanic groups want? why would frequently upper middle class trade unionists favor higher taxes anbd frequently white union members favor affirmative action? and so on and so forth--making unity particularly difficult on a set of broad ideas.

The enormity of the problem for the Democratic Left becomes quite clear if we look at the two archetypal speeches of the modern political era in America. Delivered within seven months of each other, the first marked the full-throated resurgence of conservatism, that second indicated the highwater mark of liberalism. Significantly, President Bush could pretty nearly giove the first at his nominating convention in New York next year without changing more than a few lines, while it would be political suicide for the Democratic nominee to give the second, even in Boston:

A Time for Choosing Speech (Ronald Reagan, 1964)

I am going to talk of controversial things. I make no apology for this.

It's time we asked ourselves if we still know the freedoms intended for us by the Founding Fathers. James Madison said, "We base all our experiments on the capacity of mankind for self government."

This idea? that government was beholden to the people, that it had no other source of power is still the newest, most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election: Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.

You and I are told we must choose between a left or right, but I suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down. Up to man's age-old dream-the maximum of individual freedom consistent with order or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. Regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would sacrifice freedom for security have embarked on this downward path. Plutarch warned, "The real destroyer of the liberties of the people is he who spreads among them bounties, donations and benefits."

The Founding Fathers knew a government can't control the economy without controlling people. And they knew when a government sets out to do that, it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose. So we have come to a time for choosing.

Public servants say, always with the best of intentions, "What greater service we could render if only we had a little more money and a little more power." But the truth is that outside of its legitimate function, government does nothing as well or as economically as the private sector.

Yet any time you and I question the schemes of the do-gooders, we're denounced as being opposed to their humanitarian goals. It seems impossible to legitimately debate their solutions with the assumption that all of us share the desire to help the less fortunate. They tell us we're always "against," never "for" anything.

We are for a provision that destitution should not follow unemployment by reason of old age, and to that end we have accepted Social Security as a step toward meeting the problem. However, we are against those entrusted with this program when they practice deception regarding its fiscal shortcomings, when they charge that any criticism of the program means that we want to end payments....

We are for aiding our allies by sharing our material blessings with nations which share our fundamental beliefs, but we are against doling out money government to government, creating bureaucracy, if not socialism, all over the world.

We need true tax reform that will at least make a start toward I restoring for our children the American Dream that wealth is denied to no one, that each individual has the right to fly as high as his strength and ability will take him.... But we can not have such reform while our tax policy is engineered by people who view the tax as a means of achieving changes in our social structure....

Have we the courage and the will to face up to the immorality and discrimination of the progressive tax, and demand a return to traditional proportionate taxation? . . . Today in our country the tax collector's share is 37 cents of -very dollar earned. Freedom has never been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp.

Are you willing to spend time studying the issues, making yourself aware, and then conveying that information to family and friends? Will you resist the temptation to get a government handout for your community? Realize that the doctor's fight against socialized medicine is your fight. We can't socialize the doctors without socializing the patients. Recognize that government invasion of public power is eventually an assault upon your own business. If some among you fear taking a stand because you are afraid of reprisals from customers, clients, or even government, recognize that you are just feeding the crocodile hoping he'll eat you last.

If all of this seems like a great deal of trouble, think what's at stake. We are faced with the most evil enemy mankind has known in his long climb from the swamp to the stars. There can be no security anywhere in the free world if there is no fiscal and economic stability within the United States. Those who ask us to trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state are architects of a policy of accommodation.

They say the world has become too complex for simple answers. They are wrong. There are no easy answers, but there are simple answers. We must have the courage to do what we know is morally right. Winston Churchill said that "the destiny of man is not measured by material computation. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we are spirits-not animals." And he said, "There is something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty."

You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children's children say of us we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done.

Great Society Speech (Lyndon B. Johnson, May 1964, University of Michigan)

The challenge of the next half century is whether we have the wisdom to use that wealth to enrich and elevate our national life, and to advance the quality of our American civilization.

Your imagination, your initiative and your indignation will determine whether we build a society where progress is the servant of our needs, or a society where old values and new visions are buried under unbridled growth. For in your time we have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society.

The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time. But that is just the beginning.

The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents. It is a place where leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of boredom and restlessness. It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community.

It is a place where man can renew contact with nature. It is a place which honors creation for its own sake and for what it adds to the understanding of the race. It is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.

But most of all, the Great Society is not a safe harbor, a resting place, a final objective, a finished work. It is a challenge constantly renewed, beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor.

So I want to talk to you today about three places where we begin to build the Great Society -- in our cities, in our countryside, and in our classrooms.

Many of you will live to see the day, perhaps 50 years from now, when there will be 400 million Americans -- four-fifths of them in urban areas. In the remainder of this century urban population will double, city land will double, and we will have to build homes, highways and facilities equal to all those built since this country was first settled. So in the next 40 years we must rebuild the entire urban United States. [...]

These are three of the central issues of the Great Society. While our government has many programs directed at those issues, I do not pretend that we have the full answer to those problems.

But I do promise this: We are going to assemble the best thought and the broadest knowledge from all over the world to find those answers for America. I intend to establish working groups to prepare a series of White House conferences and meetings -- on the cities, on natural beauty, on the quality of education, and on other emerging challenges. And from these meetings and from this inspiration and from these studies we will begin to set our course toward the Great Society.

Contrast the two and you see several of the themes that we've touched on endlessly and/or recently here. The most important is Ronald Reagan's division of the two parties along the faultline of freedom vs. security. The most amusing is LBJ's assertion that the cities are our future--nice call, Mr. Johnson. The most frightening--and it ties into the discussion yesterday about intellectuals, as well as into the absurd notion about urbanization--is that you can collect the "best thought" in a room, focus it on problems, and thereby solve them. One would have thought that the 20th Century failures of communism, fascism, socialism, New Dealism, and of the Great Society itself, would have demonstrated the hubris of this kind of thinking, but those Leftists who are calling for the Democratic Party to undertake the kind of return to core principles that Goldwater, Reagan, and others effected for the GOP (and it would seem important to recognize that it took about twenty years) apparently took no notice of those failures. This seems more likely a death wish than the start of a resurgence. We say: Go for it! Posted by Orrin Judd at July 14, 2003 7:36 PM