Attention: TDR Forum Junkies 
Noonan:
Recently Andrew Cuomo asked me to contribute to a book of essays on the future of the Democratic Party. I thought I would send it to Andrew through OpinionJournal.com. That way he will be able to see your responses pro and con and perhaps include a few of them in the book, too.
Dear Andrew,
As a former Democrat I'm happy to talk to my old party about its future. Some of my words may sting a little, but I send them to you in hopes your party will see in them food for thought, and for progress.
All political parties have problems--infighting, internal dissent, philosophical disagreements. But the modern Democratic Party has problems that are essentially different from that, and could actually do it in.
The first is what seems to me a lack of a constructive spirit within your party. Great parties exist in part to give us markers for the future. They offer a rough map that will get us to a better and higher destination. In the Democratic Party now, and for some time, I have not perceived that they are trying to get us to a good place. They seem interested only in thwarting the trek of the current president and his party, who are, to the Democrats, "the other. " When the president is a Democrat you now support him no matter what. You support him if he doesn't have a map, and isn't interested in markers, and is only interested in his own day-to-day survival.
I am not saying you are too partisan. Partisanship is fine. But Republicans by and large don't suffer from blind loyalty or blind antagonism. They would think it irresponsible to the country. They will bolt on one of their own if he insists on a route they think is seriously wrong (the first Bush on taxes). They will kill his presidency if they conclude he is essentially destructive (it was his Republican base in Congress that ended Richard Nixon's career). Recently it was Republicans who did in their own Senate majority leader because they would not accept a certain kind of nonsense. If George W. Bush begins to seriously compromise conservative political philosophy, or to behave in a manner grossly offensive in a leader, they will turn on him too.
The Democratic Party will now stick with its guy forever, no matter how harmful he is. Perhaps you call that loyalty, and perhaps there's something to it, but a bigger part, I believe, is that you have come to think that winning is everything--that victory is the purpose of politics.
If the purpose is just winning, you can do anything to win. And you can do anything to stay. You never give an inch. But people who never give an inch sometimes wind up occupying tired and barren terrain.
You have grown profoundly unserious. This is the result of the win-at-any-cost mindset. A recent illustration: President Bush broke through to the great middle of America and persuaded them we must move in Iraq. He was able to do this not because the presidency is the Big Microphone--President Clinton used to complain that Rush Limbaugh had the big microphone--but because he honestly believed, in his head and his heart, he was acting to make our country and other countries safer. Maybe history will show him right and maybe not, but people can tell his passion springs from conviction.
Democratic leaders, on the other hand, have by and large approached Iraq not with deep head-heart integration but with what appears to be mere calculation. What will play? What will resonate? These questions are both inevitable and a part of politics. But again, they are not the purpose of politics. Lincoln himself said, "Public opinion is everything," but he was speaking of public opinion as a fact he had to consider as he tried to push the country in a new direction. He did not think public opinion itself was a direction. And he didn't think it was a policy.
The modern Democratic Party is unserious in other ways. In the 1950s and '60s the party included many obviously earnest and thoughtful liberals who supported goals that were in line with and expressions of serious beliefs. They believed that America was an exceptional country. (See the speeches of Adlai Stevenson among others. ) Because it was exceptional it needed to remain strong. (JFK: "We shall pay any price, bear any burden, suffer any hardship . . . to secure the survival and success of liberty. ")
They also believed America had real flaws, actual sins, that needed to be righted. They assumed this exceptional country could right them. (That's what optimism is in politics; it's not smiling a hearty smile in front of a podium and pointing with a commanding air toward all your friends in the audience. ) They wanted racial integration for the good of justice and the good of our country. They wanted more government assistance to the poor for the same reason. They were anticommunist. They were grownups. They were thinking.
Vietnam changed everything of course, and even though this is an old story I'll touch on it. Your party's problem was not that it opposed the war--that was one honorable position among many. The mistake the Democrats made was to allow their antiwar movement to become infused with bitterness and hostility, with a spirit of destructiveness. By the end the animating spirit of the movement looked something like this: We do not love this place; we prefer leaders unsullied by the grubby demands of electoral politics; we are drawn to the ideological purity of Ho, Fidel, Mao. And by the way we're taking over: Oppose our vision and we'll take care of you by revolutionary means.
That was the ultimate spirit of the movement, and it began to take over your party. The old-bull liberals were swept away, more radical Democrats arose, and they led your party to become not a united and spirited force but a party of often warring pressure groups. The pro-abortion lobby, the affirmative-action lobby, other lobbies. You have had only one two-term Democratic president in the 35 years since Vietnam. This is because in the end you looked extreme, bought and paid for, and weak.
The Republican Party still manages to cohere around principles that are essentially clear and essentially conservative. The Democrats are not cohering. They are held together by a gritty talent for political process--message discipline, for instance. But what good is message discipline if there's no serious and coherent message?
There is another problem. You have become the party of snobs. You have become the party of Americans who think they're better than other Americans.
