Ideas versus identities

Ahh. The dust is finally beginning to settle on the November 4th reordering of the political deck, though the consequences remain to be seen.

I have posted several times on what appears to me to be the inversion of the two parties between my youth and today, here, here, and here.

It seems to me that there is another aspect of that inversion. The Republicans of my youth were stereotypically the party of interests; banks, oil companies, insurance companies, automotive, etc. The Democrats were the party of ideas and public intellectuals - Galbraith, Schlesinger, etc. Of course these stereotypes were simply that, stereotypes and there were intellectuals in the Republican party and the Democrats were just as subject to the blandishments of rent seeking interests as the Republicans.

Now, as with much else, it seems the parties have switched places. The Democrats are the party of interests (single elite women in general and particular strands of the feminist movement in particular, Wall Street moguls, public unions in general and teachers unions in particular, Race and African-Americans in particular, the clerisy of academics, journalists, and Hollywood). The Republicans appear now to be the party of ideas but also with a dozen shades: traditionalists, Burkeans, Hayeckians, Randians, fiscal conservatives, social conservatives, Lockeans, Classical Liberals (of the Adams tradition), etc. Old traditional liberal think tanks such as the Brookings Institution appear to be evolving towards conservative positions and newer conservative think tanks such as the Cato Institute and American Enterprise Institute seem to be generating much more of the agenda driving research than the old faithfuls such as the Rockefeller Foundation.

You look at the leading lights in the respective parties and I get the same sense. Rand Paul, Paul Ryan, Ted Cruz, Justice Thomas and others are clearly sharp minds and thinkers. You might not agree with their conclusions but they can't be dismissed out of hand. They have convictions based on a system of thinking, evidence and arguments and they can defend those positions. In terms of elected or appointed officials, who is there on the Democrat side of comparable capacity?

All this is brought to mind by this short piece by Ross Douthat. The Wendy Davis Experiment.

Now: It should be said, and many people are saying it, that Davis and her team ran a poorer-than-expected campaign overall, and that the allegedly-brilliant team running the Democrats’ new Texas ground game were not in fact so brilliant. But the more important issue, surely, is that the Democrats decided that it made sense to run, well, Wendy Davis as their “change-the-map” candidate in Texas. Nunn and Carter in Georgia were nominations that fit reasonably well with the facts on the ground, and while they obviously disappointed Nunn did at least outperform the last two Democratic Senate nominees in her state. Davis, on the other hand, actually underperformed the Democratic nominee’s totals in the last two head-to-head races against Rick Perry … which is, again, pretty much exactly what you’d expect when you nominate a figure who owed her prominence to a filibuster on late-term abortion to contest a statewide rate in Texas.

Yes, the social conservatism of Hispanics, while real enough, is sometimes overstated; yes, polling on abortion is always fluid and complicated, in red states as well as blue. But it still should be obvious that if your long-term political vision requires consolidating and mobilizing a growing Hispanic bloc in a state that’s much more religious and conservative than average, nominating a culture-war lightning rod is just about the strangest possible way to go about realizing that goal, no matter what kind of brilliant get out the vote strategy you think you’ve conjured up or how much national money you think she’ll raise. It would be a little bit like, I don’t know, nominating a political-novice Tea Partier who owed her prior fame to a pro-abstinence campaign to contest a winnable race in a deep-blue, more-secular-than-average northeastern state. Not that the Republican Party would ever accidentally do anything like that, of course.

But even that joke is part of the point: The Christine O’Donnell thing really did happen more or less by accident, because she happened to be in the right place at the right time to catch an anti-establishment wave and win a primary in which she was supposed to be a protest candidate. Whereas the Davis experiment was intentionally designed: She was treated to fawning press coverage, lavished with funding, had the primary field mostly cleared for her, and was touted repeatedly as part of an actual party strategy for competing in a conservative-leaning state. Of course she had a much more impressive resume than O’Donnell, with less witchcraft and real political experience, and in that sense she made a more credible candidate overall. (Though, ahem, O’Donnell actually outperformed Davis at the polls in the end …) But in terms of their signature issues and their public profiles, they were equally absurd fits for the tasks they were assigned; it’s just that in Davis’s case nobody on the left of center wanted to acknowledge it.

Mark Udall in Colorado (reproductive rights), Wendy Davis in Texas (reproductive rights), Jason Carter in Georgia (teachers unions), Martha Coakley in Massachusetts (elite women). It seems like there were a lot of races Democrats ran based on narrow interest groups within their coalition and were soundly defeated.

It is critical to the health of our democratic traditions that there be two competitive parties. I don't think that Democrats were so soundly set back that they become irrelevant but I do suspect they will continue trending towards irrelevance as long as they are the party pandering to narrow interest groups (whose agendas conflict with one another). Just as 2008 served as a catalyst for Republican reflection and renewal, I hope that this election will similarly serve as a catalyst for Democrats to perhaps shake themselves free from identity politics and reenter the fray with ideas pallatible to the nation at large.