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Democrats and "The Politics of Polarization"

by Christopher Chantrill
October 24, 2005 at 11:42 am

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TO DEMOCRATS the decline of the Democratic Party over the past generation seems inconceivable. How could the “amiable dunce” Ronald Reagan have won the presidency? How could the bombastic Newt Gingrich have brought forty years of Democratic Congresses to an end? How could the dim-witted frat-boy George W. Bush have been elected to the White House?

For over a decade the Democratic Leadership Council has been trying to tell them. The latest effort, from William A. Galston and Elaine C. Kamarck, is The Politics of Polarization. Angered by failure, they relate, Democrats have tried to win recent elections by mobilizing their base. The result has been to enlarge the base of both political parties. The trouble is that the Republicans’ conservative base is bigger.

Rather than mobilizing the base, liberals should reach out to the moderate center, they argue. But there is a problem here too. The Democratic base of liberal activists is an American outlier. It is more educated, more prosperous, more single, more secular than Americans in general. In “social issues and defense… Liberals espouse views diverging not only from those of other Democrats, but from Americans as a whole.”

But the Democrats’ problem is even bigger than that. In the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, the DLC says on its Third Way web site, progressive reform

brought fair labor standards, adequate wages, and decent benefits for workers. It also created the structures that brought wealth to the middle class – it increased college access, built highways, and electrified remote areas… [But now we live in] a global economy that is moving and changing at breakneck speed… [and] middle class Americans seem to have lost faith in progressive economic prescriptions.

What went wrong and what can progressives do to recapture the trust of middle class Americans?

Over in US corporate suites, people have been asking a similar question. What is going on in the global economy and what should corporate leaders do to respond? When the clients of management consultant McKinsey & Co. were asking that back in 1990, McKinsey realized it did not have an answer. So it embarked on an in-depth research project on major business sectors around the world to find out what was going on. The result, written by William W. Lewis, is The Power of Productivity, now out in paperback. There is an excellent interview with Lewis by TechCentralStation.com editor Nick Schulz here.

Lewis’s findings are startling. His team found that the United States is the most productive nation in the world in almost all sectors, and likely to remain so. For sure, in steel, autos, and consumer electronics the Japanese are marginally more productive. But the big global industries in Japan contribute about 10 percent of GDP. The rest of the Japanese economy—retail, construction, food processing—operates at half the productivity of the US. It is “inefficient, subscale, fragmented.”

What is the difference? Wal-Mart, for a start. Over the last generation Wal-Mart has driven a huge increase in retail productivity that has forced the rest of the retail sector to reinvent itself or die. In the late 1990s during the great tech boom, half of US improvement in productivity was in humble retail. In Japan, mom-and-pop stores are protected from competition by law. The result is higher prices and a large subsidized labor force working at low productivity, dragging the rest of the economy down.

It is “the productivity of every worker that matters… [It’s] the productivity of the massive number of workers in retailing, wholesaling, and construction that give the United States the highest GDP per capita in the world.”

You can see the problem for the Democrats. Their progressive political faith is based on protecting American jobs, on favoring workers over businesses, on manipulating the economy with targeted subsidies, tax cuts, and credits. They think that Wal-Mart is a problem, not an inspiration. William L. Lewis says that the way to prosperity for the ordinary American is through global competition. “The more intense and evenly balanced competition is, the faster the process works.”

Galston and Kamarck tell us why the Democratic political offering has ceased to work. Most ordinary Americans, even conservative Democrats, “believe in the politics of personal empowerment and that most people can get ahead with hard work.” They have lost the fear their Depression-era parents experienced when the progressive suits wrecked the economy with Smoot-Hawley tariffs, high government spending, high income-tax rates, and fixed wages and prices; they believe that they can thrive in the creative destruction of the market economy. So they stop voting for Democrats.

For Democrats to do well the American people need to lose their faith in personal empowerment. Short of that, Democrats need to lose their faith in “progressive economic prescriptions.”

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

Buy his Road to the Middle Class.

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Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.”  —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Hugo on Genius

“Tear down theory, poetic systems... No more rules, no more models... Genius conjures up rather than learns... ” —Victor Hugo
César Graña, Bohemian versus Bourgeois

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Religion, Property, and Family

But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family. Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
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Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

presented by Christopher Chantrill

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