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Archive: Published Feb. 21, 2009 |
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Neo-Labor Everyone, especially conservative commentators and bloggers, is offering the Democratic party advice. The Democrats, themselves, are offering each other cures for their present minority malady. So, I thought, why not me? Why can't I offer some advice, too? So, my idea, which is sort of an original idea (and, sort of not) is what follows. First, though, I think I should start at the beginning.
The leadership of the contemporary Democratic party has largely devolved to a finite number of special interest groups: elite liberals that run much of the nation's publishing empire; the intelligentsia which staffs the most prestigious magazines; Environmental groups such as the Sierra Club, Academia; black liberal groups like the NAACP; liberal Hispanic groups such as the Puerta Rican Legal Defense Fund, and other minority groups; big labor, represented by the AFL-CIO and other skilled trade unions; the teachers union (NEA); the mainstream media (MSM); the Hollywood elites like Michael Moore and Martin Sheen; the Washington, D.C. Democratic party leaders, operatives, and elected officials; leftist organization lobbyists; liberal think-tanks like the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS); NOW (National Organization for Women) and the feminists of Harvard, Stanford, and lesser stars in the academic firmament; and the gay and lesbian bloc. It doesn't sound that meager when you list them all out, but all of them combined actually amount to a rather small group of people. They rely upon the large, but still in-the-minority collection of various numbers of radicals, liberals, and union members that compose the rank-and-file of the Democratic party. These special interest groups can't by themselves swing, let alone win elections, even supposing they could command the vote of every nominal Democrat. Of course, they are still very powerful -- they control much of the country's education system and communications industry. Still, they must craft a persuasive message, because to win elections they must convert some part of the remainder of the electorate.
Supposedly well-meaning conservatives, which Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) types are in agreement with, suggest moving the party platform to the center to pick off some of the voters the Republicans have been benefiting from in the last few election cycles. Dyed-in-the-wool liberals who are loath to promise anything to anyone which is not on the liberal agenda, swear that there are enough left-leaning voters who don't vote to swing elections -- if they could just be brought to the polls. The last election cycle represented a massive effort on the part of Democrats to turn out single women, minorities, and students to vote. Its relative failure is dramatic proof that for all practical purposes there are not enough committed Democratic voters to make a majority.
There is another way to win elections, of course, and that is to expand your party in some way, so that it is big enough by itself to win elections. In 2000, Ruy Teixeira and Joel Rogers wrote an interesting book called, Why the White Working Class Still Matters. They determined that white working class men and women made up 55% of the population [ibid. p. x]. Their thesis was that neither the Democrats, nor the Republicans were doing an especially skillful job in picking up this vote. The Democrats, especially, had become the party of upscale liberals, and of the issues that these people believed were important. These, often, were lifestyle issues, not economic ones. Of course, these forgotten voters were what was labeled for much of the ' 90s, as "Perot Voters." The Perot voters were the frustrated workers who were hit the hardest by the recession that followed what is now being called the First Gulf War. The Republicans have picked up a lot of them because of 9/11 and the following War on Terror that George W. Bush has prosecuted with such considerable vigor. This group of men and women tend to be rather patriotic -- it is to be noted that much of the fighting force now in Iraq and Afghanistan are this group's offspring. Teixeira and Rogers believed that if the Democrats changed their message, they could attract this voting bloc, and easily win with it. However, this would require a new patriotism for the Party of Carter and Clinton, and would involve either jettisoning the far left from the party, or changing so much that they left of their own accord.
Who were these Perot voters? They consisted of white-collar and blue-collar workers, pink collar employees, and what might be called colored-vest workers (from the vests or smocks in the company color that they wear -- think of Wal-mart and Office-Depot employees). The white-collar workers, for example, are technicians and engineers, marketing and acquisition staff employees, and accounting staff. Most skilled blue-collars are represented by strong unions, but many unskilled are not. Or, like the white collar workers, they are often represented with weak unions, which are very often very nearly company unions. Pink-collar workers make up the vast pool of clerical and secretarial workers, mostly female, who are almost never represented at all. There are also pink-collar workers of mostly Hispanic origin in the garment industry who work under conditions that come close to sweat-shops. These people could also use representation. Some colored-vest workers are represented by unions, but most are not. This is a vast pool of possible Democrats which could easily make up for, and indeed, outnumber the radicals the party would lose if it began to concentrate upon gaining the confidence of and supporting the unionization of this sector of the population and economy. I call this potential bloc of voters, neo-Labor. Many of these people could be unionized. It behooves the left to realize this and take advantage of this to expand their base. They have nothing to lose by letting many of their present elements leave to join the Green or equivalently radical parties. They have everything to gain by jettisoning their present party platform. The radical and liberal elements in the Democratic party have crafted an agenda for the party that just loses them votes.
The Democratic party is a three-legged stool, the traditional legs of which are radicalism, liberalism, and labor. Each of these separate traditions has a legitimacy of its own. It is time to eschew the earlier two, and embrace the later. Voters who would like to vote Democratic, otherwise, are put off with much of the liberal agenda. To be a Democratic you must now support gay marriage, partial-birth abortion, female generals leading the troops into battle, affirmative action, legislation by the courts, sex education in the schools, public sector unionization with the-right-to-strike (as in the NEA), draconian gun control laws, higher taxes, universal health care coverage, the Kyoto Accords, and oppose the missile defense system, three-strike laws, the death penalty, school vouchers (specifically, school vouchers for faith-based education), and school prayer. It is a long and contentious list. Voters have become afraid to elect Democrats, for fear of the damage they might do to our society, if given the chance. Even moderate Democrats, like Bill Clinton, can cause severe damage. The Clinton administration hurt the military badly, by foisting upon it the radical feminist agenda, by neglecting it and failing to provide adequate funds to keep things like munitions up to necessary stock levels, and over-deploying its forces on every peace-keeping mission the Administration could find. Under the Clinton watch, the American military was forced for the first time to work under a non-American U.N. commander. Many Americans are religious -- the white working class is among the more religious groups. The all-out war that liberals have waged against religion in our society, so severely evidenced by the elimination of Christianity from Christmas, has done little to gain this bloc's confidence. The Democratic platform needs to be simplified and de-radicalized. I would argue that labor, other than rich skilled trade unions and the teacher's union, has been largely abandoned.
The Democratic party does not need big labor like it used to. This is for the same reason that they don't need rich donors as much, either. The answer, of course is the Internet. Unheard of amounts of money can be raised fairly easily via the Internet. The labor that the Democrats should try to attract is this neo-Labor discussed above. Don't run off NEA and the AFL-CIO, but don't let them be so powerful within the party. The NEA, for example, has an absolute veto on anything which might hurt their death grip on the K-12 education system. Instead, the Democrats should support drives to unionize and represent neo-Labor. That, and abandon much of the radical and liberal agenda. And, oh yeah -- follow Hillary Clinton's lead on curbing illegal immigration -- this bloc cares a lot about that. Probably, only Democrats could do anything about illegal immigration -- if the Republicans were to try the MSM would cry racist.
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Copyright 2009 by Dana Lotzgesell |
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