What if Democrats acted like Democrats

WHAT IF THE DEMOCRATS
ACTED LIKE DEMOCRATS


Sam Smith
1982



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Over the past 60 years only two Democratic presidential candidates have gotten over 50% of the vote: LBJ in 1964 and Jimmy Carter in 1976. For nearly a quarter of a century, beginning with the election of Reagan, the Democratic Party has tried to reinvent itself as a party of the modified right. The effort has been a disaster; all its candidates have gotten less than half of the popular vote.

What if the Democrats had instead decided to have remained Democrats? Writing in the DC Gazette in 1982 Sam Smith argued that they should and two decades later the suggestion still seems applicable.

The only way to deal with the new right - and it's alive in both parties, is to have some new Democrats as well. These new Democrats can't be rehashed liberals - the word ought to be banished from the Democratic vocabulary for at least two presidential terms. They can't be socialists; the Democrats have thoroughly discredited socialism by introducing over the past few decades every one of its worst aspects while providing few of its benefits. They can be radical, in the sense of returning to the roots, but those roots are not in European socialism nor are they as convenient chronologically as the New Deal. They are to be found further back and on this side of the Atlantic - in a judicious blend of Jeffersonianism, populism, progressvism, libertarianism and what Norman Mailer calls "radical conservatism." Liberalism and socialism suffer from many of the same defects. They both tend to favor order at the expense of freedom. They both tend towards centralism, while the historical roots of American thought are decentralist and anti-authoritarian. And in their effort to produce economic salvation, they both tend to create psychological deprivation. The American dream is not to make the right choice between economic and personal justice, it's not to choose between independence and equality but to have it all. Both the right and the left in this country tend to promote only a part of the dream; a new Democratic politics, I would submit, should try to put the parts together again. Here, for starters, are, some random notes on how it might be done:

o A new Democratic politics requires the reestablishment of a base among the people rather than, as has been increasingly the case, among those who "represent them." If the party has to make a choice it should go for the union members rather than for the unions. It worked for Reagan and it would work for the Democrats. The Democratic Party has failed to understand the depth of institutional alienation in this country. Although the Republicans are as institutionally bound as the Democrats, they have been far more effective in feigning interest in the American as an individual. The Democratic rhetoric is constantly shoving institutions on top of people - HUD, the UAW, the city machines - and people are mad at all of them.

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We all know this isn't a new problem within our party but God it really might bite us in the ass this year and it pisses me off!

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