Marc Danziger (Armed Liberal) at Winds of Change offers advice to the netroots and, possibly, the national Democratic Party. A vigorous and sometimes heated discussion has ensued.
I offered my own advice a year and a half ago and I don’t think I would change much:Â frame a credible foreign policy, stand up for public and private virtue, get your crazy people off the front porch.
I’ll offer one more short bit of advice from the famous playwright and theatrical producers David Belasco:
“If you can’t write your idea on the back of your business card, you don’t have a clear idea”.
Check out the thread at WoC!
I read your link (recommendations to Dems). Excellent piece. I was formerly registered Dem; now I’m a ‘nothing’ (in my State, you register ‘independent’ by not declaring a party affiliation.) I too consider myself a Lieberman Dem. That’s a pretty small slice of the pie these days. Until the Dems come to grip with national security (along with clearing off the front porch), they will have difficulty in national elections.
The DP’s problems are rooted in their ideology, which is a worn-out relic of an earlier age. Ideas need to be fresh and relevant to attract voters. The progressive/liberal/New Deal/Great Society “government as deus ex machina” ideology just doesn’t have anything to offer that is significantly different from what it has been offering for the past 100 years. It is long past time that we jetison that ideology and start thinking creatively to generate some new ideas.
The Republicans are going to have their own problems in the next presidential election. There will be electoral consequences to the abandonment of small gov’t principles. Also I don’t think the RP’s leaders really get that since 9/11 an awful lot of people who would have been voting Dem have been voted Rep solely on nat’l security and once that issue isn’t the primary one they may not support the RP.
Make that 75 years and I might agree with you, phil. I don’t believe that “government as deus ex machina” completely describes what the self-described progressives believe. Check Matthew Yglesias, for example.
What I think does describe them, I believe, is “Fordists” (which I’ve written pretty extensively about here). Search around here for my posts.
Basically, it’s government as a combination of coach and referee. There’s some merit in the view but it’s in desperate need of modernization. The modernization is made more difficult by the nature of the Fordism: lawyers, who have an enormously strong vested interest in the status quo, have gained the whip hand.