Combatting Conservative Arguments, Part 2

It is accepted wisdom among Conservatives in the Republican Party that the reason the Democrats are out of power in the Congress, the courts, the White House, the state houses, and the state assemblies, is because the Conservatives have won the battle of ideas. A current book by George Lakoff called "Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate--The Essential Guide for Progressives", accepts this argument and purportedly shows Democrats how to frame better arguments using better language. The problem is that this argument is wrong. Democrats have not lost the war over ideas.

Here is a history of the Republican and Democratic Parties, and why one has succeeded while the other failed. It has nothing to do with the persuasiveness of ideas. It has to do with the ability of each party to implement their ideas.

The Republican Party uses top-down leadership: the base elect the leadership based on a coherent ideology, and the leadership then tell the base how to implement that ideology. The leadership doesn't care what people outside the base think; they simply want to enlarge their base. Consequently, the leadership tells the base to do any number of things, both legal and illegal, to win elections, while the base supports these instructions because they know that the leadership agrees with its ideology.

The Democratic Party is divided between bottom-up leadership and top-down leadership. The top-down leadership don't care about the ideology of the base, and they are actually afraid of that ideology, thinking that it causes them to lose elections based on the argument that the American people have adopted conservative ideas and rejected liberal ideas. The Democratic Base also doesn't care about the Democratic Leadership, but it accepts the Democratic Leadership as the only way to win elections because of the argument that the American people have adopted conservative ideas and rejected liberal ideas. Hence, the Democratic Leadership tries to appeal to swing voters who are more likely to have conservative ideas, while the Democratic Base tries to get the vote out from the base. The Leadership and the base do not communicate well because they dislike each other.

So, to summarize, the Republicans are internally coherent, but they don't care what people outside the party think about them. They behave very much like a cult. The Democrats are internally dissonant, and they care very much about what people outside the party think of them because they are trying so hard to please everyone.

Consequently, the basic problem is that the Republican Party is a community, but the Democratic Party is not. The Republican Party acts swiftly and coherently, the Democratic Party does not.

The reason for the success of Republicans is because they behave like a community. It has nothing to do with the value of their ideas. The Democrats need to reconnect with each other to rebuild their own community. The first step is to recognize the value of community.

Recognizing the value of community is easier for Republicans than it is for Democrats, for two reasons. First, the Republicans call their community "church" , "party", and "country". Protestant denominations have grown because they provide a sense of community. Party activism has flourished because it provides a sense of community. Patriotism is rampant because it provides a sense of community. The ideas that bind the community may be false and destructive, but the forms of the community help the Republican Party.
Here then, is a cardinal rule of what it means to be a New Age Democrat: ideas and principles are irrelevant unless you can implement them. Community is the only way to implement ideas.

The Democratic Party has had difficulty recognizing the value of community because it has focused simultaneously on the national and the intensely private, without focusing on everything in between: communities. Ever since President Kennedy, President Johnson, and the Civil Rights movement, as well as numerous other liberation movements, the Democrats have accepted to contradictory ideas. The first is that we are each on our own individual path, and therefore we should not interfere with the personal journey of another person. Simultaneously, we look to the democratic leadership to combine our efforts so that we can succeed in national politics. The problem is that it is difficult, if not impossible, to look inward and outward simultaneously.

Democrats cannot expect help from the top when they reject help from their peers. We cannot believe in a single, coherent path for the nation when we believe in separate paths for each other. The base and the leadership must be in alignment, in the same way that the head and the heart must be in alignment.
The most important point is that the United States, as a society, is crying out for more community while it simultaneously separates itself into different spheres. The Republicans know this, and so they refuse to separate. The Democrats do not know this, so they accept this contradiction.

The Democratic and liberal values of helping each other, recognizing our common humanity, and using government for that purpose, have all been adopted by the Republicans. Except, they call it security. They argue that the human race is a family, and that the U.S. must go to other countries and help oppressed peoples, such as in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Syria, and elsewhere. Yet, the Democrats then argue that we are not a global community, and that we cannot impose out values on other countries through force.
This is simply a reply of the domestic argument. Republicans want community, and so they create it, virtually out of nothing, especially with the growth of ex-urban areas. The Republicans have thus gotten very good at creating something out of nothing as a justification for maintaining their community. The Democrats call this lying, acting like sheep, etc. However, all the Republicans are doing is realizing that people need to communicate with each other. That's why they have used talk radio and cable television to fill the void that is left from the disappearance of physical community. The Democrats only see the forest for the trees: they think that talk radio and cable television are hateful, angry, and filled with misinformed people, but the do not recognize that conservatives have found a good way to use information technology to create their own sense of community. We need not accept their ideas, but we can copy their methods of spreading their ideas.

That is the ultimate lesson that the Democrats must learn. Liberal and Democratic arguments have been accepted by everyone, including the Republicans, but the Democrats do not act on those arguments while the Republicans do. I would rather be in a party that acts upon its ideas in the local level first, than wait for the idea to come from the national level.