Let me quickly chart the life of a former Democrat. When I was a teenager in the 1960s, the Democrats seemed to me the party of the working class and middle class--the party of immigrants, strivers and those who adhered to an expansive reading of the American dream. I shared that dream, and saw my home as the Democratic Party. I was swayed by JFK and Bobby, by their implicit sense of honor about being Americans, as if they thought to be an American was a great gift and yet had a price: You had to help your country, you had to have guts and an open mind, you had to care about people others forgot.
I thought of Republicans as bland, unimaginative, vaguely immoral people who drank things like gin and tonic where they played things like golf. I remember reading in high school or college and being moved by someone's wonderful old turn of the century agitprop poem--"The golf links were so near the mills that nearly every day / The laboring children could look out and see the men at play. " I assumed those men were Republicans.
My father had been a poor kid in Brooklyn who grew up on what was then called relief. He'd talk about the rancid butter people like him were given to eat. But he thought Franklin Roosevelt was the only president who'd ever done anything to help the workingman, and he had a resentment of those who were comfortably middle class, or upper middle, or rich. I inherited this. These were the biases I brought to the conversation when talk turned to politics when I was a teenager and young woman.
But--again--the antiwar movement startled me. I knew America was imperfect, but I also loved it. I had no illusion that other countries were perfect, or superior. I couldn't imagine an unelected dictator had more legitimacy than an American president. I will never forget a moment when on local television they showed one day an antiwar march meeting up with a bunch of New York hardhats near City Hall. They fought, and the hardhats tried to raise the American flag. I watched and realized I was pulling for the hard hats.
I worked in Boston after college and saw affluent, well-educated and deeply insensitive officials forcing busing on working-class people who were understandably aghast at the idea that their young children couldn't go to the school down the block but had to be bused to a place far away where they knew nobody. I worked in an all-news radio station, and many of my colleagues, the writers and editors and producers, were young liberals gone left, bright and engaged by life. They were almost all for busing. Their enthusiasm for it--they hadn't yet had children whose presence might have moderated their thoughts and conclusions--left them patronizing the ill-educated and no doubt racist poor-Irish-Catholics-who-have-nothing people of South Boston, who opposed busing. Again I was startled. This was like the antiwar movement. It was like Henry Cabot Lodge looking down on the help! It would never have occurred to me to look down on anyone. But boy, these liberals did. They were real snobs. And it was class snobbery.
I was, as a young woman in the '70s, trying to commit myself professionally for the first time. I wanted to do good work, and really tried. But I saw in time that I was being clobbered by taxes, and in time I had a subversive thought. Hmmm, liberals who back busing are taxing me extra heavy so I can pay for busing. Great.
Recently Andrew Cuomo asked me to contribute to a book of essays on the future of the Democratic Party. I thought I would send it to Andrew through OpinionJournal.com. That way he will be able to see your responses pro and con and perhaps include a few of them in the book, too.
Dear Andrew,
As a former Democrat I'm happy to talk to my old party about its future. Some of my words may sting a little, but I send them to you in hopes your party will see in them food for thought, and for progress.
All political parties have problems--infighting, internal dissent, philosophical disagreements. But the modern Democratic Party has problems that are essentially different from that, and could actually do it in.
The first is what seems to me a lack of a constructive spirit within your party. Great parties exist in part to give us markers for the future. They offer a rough map that will get us to a better and higher destination. In the Democratic Party now, and for some time, I have not perceived that they are trying to get us to a good place. They seem interested only in thwarting the trek of the current president and his party, who are, to the Democrats, "the other. " When the president is a Democrat you now support him no matter what. You support him if he doesn't have a map, and isn't interested in markers, and is only interested in his own day-to-day survival.
I am not saying you are too partisan. Partisanship is fine. But Republicans by and large don't suffer from blind loyalty or blind antagonism. They would think it irresponsible to the country. They will bolt on one of their own if he insists on a route they think is seriously wrong (the first Bush on taxes). They will kill his presidency if they conclude he is essentially destructive (it was his Republican base in Congress that ended Richard Nixon's career). Recently it was Republicans who did in their own Senate majority leader because they would not accept a certain kind of nonsense. If George W. Bush begins to seriously compromise conservative political philosophy, or to behave in a manner grossly offensive in a leader, they will turn on him too.
The Democratic Party will now stick with its guy forever, no matter how harmful he is. Perhaps you call that loyalty, and perhaps there's something to it, but a bigger part, I believe, is that you have come to think that winning is everything--that victory is the purpose of politics.
If the purpose is just winning, you can do anything to win. And you can do anything to stay. You never give an inch. But people who never give an inch sometimes wind up occupying tired and barren terrain.
You have grown profoundly unserious. This is the result of the win-at-any-cost mindset. A recent illustration: President Bush broke through to the great middle of America and persuaded them we must move in Iraq. He was able to do this not because the presidency is the Big Microphone--President Clinton used to complain that Rush Limbaugh had the big microphone--but because he honestly believed, in his head and his heart, he was acting to make our country and other countries safer. Maybe history will show him right and maybe not, but people can tell his passion springs from conviction.
