Purging the Radicals
As the 2006 midterm elections fast approach and the likelihood of a Democratic takeover of Congress increases, I thought it might be appropriate to suggest how Democrats might be able to capitalize on their potential majority status for the two years before the 2008 elections. In the past I have noted here that Democrats need a real strategy for winning. This strategy lives and breathes on a comprehensive governing philosophy that offers an alternative to conservative rule. I have also noted that moderate Republicans should be welcomed as allies in the effort to purge the extremist leadership of the GOP. It is this point I wish to focus on.
It is depressing but appropriate that Iraq has become the reason for public discontent with George W. Bush and Republican government. It is depressing because it took billions of dollars and thousands of wasted lives for Americans to realize that the Bush administration's foreign policy is not only inept but rudderless (ditto on the domestic front with Hurricane Katrina). I won't go as far to suggest that the American public disagrees entirely with the neoconservative utopia of spreading democracy through coercion and chaos, but polls have consistently shown that a majority now views going to Iraq as "a mistake." Yet on prominent opinion pages and in the spectacle of cable "news", these lunatics are still allowed to lie to the public without any sort of repercussions. Neoconservative foreign policy, both in theory and practice, has been demonstrated to be an outrageous failure. But conservative commentators still suggest that things are fine in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that Iran is a "crisis" that must be dealt with militarily. There is no evidence, I am confident in saying, that lends support to any of these positions. But there is no correction made to these outrageous positions, no rebuttals. The best we see is an alternative point of view, as if there are two ways of looking at reality (and one is more real than the other). In my astonishment that these people actually have an audience and a platform for their minority interpretations I realized that rebuilding the Democratic majority is going to require the total discredit of these zealots.
Lately there's been talk of the "radical Left" taking over the Democratic Party, the Lamont primary victory in Connecticut held up as exhibit A. Moderates are being purged, we are told by pundits in the opinion business, to be replaced by radical anti-war Democrats. Worse, people who are ostensibly on the Left bemoan a repeat of 1972, with the Democratic party being overrun by McGovernites, leading to a sweeping victory for the GOP. This analysis is wrong, wrong, wrong. The Democratic party are the moderates. Yes, the Left is exacting influence, but only to the extent that it is pulling the Party away from the Right. The extremists and radicals are already in power. They are the conservative punditocracy, the Republican leadership, the President and his advisors. They have all of the advantages of promoting message, which is why they are so shrill today. They know their days are numbered, that the public is looking for alternatives to "staying the course," and that is why the myth of the "angry Left" persists. Rebuilding the Democratic majority is going to require not just electoral victory but a purge of conservative opinion in the mass media.
Purging right-wing pundits does not, I must emphasize, mean a Stalinist approach. I do not wish for these people to be dragged into an alley and shot. They are a cancer on our national dialogue and need to be relegated to minority opinion, not conventional wisdom. Think back to the Clinton years when these same people gained increasing prominence and legitimacy in the mass media. Now that they are supporters instead of critics of the government, the government message and the media message are in sync. And for the periods following 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq, most of the public agreed with them. Now that reality has finally caught up, the public is hungry for a new message. The Democrat position on the issues emulates the public's but that truth has not yet been internalized by the pundit class and won't until the pundits are replaced. In an act of dual reinforcement, the governing philosophy of the Democratic Party (frustratingly still pending at this point) will converge with a new conventional wisdom that will declare, in essence, that the Bush era was a dark one for the United States, we are all guilty of buying into it, and now it is time to change course.
Thus electoral and media victory are dependent. The right-wing extremists won't disappear and chances are they will complain louder than ever after losing in 2006 but they will be delegitimized and rightly be viewed as whiny sore losers who are intellectually and morally bankrupt. They will be marginalized just as they were during the era of liberal government and just as liberals are today. We are on the cusp, I believe, of a palace revolution that will be followed swiftly by a battle for control of the conventional wisdom in this country. Stripping radical right-wingers of elected office, committee chairmanships and Congressional majority is the first stage. Making a mockery of right-wing pundits in the media is the second. Only then can the third goal be reached: recapturing the White House in 2008, widening Congressional majorities, and starting the difficult task of repairing the damage wrought by George W. Bush, the Republican party, and the conservative governing philosophy.