They’re the ’08 leaders. Not to pile on, since Thomas Edsall‘s weekend column has been so ably dissected by Ezra and Ben already, but I do think Edsall’s piece also needs to be considered in light of the fact that the two leading Democratic contenders for the presidential nomination in 2008, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are a woman and an African-American. It seems increasingly bizarre to me that anyone could point to a sensitivity to the concerns of women and African-Americans as the problem with the party, when, in fact, the party is now being led by a diverse group of people whose candidacies have been made possible by the work of such interest groups over the past four and a half decades. Indeed, the real worry ought to be that the party has neglected to adequately study how to help its ever-growing number of female and minority candidates win in a political environment that House candidate Darcy Burner has pointed out may be uniquely unfavorable to them (wartime), and which may require them to pursue different sorts of electoral strategies than the ones that proved so successful for their white male Democratic peers this November.
That said, I’ve generally found Edsall to be a fantastically astute political analyst whose insights into the differences between Democratic and Republican organizing efforts ought to be heeded, since he does talk extensively with both sides. And in this instance, I don’t think it’s totally fair to act as if he is expressing only his own views, rather than those he has heard from a broad array of people within the Democratic Party, or that he is somehow uniquely out of touch. The fact of the matter is that a substantial number of leading Democratic and liberal thinkers have made similar critiques of the Democratic Party’s interest groups over the past few years, even in the pages of this magazine. For example, Michael Tomasky wrote last May in his acclaimed “common good” article:
the way interest-group politics are done in today’s Democratic Party just has to change. I’m not the first to observe this recently — indeed, momentum is gathering behind this view, although it’s still a long way from being a consensus one. In their controversial 2004 paper, “The Death of Environmentalism,†Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger blasted the environmental movement’s tactical narrowness and outdated intellectual frameworks. In their perceptive and passionate new book Crashing the Gate, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga and Jerome Armstrong rebuke liberal interest groups for a variety of sins, notably of feeling the need to endorse a few moderate Republicans for Congress even though those Republicans, while they might have acceptable records on issue X, Y, or Z, will go on to make Bill Frist the majority leader and Dennis Hastert the speaker — and with that single vote, more than cancel out whatever nice things they do when nothing’s on the line.
This kind of politics is shallow, it’s shortsighted, it’s anti-progressive, and it nullifies the idea that there might even be a common good. Interest groups need to start thinking in common-good terms. Much of the work done by these groups, and many of their goals, are laudable. But if they can’t justify that work and those goals in more universalist terms rather than particularist ones, then they just shouldn’t be taken seriously.
And you know what? He and the people he cited were making some reasonable points. The exciting thing, though, is that the netroots and new progressive groups like MoveOn have already helped transform some of the older interest groups, which were formed during a time of bipartisan comity, unused to the new highly polarized political environment, and oddly disconnected from even the Democratic base. In 2004, we had “The Death of Environmentalism,” but in 2006 we had An Inconvenient Truth and a series of online and off-line advocacy campaigns around global warming that have truly transformed the center of opinion on this country on this issue. Since 2004, the reproductive rights movement has undergone a real transformation around the goal of reducing unwanted pregnancies and abortions by promoting contraception, and we can all be glad that women’s groups are still strong enough to oppose the appointment of this yahoo to federal office. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina shocked America into re-examining the plight of poor African-Americans, and it was that shock that finally broke the bond between the American people and the president — a break from which he has never recovered. Indeed, the fact that the Democrats won the Senate at all can be laid at the feet of interest group politics of the most old-fashioned kind, in that George Allen lost his seat after making a highly-publicized and offensive racial remark, which spurred investigation of his past history of using racist terms. The thing is that we’re now so far past the start of the start of the new social movements that we didn’t even think of the story around Allen as one of “interest group liberals,” “identity politics,” “pc run amok,” or “liberal speech codes” — just to list a few of the frames that would have greeted his actions decades ago — but rather saw it simply as a senator violating America’s social norms and undermining its values.
So, no, interest groups and their progressive agendas don’t need to be kicked to the curb. They need to keep doing what they have started doing, which is gaining new strength as defenders of America’s twenty-first century norms against the right-wing radicals who’d like to drag us back half a century.
Cross-posted from Tapped.
