David Atkins makes some interesting points here, encouraging the left to look at the defeat of Eric Cantor in Virginia through a slightly different lens that we might otherwise use. Unlike other commentators, he is not focused on the specifics of the Cantor defeat, but the broader outlines — how a powerful, conservative Republican political actor (House majority leader in line to be the next House speaker) was taken out by a seemingly unknown and more conservative Republican in a primary, and what it means for the trajectory of the Democratic Party. Yes, the Democrats.
There are lessons, he says, that the left must take from Cantor’s defeat and from how conservative insurgencies have consistently pulled Republican politics — and national electoral politics — to the right.
The question, he says, is why the left has not sought to use the Democratic Party in a similar way, why it seems complacently willing to cede power within the party to the corporate Democrats and power brokers and rarely offers the slightest challenge — even in an environment where nearly every House seat is safe thanks to gerrymandering, it is rare to see sitting Democrats being challenged from their left.
This, he says rightly, means that corporate/centrist Democrats control the party and control the debate. The Democrats think they are chasing the center, but the center keeps moving right with the Republican Party — even as voters say they are not supportive of Republican policies. To prevent this rightward drift, he says, lefty Democrats need to be more aggressive, need to start their own Tea Party-like revolution within the Democratic Party.
I think his analysis is accurate, within the limits of electoral politics. There is a need for the left to be more engaged, though we should not fool ourselves into thinking that a more left-liberal Democratic Party will be effective in remaking America.
The Republicans’ aggressive use of the rule-making apparatus to shut down government — gerrymandering, the filibuster, the Senate hold, the power of House committee chairs — mean that that minority party is in a powerful position to keep even the most popular policies from coming to a vote. Pulling the Democrats to the left could alter the dynamic some, mostly by altering the tenor of the debate, but it will not lead to substantive policy changes. Those can only come from an engaged citizenry that is willing to do more than write blog posts (yes, I am guilty in this regard) and letters to their congressmen and local papers. The Occupy movement was too diffuse to have a real impact, though it did help push the issue of inequality onto the national agenda.
The model, I think, is the Civil Rights movement, which took to the streets and created a moral imperative for change that ultimately resulted in the Civil Rights Act and other legislation. The immigrants rights movement today is having a similar effect (New Jersey’s tuition equality legislation happened because activism by immigrant students created the moral space within which elected officials could work to pass legislation).
So, yes, we need progressives and leftists to challenge Democrats in primaries and not just run for open seats. But we also need to work outside of the electoral process.
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Hank Kalet 