2008 Woodie Awards
Why the Democratic Party Needs to Return to the Center
Oren Litwin
Issue date: 3/29/05 Section: Opinion
- Page 1 of 2 next >
On the March 1 episode of the Daily Show, Jon Stewart's guest was Nancy Soderberg, former aide to Bill Clinton and author of "The Superpower Myth." She candidly spelled out the main dilemma of modern party politics: "[A]s a Democrat, you don't want anything nice to happen to the Republicans, and you don't want them to have progress. But as an American, you hope good things would happen." Yet as the interview progressed, she seemed to be thinking more as a Democrat than as an American. When Stewart said, "[P]retty soon, Republicans are gonna be like, 'Reagan was nothing compared to this guy' ", Soderberg replied, "Well, there's still Iran and North Korea, don't forget. There's hope for the rest of us....There's always hope that this might not work."
Granted, the remark was meant to be humorous. But as James Taranto noted in a March 8 column for OpinionJournal.com, "Why would it be funny to suggest that Democrats are hoping for America to fail-as Soderberg did four times-unless there's an element of truth to it?"
This is partly an unavoidable hazard of the party system. Former President William Howard Taft, in a 1921 lecture at New York University, said: "Party members retain their party loyalty...usually because their minds have been trained to acquiesce to the party judgment and the party platform, and to associate party success with the best interests of the people and the country." Thus to Democrats, foreign-policy setbacks are actually good for the country, since the Republicans could be forced from power in their wake, and better (i.e. Democratic) policies will result.
Yet it goes further. At a February 26 rally in Kansas, new Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean depicted Republicans with a stunning lack of nuance: "This is a struggle of good and evil. And we're the good."
Such rhetoric, coming from the highest levels of the Democratic Party, has many worriedly thinking of Richard Hofstadter's 1964 essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," in which he wrote: "Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. . . . The enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman--sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving." Remind anyone of popular depictions of Karl Rove and Haliburton?
Granted, the remark was meant to be humorous. But as James Taranto noted in a March 8 column for OpinionJournal.com, "Why would it be funny to suggest that Democrats are hoping for America to fail-as Soderberg did four times-unless there's an element of truth to it?"
This is partly an unavoidable hazard of the party system. Former President William Howard Taft, in a 1921 lecture at New York University, said: "Party members retain their party loyalty...usually because their minds have been trained to acquiesce to the party judgment and the party platform, and to associate party success with the best interests of the people and the country." Thus to Democrats, foreign-policy setbacks are actually good for the country, since the Republicans could be forced from power in their wake, and better (i.e. Democratic) policies will result.
Yet it goes further. At a February 26 rally in Kansas, new Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean depicted Republicans with a stunning lack of nuance: "This is a struggle of good and evil. And we're the good."
Such rhetoric, coming from the highest levels of the Democratic Party, has many worriedly thinking of Richard Hofstadter's 1964 essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," in which he wrote: "Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. . . . The enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman--sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving." Remind anyone of popular depictions of Karl Rove and Haliburton?