Getting Narrower and Angrier: A Warning to Democrats

Watching, listening to and reading about the boorish and sometimes violent behavior of conservatives at health care forums brought to mind an article from The Times of London that I read while studying at Cambridge this summer.

It was written as a commentary on the Republican Party, framed by Sarah Palin’s resignation as Governor of Alaska: Republicans, according to the author, “prefer talking to themselves rather than to voters… Many questions present themselves when reviewing the state of the modern Republican Party… And with all of the revelations about adultery, the regular resignations and defections, there is no more eloquent statement of modern Republicanism than resigning from office with time left on the clock.

“Mrs. Palin has chosen to talk about power, rather than exercise it. She would rather write a book and give lectures about being a governor than to actually be a governor. And her party has made the same choice. It has cast itself, deliberately, as the opposition, the angry outsider, and it is more comfortable in this role than it is as a party in power…

“The maths of politics aren’t complicated. If you want to win and you don’t have enough votes from people who agree with you, you have to win support from people who don’t by accommodating their views. You cannot win elections by getting the same people to vote for you by pulling (the voting machine) lever harder. This, however, is the strategy the Republicans seem to be embarking on. It sells books and builds radio audiences. But win elections? Forget it!” (Daniel Finkelstein, the Times of London, July 17, 2009)

This is a hard lesson that Democrats learned during our years in exile, and having acted on those lessons we have returned to power. The challenge now is to keep the coalition of liberals, moderates and Blue Dogs together in a way that the balances and honors intra-party differences.

Those of us who come from a liberal perspective must listen to and value the input of our more conservative colleagues, as they must listen to and value ours. There will, of course, be times that disagreements and the differences will be irreconcilable and majority vote will prevail. But we cannot let the relationships become irreconcilable or we will lose the fragile coalition that has given us progressive leadership in the White House and Congress. If the party breaks into quarreling factions we will soon be out of power, and the hope of restoring the American dream of equality and opportunity will be lost.