Whims of a Weaver

State of the Party: A Democratic Reflection, In 700 Words January 29, 2014

A conversation with a friend triggered some thoughts about a topic with which I’ve been grappling, namely why do liberals screw themselves over? (For the purposes of this post, liberals and democrats can be considered inter-changeable, as can conservatives and Republicans. Disclosure: I am an active and fairly liberal Democrat from New York and living in Pennsylvania.) My thoughts on some major problems that liberals have because of themselves…

See, the GOP is a visibly divided party but Democrats, to me, are fairly homogeneous in their beliefs. I think that Democrats are very consistent believers in lessening economic inequality, closing the racial and gender gaps, protecting the environment, enacting better gun control, maintaining social government programs (by which I mean Medicare, Social Security), and avoiding large-scale foreign conflicts. But Democrats differ greatly on the priority that they place on each issue, and they emphasize their top priorities so heavily that it ends up hurting the party’s capacity to enact change.

We often look whiny because some or most of those issues are always left unaddressed at any given time. President Obama covered many things last night but you know that liberals are going to be on him for leaving out race or the environment or the space program or not closing Guantanamo yet or continuing drone usage or…you get the picture. If the President fights hard for health care, we hit him for not working on taxes or Wall Street reform. If he kills Bin Laden, we complain about drones or Guantanamo. And if the President were to simultaneously balance all of those issues at once? Then we’d complain that he hadn’t actually fixed all of them ALREADY. We are NEVER satisfied because gosh darn it the world hasn’t been saved from EVERYTHING yet! Augh! Sometimes we seem like Type-A parents pushing their kids to simultaneously get straight A’s and play sports and join clubs and take up an instrument and….yikes. We get a bit out of control.

Liberals often do a poor job on sales pitches because we tend to have those “pet issues,” focusing on one big issue from the aforementioned group. We view our preferred pet issue as the biggest priority or most important issue, so much so that we often eschew the other issues and their supporters as we tout our concerns. But in a sense, all of those “pet issues” are connected because they are (surprisingly to us) partisan: a conservative economist recently wrote about the “unrelenting beauty” of inequality, Sarah Palin jeered President Obama last week for tending to “pull the race card,” and Rand Paul dismissed the “war on women” just this weekend. Republicans are, at best, torn on believing in climate change and they like to deride social programs as “entitlements” (side rant: we pay into all of those programs…look up the definition of “entitlement”). We view all of our positions on these issues as “common sense,” but that clouds our attempts to pitch solutions or even the importance or existence of the problems in the first place. We expect everyone to know, understand, and agree with us on these issues and their solutions and so we never seem to know what to do with the disconnect.

Additionally, as the group that wants to change the status quo, Democrats always face the tougher fight because 1) the defenders of the status quo are usually staunch, 2) the “change” group typically lacks a unified idea of what change should look like and 3) the members of the pro-change group becomes disillusioned, apathetic, and cynical if things don’t change or don’t change in the way they envisioned. I think this is a big part of why Republican strategists out-communicate and out-maneuver the Dems. When all of this comes together, Democrats look uncoordinated, whiny, and “partisan.”

I think you should fight the battles you have to fight, not just the ones you can win. You shouldn’t stop trying to change the world but sometimes you have to step back to regroup and fight better tomorrow. Liberals can’t sell the rest of the country on all of the big issues at once. We need to develop more awareness of how we approach issues and pitch solutions.