Building the Next Democratic Majority
By Al From & Will Marshall
Table of Contents
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The New Deal political era, characterized by Democratic Party dominance, has long been over. But the political order of the new era has yet to be set. The next dominant party - if there is one - has yet to be determined.
We are convinced that the Democrats can be that majority party again. The key to building that new majority is shaping a progressive politics in tune with the new realities of Information Age politics explored in this issue.
To do that, Democrats must do more than galvanize higher turnout among downscale voters or create a coalition of cause-oriented activists. While retaining its base voters, Democrats must speak to the values and aspirations of the rising forces that will dominate our society over the next 25 years: Baby boomers and GenX'ers who are skeptical of big institutions, including government; wired workers who rely more on mind than muscle; well-educated members of a new Learning Class who comprise an increasingly upscale electorate; and Latino and Asian immigrants who are changing the face of American society even as they assimilate into the mainstream.
President Clinton and Vice President Gore have advanced that process with their New Democrat agenda. But the party's decline at the congressional, state, and local levels has yet to be reversed. The party - from top to bottom - needs to complete the work of political modernization, challenging outdated assumptions, embracing new solutions, and demonstrating sufficient independence from interest groups to govern in the broader public interest.
To that end, we propose 10 commandments for 21st century politics. They are not, of course, engraved on stone tablets, but they just might help Democrats find the Promised Land of a new national majority.
Rule One: Remember the fundamentals
To be trusted to lead, Democrats must always make sure to first concentrate on the fundamentals. That is why President Clinton and Vice President Gore fought to restore fiscal discipline through a balanced budget, to reinvent a sclerotic federal establishment, to end welfare entitlements that flouted most Americans' belief in responsibility, and to prevent crime with more police on the beat.
Confronting these central issues has helped the party shed old liabilities while shifting the terrain of political debate to ground more favorable to Democrats. Seizing the political center has a dual benefit: It reassures an electorate more receptive to progressive ideas on education, healthcare, the environment and other issues, and it forces Republicans farther toward the fringe.
Rule Two: Embrace the New Economy
No amount of hiding in the sand will change this basic fact: The New Economy is here to stay. Globalization and increasing technological sophistication will not be reversed. For Democrats the choice is clear: to offer paeans to a bygone time or to be the party that makes this New Economy work for all Americans willing to do their part.
Fanning economic fear and pessimism won't do. Instead, Democrats must have a credible and optimistic strategy to help working Americans enter the winners' circle as we move from the industrial to the information economy. That means uniting behind efforts to stimulate greater public and private investment in developing all workers' skills; reforming public policies to give workers control over key sources of economic security such as pensions and health insurance; and creating incentives for workers to build wealth through capital ownership. Democrats succeed when they are the party of growth and opportunity. To do so in the next century, it is imperative to see the world as it is, not as it used to be.
Rule Three: Replace class warfare with a politics of common aspiration
The old class warfare doesn't work. Outdated appeals to class grievance and attacks on corporate perfidy only alienate new constituencies and ring increasingly hollow to the modern workforce. To win in the next century, Democrats must link the aspirations of working Americans who most fear the New Economy to those of wired workers and the burgeoning Learning Class who are prospering in it. In 1996, President Clinton set the example by winning every category of voter up to $75,000, thereby winning the election - while Congressional Democrats won every category up to $30,000, thereby remaining a minority.
Wired workers have so far shown little interest in demonizing the companies on whose competitive success their own economic fortunes depend. Moreover, in a hotly competitive global economy, neither U.S. workers nor bosses can afford to indulge in adversarial habits. Only teamwork, innovation, and flexibility can keep them ahead of the competition and support high wages and living standards. Democrats must show they uphold those interests.
Rule Four: Speak to common values, not narrow interests
As America grows more diverse, majorities cannot be built the old way - piling new interest groups atop the old coalition by offering new public entitlements. Not only would such a course resurrect the party's identification with wasteful government, it would create a weak coalition bound together not by a common creed but by separate appetites for public spoils.
