A reader asks: What if independents reject progressive ideology?
I think of independents as a herd of cats, a pack of dogs, a murder of crows, and a gaggle of geese, all wrapped together with a word that means little more than rejection of the two party system in general and the two parties we have, in particular. Trending more left than right over the past few cycles, they are Libertarian on bedroom issues, pragmatic on budget issues, fair minded up to a point, and all over the place on everything else.
With the baggers coalescing around an agenda of racism and hate, only the lunatic fringe will want to associate them. The remaining "clean" independents will trend more left than right, but not all the way to progressive by any stretch.
Progressive ideological views are, by definition, not centrist. Independents, as a practical matter, are largely centrist. The job of progressive activists is to help these centrists understand that a calculated shift to the center left is good for everyone in America except the richest of the greedy rich. A calculated shift to the center left is good for business (e.g., gets companies out of being healthcare mediators), good for government (e.g., rewards competence and excellence), good for individuals (personal freedom, equal opportunity, reliable and well-maintained public services, safety and security).
Are we doing a good job articulating that vision? Hell no. Will independents reject it in favor of the teabaggin' fringe? Not likely.
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Most voters are not ideological.
I think you misinterpret most independent voters (maybe most voters) when you describe them as "centrist" and ask if they will reject progressive ideology. I believe that most voters are decidedly NOT ideological. And that is a good thing. Perhaps it has saved us from the wild ideological swings that have plagued so many other countries.
Most voters want a competently run government. They want common sense workable solutions to the problems they face. They want a stable economy that enables them to have a job they can count on to provide the security to raise a family and put the kids through college and retire well enough off they don't have to eat dog food.
There is a lot of talk about anger among the electorate. I think it is important to realize that fear often manifests itself as anger. I believe that a great many of these so called angry voters are afraid and uncertain.
They have seen good jobs disappear, likely forever. They have seen fixed benefit pensions become a thing of the past. And then watched their 401k's tank when the market took a 40% dump. They are currently watching gas prices go up and they wonder if we are going to see $4 per gallon again this year. Their fears are hardly irrational. And they will likely express it at the ballot box. They aren't likely to be swayed by the fact that the policies that screwed the middle class so badly began during the Reagan administration. And making that argument (correct though it may be) or other ideological arguments ain't gonna win too many elections this year.
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I don't think the success in the 2006 and 2008 election cycles was about ideology. A large part of it was a rejection of the clear incompetence of the Republicans who had complete control of the government (2006 was also a large dose of Iraq). The Democrats have done a very poor job of appearing competent. The healthcare debacle is a case in point. Even in the face of a totally obstructionist Republican opposition it is unbelievable how the Democrats in Congress have shown themselves to be so inept in the exercise of power.
The first thing we need to pray for is a visible improvement in the economy and the employment outlook by election day. That will help Democrats more than any brilliant strategy by the so called "smart" people in the party. And the absence of that will clobber us. Then we need to show that we didn't just waste all of 2009 with an ugly display of sausage making regarding healthcare only to come up empty. The voters would then rightly view us as incompetent putzes. We need to hope Nancy Pelosi is as tough as her daddy and can get 218 votes for the bill the Senate passed and get it to the president to sign pronto. It is far from perfect, but liberals need to develop the maturity to accept half a loaf and know that no political issue is EVER settled. You come back later for more. And, in the meantime, you have something to show the voters that helps them.
Please say no to ideology in this election! The voters don't want to hear it. Solve problems. Govern well. Show them how what you have DONE (not what you say you will do after you have held power for a time already) will improve their lives. Give them genuine hope for the future. Hope always trumps fear. The Republicans are offering nothing. We still need to make an effective case.
Straw-man or poorly written sentence.
......"Perhaps it has saved us from the wild ideological swings that have plagued so many other countries."...
Can you supply a little more info to support that statement?
Italy changes government more frequently than the seasons, but the only big swings in government philosophy around the world,in my life time usually came from US or Soviet intervention in the form of spooks, money & arms.
The US preferred a harsh dictators to any socialist commie duly elected by the people. Soviets preferred to take over the countries but the effect was the same.
I'm looking forward to your response.
There is no denying that
we made some very poor choices during the Cold War. It didn't take long either. What was it Truman said about Syngman Rhee? "He may be a son of a bitch. But he's our son of a bitch".
I also remember when the democratically elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende, chose a rather odd way to commit suicide. As I recall it was with machine guns from across the room while Pinochet was seizing power. September 11th was also a dark day for the people of Chile.
If you go back a little farther than the revolving door of post war governments, Italy is a good example of what I was talking about. The embrace of fascism was, I think, a pretty wild ideological swing.
The German elections of July 1932 that made the Nazis the largest political party in Germany would certainly qualify.
During that period there were prominent voices in the United States calling for us to go down a similar path toward fascism. Others were calling for us to move down the road toward communism.
I give a great deal of credit to FDR and the New Deal for saving us from either of those disastrous paths. Whether or not one agrees that FDR deserves the credit, one thing is undeniable. Our system and our people (our voters) declined to lurch in the direction of either extreme and bogus ideology.
I hope we will always exercise that good judgement.
We are in agreement
I understand your reference, thanks
BRAVO, DanR
Damn, that was good !
We need progressives
I hope someone embraces progressive ideology as the Obama adminstration appears to be abandoning it.
What DanR said
DanR laid it out. Most citizens lack the inclination to think much about the philosophy of governance. They'll respond positively to visible progress on the problems fretting them personally now. Most people also over-personalize events, attributing change (positive or negative) to the individuals who are "in charge" at any given time.
In combination, that produces the notoriously fickle electorate which will vote overwhelmingly one year for a left-centrist running on a platform of fairly progressive change, and turn around a year later and elect a protest candidate running explicitly to block the first guy's agenda. Philosophical consistency? What's that?
Programs and laws that work over time shift attitudes. Social Security, Medicare, pollution controls, anti-discrimination laws, wage and hour laws, similar examples.
People before and after will still describe themselves more often as "conservative" than "progressive"--because they're interested in protecting what they have--but their definition of what they're protecting has shifted.
The kinds of life-and-death-for-society crises in which truly radical shifts are politically possible are fortunately rare. We're not (at least, not visibly to most people) in one of those now.
This is the kind of era in which problems are bad enough, and the public worried enough, that significant incremental progress can be made. That will reset the markers.
Health care access is a major example of that, and that's part of why reactionary/regressive political forces are conducting such a scorched-earth campaign to stop it at any cost. (In this context of philosophical discussion, I refuse to dignify those forces with the title of small-c "conservatives".) And it's critical that we seize the half-loaf reform that is within reach. The last train is leaving the station in our generation's window of opportunity on that issue. We can still catch it, and that will shift the debate in an incremental but very real and positive way.
Dan Besse
Bullseye
Dan
You truly understand voters.