The Democratic Theme

This is an email I sent to Digby at Hullabaloo that I thought was worth posting.

Hi Digby.

While I couldn't agree more with the essentials of your "New Front" post, I think there is one element you might have wrong. One of the ways that Democrats have bought into the Republican frame of issues is that we keep defending "government" in the abstract. Voters hear "government" and think "pointy-headed bureaucrats and corrupt politicians in Washington telling me what to do. Government is a "them." We may not like it, but there it is. What we need is an "us."

Democrats, I believe, need to step back and discuss public responsibilities,and civic obligation. We need to directly engage "we" language. The problem with "government" solutions is that liberals tend to default to the bureaucratic solution, which is pretty demobilizing. It also feeds into the current right-wing model of citizens as passive consumers of public services, rather than engaged members in the project of self-government.

FDR and Kennedy didn't say "government should do this" but "we should do this" or "America should do this." One of the great things of about the Dean campaign is that it used this participatory language. We need to get that back. This doesn't mean that we need to start bashing government, it just means we need to change the tone with which we discuss public action to stop making it sound like it's something someone else should be doing. It is our responsibility, both individually and as a country, to tackle these issues of public concern. Only after we have set the table in this fashion should we start getting into the specifics of how we do so.