To emulate President Clinton's national success, Democrats must knit together a highly diverse set of legislative districts which on their own, are ever more homogenous because of gerrymandering. Districts that are heavily African American, for example, or tilted to labor must be woven together with districts comprised of white suburbanites or wired workers. The only way to achieve this is to build a politics grounded in crosscutting values and ideas.
Rule Five: Speak to voters directly rather than through intermediaries
Interest group politics - appeals to constituency groups rather than directly to voters - worked for the Democratic Party when most voters got their political information through large mediating organizations that could turn out large blocks of voters (urban machines, and labor unions, for example). Today, increasingly educated voters arrive at their political judgments on their own, based on information available from a variety of sources. And, interest groups have an increasingly hard time getting their own followers to follow, as the teachers' union chiefs learned recently when rank-and- file members rejected their plans to merge.
Rather than speaking primarily to and through constituency groups, Democrats must learn to appeal directly to people as citizens rather than as beneficiaries of this program or that. In the Information Age, a promise made to one group will instantaneously be known to everyone, making narrow appeals to disparate interests more likely to divide than to unite a political coalition.
Rule Six: Replace identity group politics with national identity politics
America's increasing ethnic and racial diversity gives Democrats both an opportunity and a challenge. Wedge politics - a kind of white identity politics principally practiced, to cynical perfection, by the GOP - is likely to boomerang in a nation of multiple, growing minorities. Having thoroughly alienated African Americans, the nativist and exclusive themes sounded by some prominent Republicans are driving Hispanic Americans out as well. In a multiethnic democracy, prospects are bleak for an all-white party.
As this decade began, California seemed to be becoming increasingly Republican. Yet the combination of the insistence by Republicans on playing crass wedge politics and the growth of wired workers has given Golden State Democrats a new lease on life. Similarly, the combination of exploding ethnic diversity and growing numbers of wired workers in Texas and Florida should continue to give Democrats openings in two key states that recently have been considered GOP bastions.
But America's growing diversity should not be a signal to Democrats that identity politics - their brand of race-based politics - will be any more effective. The ability of more and more minority Americans to enter the middle class will mean that they will become increasingly concerned with a host of political issues that have less and less relation to the color of their skin. Moreover, as the coming decades will bring a new diversity within diversity, the idea of minorities as a homogenous community with shared principles will be called into further question. Already we see the different outlooks of Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Cuban Americans - all grouped under a single category as Hispanic.
To build a broad and diverse coalition, Democrats should work overtime to place the primacy of our common national identity over separatist claims based on race, ethnicity or gender. That common identity, that common civic culture, consists of the democratic values and institutions we share. It rests on the ideals on which our nation was founded, the sturdy framework that has enabled us to convert our diversity into a source of strength rather than a source of discord and weakness.
Rule Seven: Replace urban machines with metro-wide coalitions
For decades, a key element of the Democrats' strategy has been to steer more federal aid to the cities in order to "feed the base." That is, urban machines - typically controlled, in succession, by various ethnic and later racial groups - needed oiling if they were expected to turn out loyal Democratic voters. But this approach proved self-defeating as top-down urban policies often made matters worse - federal housing policy is a conspicuous example - and thus contributed to middle class flight by all races and ethnic groups. The post-war exodus from cities to the suburbs has sharply reduced the cities' share of the statewide vote.
To build a new majority, Democrats must win in the suburbs. In 1996, President Clinton won re-election largely because of inroads made among suburban voters. But Democrats cannot win with the suburbs alone. The cities contain voters who are important to Democratic majorities - and whose concerns deserve serious attention from a nation interested in lifting all its citizens.
To bring these interests together, Democrats must forge metropolitan coalitions of both city and suburban voters. Without political support in the suburbs, Democrats won't be able to help the cities. But without a concern for the cities, suburban votes won't be enough to form a Democratic majority - and the Democrats won't be living up to their traditional principles.
The key is to recognize that urban and suburban voters want essentially the same things: economic prosperity, safe streets, and good schools. At the state and local level, Democrats must see that the key is a bottom-up empowerment agenda that reconnects cities to markets, creates growth boundaries to limit sprawl, and works through community institutions not public bureaucracies.