Democratic leaders, on the other hand, have by and large approached Iraq not with deep head-heart integration but with what appears to be mere calculation. What will play? What will resonate? These questions are both inevitable and a part of politics. But again, they are not the purpose of politics. Lincoln himself said, "Public opinion is everything," but he was speaking of public opinion as a fact he had to consider as he tried to push the country in a new direction. He did not think public opinion itself was a direction. And he didn't think it was a policy.
The modern Democratic Party is unserious in other ways. In the 1950s and '60s the party included many obviously earnest and thoughtful liberals who supported goals that were in line with and expressions of serious beliefs. They believed that America was an exceptional country. (See the speeches of Adlai Stevenson among others. ) Because it was exceptional it needed to remain strong. (JFK: "We shall pay any price, bear any burden, suffer any hardship . . . to secure the survival and success of liberty. ")
They also believed America had real flaws, actual sins, that needed to be righted. They assumed this exceptional country could right them. (That's what optimism is in politics; it's not smiling a hearty smile in front of a podium and pointing with a commanding air toward all your friends in the audience. ) They wanted racial integration for the good of justice and the good of our country. They wanted more government assistance to the poor for the same reason. They were anticommunist. They were grownups. They were thinking.
Vietnam changed everything of course, and even though this is an old story I'll touch on it. Your party's problem was not that it opposed the war--that was one honorable position among many. The mistake the Democrats made was to allow their antiwar movement to become infused with bitterness and hostility, with a spirit of destructiveness. By the end the animating spirit of the movement looked something like this: We do not love this place; we prefer leaders unsullied by the grubby demands of electoral politics; we are drawn to the ideological purity of Ho, Fidel, Mao. And by the way we're taking over: Oppose our vision and we'll take care of you by revolutionary means.
That was the ultimate spirit of the movement, and it began to take over your party. The old-bull liberals were swept away, more radical Democrats arose, and they led your party to become not a united and spirited force but a party of often warring pressure groups. The pro-abortion lobby, the affirmative-action lobby, other lobbies. You have had only one two-term Democratic president in the 35 years since Vietnam. This is because in the end you looked extreme, bought and paid for, and weak.
The Republican Party still manages to cohere around principles that are essentially clear and essentially conservative. The Democrats are not cohering. They are held together by a gritty talent for political process--message discipline, for instance. But what good is message discipline if there's no serious and coherent message?
There is another problem. You have become the party of snobs. You have become the party of Americans who think they're better than other Americans.
Let me quickly chart the life of a former Democrat. When I was a teenager in the 1960s, the Democrats seemed to me the party of the working class and middle class--the party of immigrants, strivers and those who adhered to an expansive reading of the American dream. I shared that dream, and saw my home as the Democratic Party. I was swayed by JFK and Bobby, by their implicit sense of honor about being Americans, as if they thought to be an American was a great gift and yet had a price: You had to help your country, you had to have guts and an open mind, you had to care about people others forgot.
I thought of Republicans as bland, unimaginative, vaguely immoral people who drank things like gin and tonic where they played things like golf. I remember reading in high school or college and being moved by someone's wonderful old turn of the century agitprop poem--"The golf links were so near the mills that nearly every day / The laboring children could look out and see the men at play. " I assumed those men were Republicans.
My father had been a poor kid in Brooklyn who grew up on what was then called relief. He'd talk about the rancid butter people like him were given to eat. But he thought Franklin Roosevelt was the only president who'd ever done anything to help the workingman, and he had a resentment of those who were comfortably middle class, or upper middle, or rich. I inherited this. These were the biases I brought to the conversation when talk turned to politics when I was a teenager and young woman.
But--again--the antiwar movement startled me. I knew America was imperfect, but I also loved it. I had no illusion that other countries were perfect, or superior. I couldn't imagine an unelected dictator had more legitimacy than an American president. I will never forget a moment when on local television they showed one day an antiwar march meeting up with a bunch of New York hardhats near City Hall. They fought, and the hardhats tried to raise the American flag. I watched and realized I was pulling for the hard hats.
I worked in Boston after college and saw affluent, well-educated and deeply insensitive officials forcing busing on working-class people who were understandably aghast at the idea that their young children couldn't go to the school down the block but had to be bused to a place far away where they knew nobody. I worked in an all-news radio station, and many of my colleagues, the writers and editors and producers, were young liberals gone left, bright and engaged by life. They were almost all for busing. Their enthusiasm for it--they hadn't yet had children whose presence might have moderated their thoughts and conclusions--left them patronizing the ill-educated and no doubt racist poor-Irish-Catholics-who-have-nothing people of South Boston, who opposed busing. Again I was startled. This was like the antiwar movement. It was like Henry Cabot Lodge looking down on the help! It would never have occurred to me to look down on anyone. But boy, these liberals did. They were real snobs. And it was class snobbery.
I was, as a young woman in the '70s, trying to commit myself professionally for the first time. I wanted to do good work, and really tried. But I saw in time that I was being clobbered by taxes, and in time I had a subversive thought. Hmmm, liberals who back busing are taxing me extra heavy so I can pay for busing. Great.
