Democratic Unity

Matt Stoller at The Blogging of the President has a very interesting post up about the “Democratic Coalition.” I urge everyone to read it because it discusses the challenge of governing if we do manage to wrest the presidency from Junior and the Retreads.

Matt sees the Party as being split between four groups. First, there is the party apparatus which consists of Hillary Clinton, Joe Lieberman and the writers of The Nation who are basically concerned with preserving their power. The second group is made up of those like Howard Dean and Al Gore who are forward looking and believe in refreshing the talent pool rather than clinging to outmoded power structures. Then there is group three who are essentially reformers first and politicians later, many of them the independents and third party types who might work with Democrats if they are willing to reform themselves in a way that pleases them. The fourth are leftist vanity players like Kucinich and Sharpton who are the poster children for what the wing-nuts describe as the deviant left.

I think that Matt may be a bit unnecessarily cynical about group number one and perhaps a bit naive about group number two, but aside from that, I think this is a good definition of a large portion of the party. I do think that you can’t discount the various constituency groups like unions, feminists, racial minorities and gays. This is an essential part of the coalition that is represented within our party for a reason — Democrats care about these people and Republicans don’t. Identity politics is a dirty phrase invented by the Wurlitzer to disparage Democrats.

I think that we will continue to have quite a bit of tension between all of these groups because well … we always have. The Democratic Party does not respond well to top-down hierarchical models of governance which makes us intrinsically at odds. Even FDR had a helluva time keeping it together and he had the mandate of all mandates. I can certainly understand the outrage of the Dean supporter at being asked to sign a “unity pledge” at a Democratic Meet-up:

I was and still am a Dean supporter. I cannot speak for supporters of Clark, Edwards, Gephardt, etc., but the pledge is clearly directed at those of us that did not support Kerry in the primary campaign. Apparently the Democratic Party thinks that it needs us to sign a unity pledge, to prevent us from peeling off into apathy or Naderland. I have been a Democrat all my life, and don’t feel that I need to sign anything to prove my loyalty, unity, status, etc.

Beyond that, I want to focus on the reason I was attracted to Dean in the first place. It was almost a year ago that I first saw Dean speak. He stepped up to the microphone and said “What I want to know is what all those Democrats in Washington are doing voting for George Bush’s [x, y, or z].” That hooked me! For the first time, here was someone that understood that for the past 25 years the Democratic Party has been bending over and accommodating the Republicans. We’ve been letting ourselves get steamrolled ever since Day One of the Reagan Administration, and Dean was calling the party out on it!

So I should not be expected to sign a unity pledge, or loyalty oath, or anything like it. Nor should Howard Dean. The people that should be signing the pledge, in a very public ceremony, should be Terry McAuliffe, Al From and the rest of the DLC, and all the Democrats in the House and Senate, including John F. Kerry, who voted for the Republican war in Iraq and the Republican Patriot Act, John Edwards, who voted for the Republican war in Iraq and the Republican Patriot Act, and Dick Gephardt, who co-wrote the Republican Iraq war resolution, and Wesley Clark, who had the audacity to run for the Democratic nomination for the presidency when he wasn’t even a Democrat.

Those are the people that need to be demonstrating that they will stand with the party!

Like I said, I would be outraged at being asked to sign any kind of “loyalty oath.” I hate stuff like that and I think it is antithetical to everything Democrats are supposed to believe in. But, surely we can all see the internal inconsistency of the argument as expressed here, can’t we?

“…The people who should be asked to sign a unity pledge …in a very public ceremony …are anybody…I … don’t…approve…of.

Matt says that this kind of rage is the result of a traditional party structure and he believes that someday the Party will “once again emerge as a source of self-expressive pride for a majority of the citizenry.” I don’t know that it ever has been that, really, but I certainly think it’s possible.

However, I will be my usual dark Cassandra in this argument and issue my standard warning. There is a great big political battle going on with a bunch of guys who take no prisoners. We are not dealing with our daddy’s Republican Party. They are not going to disappear and they are not going to allow us to enact a progressive agenda unimpeded. We’d best take that into account because simply reforming the Democratic Party into a fighting progressive voice for change ain’t gonna get it done. We need every last person for this battle from all those awful DLC’rs and Democrats in the House and Senate to John Edwards to audacious faux Dem Wes Clark to Howard Dean. We don’t have to sign any loyalty oaths but we do have to be serious and mature and understand how terribly difficult and how high the stakes are in trying to govern with the sort of opposition that puts a criminal like Tom DeLay into a leadership position. They will fight with everything they have.

If the Democrats take back the White House the Republicans are going to lose their minds, not because our party is faulty because theirs is. We need to remember that. We may be imperfect, but they are nuts.