Rule Eight: Replace top-down bureaucracies with an enabling government
In declaring the era of big government over, President Clinton freed Democrats to rethink the means by which a progressive government responds to citizens' needs. Instead of defending centralized programs with roots in the social conditions of the 1930s and 1960s, progressives should be leading the charge to invent a modern model for governing that equips people and communities with the tools they need to solve their own problems. In the 21st century, Democrats don't have to give up on activist government, but they do have to realize it must take a new shape.
The Skeptical Generations do not reject government; they object to inflexible bureaucracies that move too slowly, limit choices, and resist sensible innovations in areas such as welfare, education and criminal justice. That is why, for example, charter schools - a new form of public school not controlled and run by the central school bureaucracies - are spreading. It is why New Democrats have proposed converting federal training and social programs into vouchers, so that citizens can make choices formerly delegated to so-called experts. And it is why many Democrats are talking about modernizing Social Security to include individual savings accounts.
The model should also break down the rigid separation of government and society and create a new hybrid of public-civic activism. The left-right debate posits a choice between government and the market, overlooking the crucial third sector of civic institutions. For too long, progressives have assumed that "public" and "government" are synonymous. But civil society is also a public realm. It is important to reject the conservatives' false choice between government and the voluntary sector. But it is also critical to break down bureaucratic monopolies and enlist community leaders and institutions in the delivery of key public services.
Rule Nine: Protect children, not programs
By the 1980s, a public backlash against high taxes and excessive government spending and regulation had undermined the force of traditional Democratic appeals to social justice. A new approach - focused on "protecting children" - became a catchall to build support for liberal programs. Who could be against helping kids, the thinking went.
This theme has played shrewdly on the anxieties of baby boomers, a critical mass of voters who are now raising children. They often see themselves as contending with an outside world crowded with harmful influences: tobacco and drugs, all-pervasive media saturated with sex and violence, disorderly schools, and dangerous public places. They understand that families, not government, raise children, but they do not want to face that responsibility alone: They rightly want the force of public policies on their side.
However, Democrats should guard against letting the formula of "protecting kids" become an all-purpose rationale for activist government. Eventually, promiscuous use of this tactic will only discredit legitimate attempts to help our children. And it will make even less sense as the number of families with minor children at home falls to an all-time low early in the next century.
As the boomers move toward retirement, empty nesters will come to rival parents with children as a dominant force in politics. This means that Democrats will have to develop overarching themes that unite the interests of families with children and those without them. Above all, Democrats must not allow a new divide to open between "haves and have nots" - in this case families, many of them younger immigrants, who have minor children and those families, older and mainly white, who do not have them. It is a moral imperative to continue to show the electorate that American children - whether they live under our roof or not - are our most basic investment in the nation's future.
Rule Ten: Replace partisanship with problem solving
Since only about 20 percent of Americans describe themselves as liberal, the new majority needs to win most moderates and even a substantial percentage of conservatives. In the 1996 elections, for instance, 39 percent of the voters identified themselves as Democrats, 35 percent as Republicans and 26 percent as Independents. Democrats therefore will need to capture about half the Independents to win even a bare majority.
This basic electoral math casts doubt on an all too typical Washington tactic of polarizing issues along starkly partisan lines. The point of such tactics is not to solve problems but to score ideological points and stimulate campaign contributions from special interests. Such polarization inhibits reasonable compromises and ensures political paralysis. No wonder the public feels disengaged from Washington debates that put partisan posturing over progress.
Yet President Clinton's ability to sustain support throughout much of his presidency - despite the miasma of scandals and investigations that hangs over Washington - shows that Americans are ready to reward pragmatic problem-solving over reflexive partisanship. It's telling that critics have often accused Clinton of stealing Republican ideas. In fact, he has understood that Democrats can only succeed by solving America's major problems as the public defines them, not as party ideologies define them.
These, then, are 10 commandments to help build the foundation of a new progressive majority. In a century as hopeful and turbulent as the next one promises to be, America more than ever needs a creative and innovative Democratic Party. When Americans step into the election booth, they vote not for a political party, but for a better future. If Democrats are to regain majority status, they must convince America that they will be able to build that future.
Al From is president of the Democratic Leadership Council; Will Marshall is president of the Progressive Policy Institute.