Thanks to Gary Farber of Amygdala for drawing my attention to this very interesting article from former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich in The New Republic. Registration or subscription is required so use BugMeNot. It may take you a few tries to get in. In the article Reich lays out the case that, for a political party to communicate effectively with the American people, the party must cast its policies, programs, and values in terms of one or more basic narratives. These narratives are “The Triumphant Individual”, “The Benevolent Community”, “The Mob at the Gates”, and “The Rot at the Top”. He continues by analyzing the history and sources of these narratives, reviewing how the Democratic Party once communicated convincingly via these narratives, considering how the Republican Party has coopted these narratives, and suggesting approaches for how the Democratic Party might recapture the initiative.
I think that Reich’s four narratives are pretty much on the money. “The Triumphant Individual” (think Horatio Alger), “The Benevolent Community” (think of the last scene of It’s a Wonderful Life in which George Gibbs’s friends and neighbors rally to his support as he’s always been there for them), “The Mob at the Gate” (think Night of the Living Dead), and “Rot at the Top” (think Willie Stark in All the King’s Men) are intimately related to the four schools of American thought that Walter Russell Mead characterized as having guided American foreign policy throughout its history in his wonderful book, Special Providence: Hamiltonians, Wilsonians, Jeffersonians, and Jacksonians. I’ve written about them before.
I wonder if Reich’s prescriptions make any sense. He seems to understand the fundamental conundrum facing Democrats:
“The challenge for Democrats and progressives is not simply to manufacture a new set of stories but to find and tell stories that match their convictions. The stories must also resonate with what Americans sense to be the truth.”
Do Democrats have a common base of convictions? Or is today’s Democratic Party (at the national level) a cacophony of competing interest groups who only share the conviction that the federal government can provide the solutions to their problems? That’s the one thing that the national Democrat Party seems to agree on: it’s the party of Fordism.
Fordism was America’s response to the challenges of socialism in the early 20th century. It’s a set of compromises among management, labor, and government. Management pays higher wages and accepts a certain level of government regulation. Labor takes a less-adversarial stand with respect to management and accepts a level of government arbitration. Skillful government experts fine tune the economy and the society. Mass production. Mass consumption. Technocracy. If all this sounds familiar to you, it should. The EU is the ultimate flowering of Fordism.
The problem is that Fordism is failing everywhere under the combined pressures of globalization, information technology, modern transportation and communications, and the portability of capital. The economies and societies are too large, complex, and fast-moving for the government experts to maintain their control. A little fine-tuning of the compromises doesn’t seem to be enough. Fordism has fallen and it can’t get up.
And remember the second part of Reich’s formulation. The new Democratic narratives must make sense to Americans. Turning America’s security and economy over to international institutions (sometimes referred to as “trans-national progressivism”) is not an idea that makes sense to quite a few Americans.
So I’d say the Democratic Party has its work cut out for it. First on the agenda must be figuring out what the fundamental convictions of the Party in fact are. If the drumbeat to dump Joe Lieberman out of the Democratic Party that I’ve been hearing from any number of the bloggers on the left hand of the blogosphere is part of that discovery process, it doesn’t sound like a move in the right direction to me. The second step must be to come up with some creative approaches to solving today’s problems that don’t involve Fordism or transnational progressivism. This will be a good trick when you realize that the Party’s most ardent supporters these days are the public employees’ unions.
Reich’s prescriptions for new narratives for the Democratic Party include a new global organization to combat terrorism, improved education and health (in the interests of empowering the individual), and pledging undying enmity with crony capitalism. It sounds like he knows the words but not the music.
