THE SOUL OF THE PARTY
Morning on Capital Hill by K3nna (Creative Commons)
What, exactly, is a Democrat? We like to think we know, we perpetuate this wonderful myth that somehow it’s common knowledge, but every single election people ask the same question: What do the Democrats stand for? The elections come and go, but that question never changes. People keep asking, over and over, and it’s because we .. unlike the Republicans .. have failed miserably to define who we are. And that should scare the shit out of us.
Identity Politics has been a curse around our necks for a long time, but we’ve never looked at why. FDR founded the modern Democratic Party back in the 30s. We liked to say we stood for everybody then, but the cultural norms of the day .. what governs all political reality .. meant that everybody really meant white, working class men.
Of course, that sense of “everybody” evolved. The Civil Rights Movement happened, and we began to include blacks in the party. Then women (sort of). Then gays. And so Identity Politics was born, how we could appeal to these various groups .. “we” being the white male Establishment center that has held Democratic power since the very beginning. It never occurred to anybody that the very nature of Identity Politics meant a fundamental division into “We” and “They”. And how could it? The social norms of the time .. just a few decades ago .. had not caught up. “They” were still “they”, no matter how hard we tried to embrace.
But social norms have changed. Fast. Twenty years ago several states refused to honor Martin Luther King Day as a national holiday, ten years later a black man was elected President. The first gay marriage was conducted fifteen years ago, today it’s legal everywhere. This is stunning social change, and the evidence is everywhere. Just take a look at the freshman class in the House of Representatives, or the faces of the anchors and pundits that appear on CNN and MSNBC. The “they” of Identity Politics is rapidly becoming “we”.
That means we are rapidly becoming a new party, with a new identity, and this emerging new party cannot let itself be defined by labels and ideas from fifty years ago, and it cannot let itself be defined by division. This is precisely why there are such undercurrents of stress in the party, why elected Democrats in the Midwest sometimes wonder if they’re at war with big city Progressives, why we keep wondering if we’re going to screw up yet another election despite who we’re facing. Hey, Democrats are never going to agree on policies, it’s the very nature of being a Big Tent. We’re not only going to disagree, we’re going to be having kick down, drag out fights for as long as we exist. But if we cannot find common values that we all share .. if we cannot publicly state what those values are .. we may not even end up in the same party.
Democrats are obsessed with policies. People ask who we are, and we answer with policies. We can’t seem to help ourselves: “Policies, take a look at my policies!” Well, our policies are not who we are, they’re what we want to do. Values are who we are. Values have emotional power. Nobody stands up and cheers for policies. Values have that kind of power, values inspire, and right now, Americans are hungry for values, they’re desperate for them. Change is crashing all around us. Basic beliefs are under assault, basic ways of life, and people all across this country want to know what to look up to, what to aspire to.
The Republicans understand this. Newt Gingrich was a brilliant man in that regard. By skipping policies altogether and reaching out to the core values of their base, the modern Republicans have welded their voters into a formidable political weapon. The Republican base doesn’t care about an actual wall, they care about the values it symbolizes. Deep-seated values of fear and racism and nostalgia is what holds the 33% together. That’s why Trump gets to lie. He never forgets what they really want to hear. (It’s actually why he’s President, not because of any policy he proposed, but because of values he hinted at, however false they may have been.)
We are the good guys. We do stand for something universal, values that lift and ennoble us, but nobody is going to understand that until we are able to stand up and state it publicly, over and over in a way that inspires. And we're never going to do that until we as a party, come to terms with just what those core values are. It bears repeating: policies are not values. The Green New Deal is not a core belief. Neither is Medicaid for All. We can support these things, but we absolutely cannot use them to define ourselves as a party, and that’s exactly what we’re letting the Republicans do. We’re letting them label us.
This has to stop. We as a party have to stand up and make sure we’re seen as having basic, core values worth aspiring to, and we need to do it publicly. People .. Democrats and Americans alike .. need to understand that the age of Identity Politics is over, because the Identity is now us. We no longer fight for racial justice because we worry about black people. We areblack people, and gays and whites and Hispanics, and everybody else. We fight against racial injustice because we fight against all injustice, because that is who we are as Democrats. That is a core value.
A statement of core values is an overpowering message. Republicans can attack the Green New Deal or Medicaid for All because these issues are complicated. But who can stand up against a belief in justice for everyone? Who can attack a belief that all Americans deserve an opportunity for a better life? Wouldn’t you just love to have a Republican publicly agree with those values .. no conditions .. and then argue over the best way to make it happen?
Our core values truly deserve to be the American ethic, but until social norms truly catch up, it is up to us as a Party to be the standard bearer. It’s up to us to lead, to put a light on the hill, to enshrine these basic values as the national goal. This is how you fight racism, and xenophobia, and the Alt Right .. by publicly standing up for basic values that the majority of Americans can now relate to for the first time in history, by enshrining these core beliefs in such a public way that those who would take us backwards, are seen as such.
America was founded on ideas. The Republicans have co-opted a lot of them, twisted them around for their own purposes while we sat around and watched, but the true essence of what this country is about is still there. The spiritual core of America is one line in the Declaration of Independence: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. Everything good in this country stems from this passage. These are our true ‘basic American values’, and this is precisely what the Democratic Party needs to reconnect with. “Justice and opportunity for everyone in this country is a basic right,” that’s what that line means today, and everything we believe in as Democrats arises from this. Affordable health, free elections, racial justice, job training .. it all does, and that’s why it is so desperately important to proclaim our core values, to cloak ourselves in them. They need to be the backdrop for everything we do, the very first thing mentioned by every candidate, everywhere from Los Angles to Harlan County:
On behalf of the American people, we, the Democratic Party, believe in the following for all our citizens:
• Equal rights
• Equal opportunity
• Equal justice
• And an equal voice
If we proclaim values like this, if we think it out and word it carefully, then the forces that currently control the Republican Party .. the very forces of hate and division that threaten our American democracy .. will lose their ability to camouflage themselves. And as long as all Democrats agree on these basic principles, then the fiercest of internal debates over tactics and priorities will always result in us coming together in the end, moving forward and carrying the day.
This is not about splitting up a pie, or political ideology, this is about basic American values. But nobody is going to understand that if we don’t set it out. And that will not happen until we as a party, begin a very serious discussion.
It is very much up to us, each and every one.
by J.M. Purvis