Last Friday the Washington Post’s David Ignatius wrote this increasingly familiar refrain:
This should be the Democrats' moment: The Bush administration is caught in an increasingly unpopular war; its plan to revamp Social Security is fading into oblivion; its deputy chief of staff is facing a grand jury probe…. So where are the Democrats amid this GOP disarray? Frankly, they are nowhere. They are failing utterly in the role of an opposition party.
That same week I had penned much the same here: “The loyal opposition has only needed to oppose…. [Yet] handed five years of uninterrupted maladministration, Democrats still haven’t learned how to take the lead in speaking up about the right issue at the right time and in the right way.”
OK, so the Democratic Party is directionless, hapless and voiceless. It’s been “less” so long, been noted so often, and the majority anti-GOP faction is so sick of reading it, the party’s failures could be building to a critical mass at which point it will cease to be relevant as a national organization. Sounds unlikely, even crazy, but so was the 1990s rise to prominence of political goons like George W. Bush and Tom DeLay. After them, anything became thinkable.
But I’m not ready to chuck this nation’s oldest party just yet, if only for practical reasons. Stagnant or not, it possesses the essential political machinery to wrest control from the thugs in power. No other organization does, and none appears on the horizon. I gather Mr. Ignatius and hundreds of other advocates of Democratic backbone-grafting feel the same, otherwise they wouldn’t indulge in this persistent soul-searching.
As remedies for Democratic inertia, Ignatius first notes one option, only to reject it:
Because they lack coherent plans for how to govern the country, the Democrats have become captive of the most shrill voices in the party, who seem motivated these days mainly by visceral dislike of George W. Bush. Sorry, folks, but loathing is not a strategy.
Sorry, David, but loathing - part and parcel, of course, of its vocal manifestations - is very much a strategy.
There reigns in this country an odd notion about the role of a loyal opposition that’s as persistent as it is inaccurate - that is, that the opposition must always be Johnny on the spot with clearly defined alternatives to ruinous policies. That just isn’t so.
The overarching duty of any opposing party is to oppose - to criticize, to throw light on misguided policies, to prove the incumbent party guilty of the grossest of miscalculation. Watch the British House of Commons in action. You’ll rarely see a member of the opposition rise to tell Tony Blair how he should run the government. What you’ll see is members rising to tell Tony Blair how utterly ignorant he is and how badly he’s botching the job of seeing to the nation’s welfare. To “op-pose” means just that. It carries no absolute obligation to “pro-pose.”
Keep in mind that the loudest advocates of this requirement to always proffer detailed, positive alternatives are the folks in power who’ve screwed things up nearly beyond repair. If they make things bad enough, to where no attractive solutions exist, they can proclaim the other guys void of creative thinking and hence justify their continued stewardship.
Nevertheless so common has this expectation become, one hears the call more and more even from friendly voices these days. Mr. Ignatius himself made the demand (without, however, offering any positive alternatives himself).
The Democrats should put together a clear and coherent list of measures they would implement if they could regain control of Congress and the White House.
Well, here’s a thought, and it still fits with my insistence that no such broad list is mandatory. How about the simple proposition that we return to Clintonian policies? You remember, policies such as more equitable taxation. A balanced, even surplus budget. A sincere effort to work in accord with the international community. They once included guaranteed health care for all Americans, and that banner should again be taken up as well.
In short, a complete reversal of every destructive Bushian policy from bankruptcy “reform” to anti-environment stubbornness to tax regressivity, while adding that one major component of progressiveness - universal health care - advocated since the Truman administration.
A return to peace, prosperity and progress. A return, you might say, to a kind of normalcy-plus. Who, excepting the dittoheads and Fox addicts, isn’t sick to death of the bullying, swashbuckling, arrogant, divisive, prevaricating, plutocratic, insufferable asses in charge? Who wouldn’t like a respite, a return to sane, practical, (D-d)emocratic policies of yesteryear?
That’s not hard to articulate, and one can loathe to delight while articulating it.