What Would Brian Boitano Do?

For the past week, Slate has been asking Why Americans Hate Democrats .  My answers to this question are alternatively, depending on my mood:

1) Because they're idiots
2) Who cares?  Fuck 'em, and
3) I don't know

Not surprisingly, the writers at Slate, most of whom get paid to do this sort of thing for a living have come up a with a different set of answers.  Generally speaking, among the suggestion are  move to the right , move to the left , do nothing and do the hokey-pokey and shake it all about.  I think the answer is none of these, though the hokey-pokey thing shouldn't be dismissed without due consideration.  The real problem (which in fairness, Tom Tomorrow does touch upon) is that the Democrats are prone to engage in these sorts of recriminations.  We have become the first entirely post-modern political party in American politics.  This is a three step process.  First, there are Things Democrats Believe.  Then, they look to the good people of Alabama for guidance, use them as a proxy for the American people as a whole, and decide The American People Will Not Tolerate the Things Democrats Believe.  Finally, there is the Things Democrats Say They Believe, which they generally don't truly believe, but are close enough that they don't quibble.  We try to see ourselves as others see us, adjust accordingly, and the face we present to the world isn't actually who we are anymore.  See also "How John Kerry Became the 2004 Democrat Nominee for President."

We have thus become a nationwide political party whose stated positions are not firmly entrenched in a set of commonly held beliefs but are massaged from a set of shared principles to form some sort of watered down notion of liberalism packaged for public consumption.  It creates this odd dichotomy where Democrats articulate their support for a candidate not based on any of his or her stated positons but based on what we believe the candidate believes notwithstanding what he or she really said.  So nobody really believes John Kerry's position on gay marriage is the right one, but we know that if he could, he would come out against it.  Nobody really believes John Kerry's position on the Iraq war is the right one, but we know if he was president in 2002, he wouldn't have started it.  Nobody really believe the Democrats wanted to jack up the fines for broadcast indecency - strike that - they totally and completely spit the bit on that one. Nevertheless, true blue Democrats can decipher the code, and maybe some ineffectual moderates think "Well, that seems reasonable," but everybody else is sitting around thinking "What the hell?"  And they would be right, but we don't realize their they're right because we don't read the words on the page, we just see the code between the lines.

In a sense, it's similar to the way bigots knew that everytime a Republican politician was talking about states rights, what they were really saying was "Damn them negroes."  Now, if you're going to advocate racism, maybe it makes sense to speak in code, because you're only talking to the true believers and you don't actually want everybody else to understand what you are talking about.  But support for gay marriage, abortion rights and the Democratic position on the Iraq War are not the moral equivalent of racism, and the Democrats have to stop acting like it is.  No matter how watered down the positon they take, Democrats are always going to be the position of gays and abortion.  We're not going to get credit for being only sort of pro-gay marriage or sort of pro-abortion (and this isn't the type of credit we should want anyway), so embrace it.  We are never going to convince anybody that what we believe is right if we don't actually sat what it is that we truly believe.  It's just not productive to sit around navel gazing wondering how we can mute ourselves enough that we become palatable to 600 more people in Florida or 150,000 more people in Ohio. 

So get John Kerry, John Edwards, Russ Feingold and as many of the Clintons as you can round up, put them in a room, have them figure out some good stuff and then give that stuff to the marketers and tell them to sell it.  But for the love of god (see, we Democrats can talk about god comfortably), don't let the marketers in the room.   So my advice to the Democrats (other than stop listening to advice) is the same advice a parent would give to their child on the first day of school - just be yourself and people will like you.  Now maybe your kid is an asshole, and they should try not to be themselves.  That's the Republican approach and it works for them.  But I think the Democrats are actually pretty decent.  They should stop being ashamed of it.

Comments

[sugis]

My thoughts exactly! I'm glad somebody out there in the blogosphere has hit the nail on the head. Here's hoping the Democratic Party will have figured this out by 2006.