David's been doing excellent push-back against the "center-right nation" meme that's exploded post-election, just like 2006, but on steroids. While it's vitally important to keep up this fight, I'd like suggest opening up a second front--to wit, thinking about how to coopt all the building centrist narratives. Doing so goes back to one of the most important 2004 post-election analyses, Chris's "Eureka! Or How To Break the Republican Majority Coalition", in which he distinguished a form of moderate that really didn't fit on the traditional liberal/conservative spectrum. He identified these moderates with states that had a history of strong support for third parties, whose outward ideologies varied from populist to progressive to socialist to Perot's reform party.
At the time, Chris wrote:
While it is currently non-ideological, this segment of the population, which has existed in large numbers since at least the 1880's, has an outlook on politics that is far more closely allied with liberalism than conservatism because of its emphasis on reform. It is, to put it one way, latently liberal. This segment of the electorate can be swung toward the liberal camp, thus breaking the Republican majority coalition, if the pragmatic, non-dogmatic, reformer, anti-status quo, entrepreneurial aspects of liberalism are foregrounded and turned into a national narrative and platform.
So familiar? Maybe even prophetic? Not only that, but put this way it exposes precisely why those pushing the "center-right nation" narrative are just as opposed to Obama's message as they are to ideological progressives. For they are not only arguing against traditional progressive politics, but against any disruption to the status quo.
This is not an "Edwards for VP" candidate diary series. But it is a very candid look at why Edwards makes a strong choice, the better to discuss the underlying forces at play. The foundations of my argument comes from two different diaries Chris wrote, years apart. The first-discuissed in this diary-concerns the need for connecting Democratic Party liberalism with a more non-idelogical reform tradition. The second-discussed in the next diary-concerns the logic a reinforcing VP pick. After discussing those two diaries, I'll review some recent polling data that shows Edwards as a very strong VP pick for Obama.
The first diary comes from a period in which Chris did some of his most fundamental thinking, in the immediate aftermath of the 2004 election, and it represented a culmination of almost a month of intensive analysis and reflection, starting with basic number-crunching, and reflecting critically on the results.
I believe it is possible to break the majority Republican coalition, which is primarily an ideological coalition of conservatives against liberals, and create a majority Democratic coalition that will last for at least two or three decades, by liberalizing / progressivizing the 10-15% of the population that is currently primarily reform minded and non-ideological (and thus has a strong tendency to support major third-party efforts). While it is currently non-ideological, this segment of the population, which has existed in large numbers since at least the 1880's, has an outlook on politics that is far more closely allied with liberalism than conservatism because of its emphasis on reform. It is, to put it one way, latently liberal. This segment of the electorate can be swung toward the liberal camp, thus breaking the Republican majority coalition, if the pragmatic, non-dogmatic, reformer, anti-status quo, entrepreneurial aspects of liberalism are foregrounded and turned into a national narrative and platform. Pulling this off will also require dismantling the Great Backlash narrative of oppressive liberal elites, and replacing it with a narrative about conservatism being a force that relies on pure theory, faith-based worldviews, and that supports status-quo institutions such as corporations and the media.
Currently, the significant majority (60-70%) of the non-ideological "reformer" segment of the population, which has a tendency to vote in blocks, is allied with the Republican coalition. In fact, it was this addition to the Republican coalition that led to their 1994 sweep to power, and it remains the aspect of the Republican coalition that gives them their national slim majority (50-52% of the electorate). Primarily, this alliance is a result of the Great Backlash narrative, which identifies liberalism as an oppressive, status quo force in control of academia, the media, the entertainment industry, and the judiciary. However, unlike the conservative and evangelic / born again segments of the coalition that allies itself against liberalism on ideological grounds, the non-ideological element allies itself against liberalism not because of what liberalism stands for, but because liberals are viewed as powerful, anti-reform "insiders." It opposes liberalism not because of left / center / right reasons, but because of insider / outsider reasons. Best of all, because liberalism is a reformer ideology, liberals have the potential to swing this group more or less permanently, which is something that conservatism have never been able to do.
Of course, Chris didn't say that the way to outreach to the reformer segment of the population was to nominate one of them as our candidate for President, but that's precisely what we've done, and it's part of what's got us a little off balance, even as we're in a far superior place to where the Republicans are. Instead of reaching out to the reformer wing, Obama has to reach back to the base of the party, while at the same time fighting the media love-fest delusion that his opponent, John McCain is himself a reformer.
In this strange position, the very sensible act of connecting the reformer wing and the Democratic base together is guaranteed to be portrayed as nothing more than simply playing to the base and trying to deceive those in the middle. In short, Obama will be falsely accused of doing exactly what John McCain is actually doing. But we'll worry about that later on. First, let's take a closer look at what's going on in light of Chris's prescient diary from so long ago-and then, in the next installment, let's connect that with his more recent diary on reinforcing VP picks.
STATE BLOGS
