On Thu, 4 Nov 2004, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> That's precisely the strategy that leftists should use: use the issues
> that matter to your base -- class issues like the Iraq War, universal
> health care, public works jobs with living wages for the unemployed,
> shorter workweeks, etc. -- to split the people and then win on turnout --
I'm not sure this is a game both sides can play, even if we wanted to. It might be a fundamentally asymetric playing field. And I have a feeling we shouldn't want to either.
The first problem is that you're talking about real issues, about class issues -- and those don't even get our side all that fired up. Someday that might work, in an alternate universe, and one I'd be glad to live in. But Rove's success certainly can't be adduced to support it. He didn't use real interests at all to fire up his base. His baseline drive was founded entirely on identity issues -- on stoking the perception of threats and insults and contempt and encirclement directed against a group's beliefs and self-respect and sense of entitlement.
And although we have a congeries of identity issues on our side, I don't think even if you put all the underlying demographic groups together they'd be as large or as organized as the evangelical churches. This is not just 40% of the population. This is 40% of the population who belong to membership organizations that meet every week. They know where all of those people live. And the Repugs already seem to know the issues that will polarize them in their favor 7 to 3, which is an astonishing ratio for such a large group. And now Rove has proven he can get them to the polls in a proportion that over-represents them in the electorate. That's one huge scary bloc. I don't think the Democrats will ever have anything comparable.
On the other hand, it wouldn't be crazy to assay that they might finally have hit their top with this particular bloc. And that Kerry was a remarkably uncharismatic candidate with a very muddled presentation. So it's not necessarily true that he followed the wrong strategy; he might just have executed badly. It wouldn't be at all outlandish to attribute 2% to the personal limitations of the candidate. And then everything would have been starkly reversed. Kerry wouldn't have just won the popular vote, he'd have romped in the electoral college.
So you might well have a situation where the Democrats and Republicans rationally choose very two different strategies. But the fact that even one national party can win this way is new. And maybe this is one of the cruxes of the differences between the two parties. Perhaps one party can win like this, and one party can't. Perhaps the Repugs have two strategies they can choose from, and the Dems just have one.
But just speculatively, if you were a Democratic Rove, and you had tried to win this election -- not some election in the future, but this election -- by trying to use the same strategy, polarize and then GOTV, the only thing I could imagine doing really differently with the issues at hand is that the war could have been used as a polarizing issue. Clearly the polarizing potential was there. The thing to do to harness it would be for the candidate to have taken a clear and polarizing stand, like saying an orderly withdrawal was his first priority.
For that to work, however, not only would it have had to attract more people than it repelled. The key to the Rove strategy is that you have to know precisely where the people who get fired up by such an appeal are located. Random access issue outrage simply turns out both sides, both you and your worst enemies. It's only targetting and efficent GOTV that allows you to leverage it -- and only if it's better than the other guy's.
Continuing this line of speculation, conceivably the untapped demographic lode that could have complemented such a highly polarized war campaign -- which would mean one that used the draft issue with the same abandon, and flat out lies, that a leftist Rove would have -- would have been colleges. There you know where everybody lives. And for all the hype about getting out the youth vote, it seems this lode was never really mined. In fact, I don't think it ever really effectively has been. I think college students have been a damper on turnout ever since they joined the electorate. When people say how this was the biggest turnout since 1968, there's a reason for it -- that was the last election when you had to be 21 years old to vote. As soon as the amendment allowing 18 year olds to vote was ratified in 1971, turnout dropped from 60%+ to 55% of the electorate. This is the first time it's approached -- but not yet exceeded -- its former level.
But underneath it all, I'm afraid my instincts say Progressives need an asymetric response. I think Progressives have an instinctual aversion to a manichean universe -- and that there are fundamentally good reasons for that aversion, above all in foreign policy, above all now. I think progressivism can't finally be based on the idea of an implacable enemy who is evil and threatens your existence and can't be reasoned with. And for this kind of worldview to really work electorally, it has to be your worldview all around.
I think progressivism has ethical principles that are attractive and all-American and that can command a majority, and that the most central one is tolerance. I agree with Seth Ackerman, following Lakoff, that progressives need to reconceive themselves as a group based on ethical principles. And that it's perfectly possible to represent our issues -- economic, foreign policy, social, you name it -- in those terms. But it would require reframing almost all of them.
I think the central progressive faith is that you can beat intolerance with tolerance -- that tolerance is simultaneously a principle and a policy that makes the world a progressively better place. It's a paradoxical idea, and that makes it a harder faith to proclaim clearly, and a harder strategy to explain clearly. But I think that's exactly what we have to do.
And then we'll win, not based on lies, but on something we believe in -- and in something we believe in that resonates with a majority of Americans.
Michael