Liberals Not Eggheaded Enough?

New ITA contributor Jonathan Bunch criticizes liberals for spending too much time worrying about their “narratives” and their “framing” of issues. Instead, Bunch says, liberals need to get to the nut of their problem: That their ideas themselves need changing. Bunch characterizes Democrats as a party in thrall to moribund ideas, and contrasts them with the intellectually nimble Republican party with its bold and brilliant conservative avant-garde. I find this argument not a little misguided, but the reason Bunch’s piece goes off in the wrong way is enlightening.

Let’s consider a simplified model of a political party defined by four groups (not all necessarily internally homogenous). The party’s intellectual elite, the eggheads and analysts and professors who develop or appropriate policy ideas, make up one group; the officeholders, candidates and key staffers make up another. There is the broad mass of the party, its activists and habitual voters, who will stay with the party and work for it over a long period of time (although, in the long run, any group may enter or leave a coalition; contrast African-American voting patterns at the end of the 19th century with the same group’s voting habits at the end of the 20th). Finally, there are the swing voters to whom the party may appeal at any given time, although always at the risks of dampening the enthusiasm (and, less likely, losing the support) of the party’s base.
This model, I think, holds for both parties. And it partly explains why Bunch, like the National Review writers he cites, are wrong, first, to conflate “liberals” and “the Democratic Party;” second, to ascribe the philosophical weaknesses of the Democracy (to use the 19th and early 20th century term) to a purely intellectual failing; and, third, to pin on the Democrats’ intellectuals and politicians the apparent inability of the Democrats to articulate a bold alternative to the innovative conservatism Bunch claims to see. (There are other problems with Bunch’s argument, which I address below.)
“Liberals” and “the Democratic Party” are not the same thing; at times they do not even rhyme, although the two groups have been closely allied since the end of the 1960s and may be as closely aligned now as they have ever been. Many liberals think the Democratic Party is altogether too moderate, even conservative, and would share Bunch’s assessment of the weakness of the party in generating and explaining new policy ideas. (Most of Jon Stewart’s jokes about the Democrats come from this vein.) A party that includes Brad DeLong and anti-NAFTA activists, Joe Lieberman and Barbara Boxer is one that does not subscribe to any particular dominant ideology. Liberals come in many flavors, but a generic liberal (as opposed to a leftist, a Green or a moderate) would at least be more consistent than the Democratic Party on most issues.
This, though, brings us to the reason why liberals and Democrats are distinct, as well as why the failure of the Democratic Party to enunciate an opposition party programme is not an intellectual failure. Liberals are ideologues, and ideologues always have the indulgence of seeking to become pure and consistent. The Democratic Party, however, is–like all democratic parties–a permanent political organization aimed at winning control of the machinery of the state through peaceful means. A party so organized–that is, a party that is determined to be relevant and indeed responsible–cannot afford in most times the luxury of consistency. It is a coalition of interests, not a consensus of thinkers, and its party platform must reflect that.
To put this in terms of the four-group model advanced above: The policy-making class, the officeholding class, and the two different types of voters (loyal and potential) are not going to be able to come up with a consistent platform. Few mass governing democratic parties are. For the Democrats, the diversity of their coalition is, in the medium term, an especial hindrance to the resolution of some of their key internal tensions. Until the union movement dies out, for instance, the unions will vote and campaign Democratic, and that will tie the politicians’ hands about appealling to pro-trade voters in the swing category, no matter what the policy wonks say. (Wait twenty or thirty years, however, and unions in the tradable goods sector will probably be extinct in America.) The intellectuals and policymakers, therefore, cannot be held accountable for any supposed failure to generate and explain bold new ideas: The structure of political life in a two-party system works against them.
Here, though, we have to take up the other major reason why Bunch is wrong in his assessment of the contemporary state of liberalism, and that is his assertion that conservatives, considered as a group and considered as synonymous with the GOP, have a monopoly on the creation of new ideas. The evidence simply refuses to bear out that statement. The best ideas the Republicans have–and they are very good ideas–are deregulation, free trade and a generic presumption in favor of liberty against enemies foreign and domestic. These also happen to be, in the American context at least, rather old ideas. And as long as certain qualifications are admitted (for instance, that sometimes regulation may be the quickest and cheapest way to solve certain problems), they are ideas that don’t require much updating. The generation of new ideas, in other words, is not–more accurately, should not be–the job of conservatives.
Here again, though, Bunch’s terminology blocks him from making the necessary fine distinctions. The most glaringly obvious flaw in this part of his argument is simply that Republicans do not agree with each other on a great many subjects, from the absurdity that was the theocratic justification for the intrusion of the state into the affairs of the Schiavo family to the dispute between small-government activists and free-spenders over how much money a Republican government (which the federal government now is) should spend to the continuing arguments between social conservatives and libertarians over the degree to which government should interfere in anyone’s lives. Here we have, in much the same degree, a picture very similar to that of the Democratic Party.
Claiming a monopoly on policy innnovation for the Republican Party is to mistake the advantages of a monopoly on federal power and the longstanding (and enjoyable) ability of Republicans to speak their minds loudly for true intellectual ferment. I do not, I wish to reiterate, mean to knock the Republicans–my party–for this; as I indicated above, I don’t think we need to reevaluate our core ideas of government all that often, although there is a clear need for us to update (not enlarge) government’s role in this or that sector. To do anything else, I believe, would be to arrogate to the government that power which properly belongs in the private sphere–namely, the power for individuals to run their own lives. (Yet, as I indicated above, there are apparently a great many people who vote for most of the same candidates I do who think that the government should intrude into that sphere on moralistic or religious grounds.)
The greatest intellectual clashes are always to be found among those who march behind the same banner. In Russia, before the revolution, when there were no more than a handful of Marxists, nonetheless there were whole forests felled for the paper of the frantic scribblings of the squabbling socialists. Much the same process is at work today within the two American political parties and the two broadest ideological camps in American political life. Democrats never try to persuade other Democrats that Republicans are wrong; that is taken for granted. But this Democrat will want to persuade his fellows that Democrat is misguided, because the rewards for the winner of intraparty contests are more certain than those to be won in interparty campaigns. Similarly, only very dull conservative writers are still arguing against Communism and the 1970s environmentalism of, say, Paul Ehrlich (which is not to say that only a very few writers are engaged in those battles). Those campaigns were won, or at least settled, long ago. The real action is now to be found in the shots that Reason takes at the National Review.
Of course, very little of this matters to partisans. The Democrats and Republicans remain nearly evenly matched, and in such an environment, it is unlikely that an ideological revolution will take place. It is more likely that events and interests, not ideas, will decide the next campaign.