I agree with Arianna Huffington in
her op-ed piece (also included as a comment on this post) about the need for an entirely new Democratic strategy. It's not that Kerry himself was necessarily a bad candidate -- although it was shameful that he didn't mention Palestinian rights and otherwise aped Bush's aggressive disregard for human rights in the "war on terror." The real problem, however, was that the Democratic Party as a whole, with the Kerry campaign and Terry McAuliffe spearheading it, chose the most timid approach to electoral politics because they were focussed excessively on undecided voters and reaching across the political divide as a first priority.
Amardeep Singh satirically envisions a counterstrategy to this failed Democratic campaign in calling for a
"vast left-wing conspiracy". I wouldn't argue with him -- in fact, it's too bad that Nader didn't have this kind of a sense of humor.
All that said, however, I've seen a lot of 20-20 hindsight prognosticating on the Web. It's not entirely clear to me that there was a potentially winning strategy in this election for the Democrats. In this election we faced two political factors that I think the left has yet to come to terms with: the first is the "lingering halo" (as Paul Krugman puts it) of 9/11 that accounts for much of Bush's emotional appeal. It is the appeal of fear. In 2008, that may not be as much of a factor (depending, of course, on events in the next four years), and if it is, the Democrats need to do a much better job of explaining why Bush administration policies fail to keep Americans "safe."
Secondly, and more importantly, a large section of the country has turned rightwards, part of a long, slow pendular swing that's been going on for decades. If the left wants to win future elections and reverse that pendular motion, it is going to have to understand how the right has managed to appeal to so many (white) suburbanites, rural and religious folks. I can hardly describe to denizens of New England or California what it is like living out here in Alabama. The ideas and norms are so different from those of Blue States and the Democrats seem so out of touch. I was at the Democratic Party's election night event in Mobile -- it was a sparsely attended and subdued event even before it became clear that a Republican sweep was in the making. And in Alabama, that sweep was like a hurricane -- the state's supreme court is now composed, for the first time ever, of all Republican judges. Not a single Democrat. Bush won 63% of the vote here, much higher than predicted. And this in a state that still has more registered Democrats than Republicans due to its historical Democratic leanings.
I think that in addition to creating new alliances among progressive groups that have never before worked together, the left is going to have to learn about who comprises the right, what animates them, and how to speak to them. (I was even imagining writing a new political drama entitled "Their Town"). Religious groups, here as in Israel, are not monolithic. They are as complicated as any other demographic, and the left needs to learn how to communicate with them (Gramsci, the Italian political theorist, understood this very well, as Thomas Frank pointed out in a
recent editorial. Some would argue that the left will never appeal to "evangelicals" more than the Republicans do, but I would counter that such religious blocs are actually heterodox and that we can't simply write them off.
Huffington makes a different point, and I strongly agree: the left needs to motivate its own base by putting forth bold ideas and vision. Grass roots groups (like Jewish Voice for Peace, for example) must take part in this. We need to mobilize a new kind of progressive populism that appeals to people's basic sense of justice and equality. Let's remember, though, that we progressives will remain a minority unless we understand our audience and can appeal to them with ideas that make so much "common sense" that they put our adversaries, the parochial and narrow-minded promoters of "divide and control" wedge issues, on the defensive. I believe we can succeed, and so can progressives as a whole, if we connect with those who are already sympathetic to us as well as those who are unconvinced but willing to listen.
--Lincoln