Planning For The Future

The post-mortems and excuses and rationalizations about our shellacking in the Alito confirmation fight are well underway already. The optimistic version is that we weren't going to win anyway, that Scalia received 98 votes rather than 25, that we're in the minority and have to expect this sort of thing, and that we shouldn't give up but dig in for the future.

This debacle underlined one important point for me. The Democrats have made very little progress in the last few years in learning to counter the Republican "noise machine" or to build a coherent strategy of our own. The Republican rhetorical advantage was identified years ago, but we seem to have made zero progress in combatting it. This is extremely disheartening, and just provides more evidence for the manifest political incompetence of our party's leadership. Great at policy, bad at elections - not exactly a recipe for political success.

There are two things that we are going to have to think about very seriously in the future. The first is that our resistance of creating our own, rival "machine" is going to come at a high price. Tammany Hall built a machine in New York City in the year 1800. It was challenged by reformers for the next 160 years before it was finally destroyed. The reformers refused to build their own machine, instead relying on their own moral purity (which was condescending), their superior policy positions (which were unconvincing), and the collapse of the Tammany machine (which never seemed to happen). Every time Tammany would get into trouble and lose an election, it would pull itself together and come back strong the next time. The reformers were never able to maintain any consistent success because they refused to fight fire with fire. It took massive political and technological changes to bring down Tammany. I know Democrats don't want to build anything like the machine that Republicans have - we value openness and diversity too much. But if we don't at least narrow the organizational gap, we are going to continue to get creamed.

The second thing we need to think about is what we are going to do about the Courts. For decades now liberals have relied on good judges bailing us out after we lose elections. The Theocons pass prayer in schools requirements or something and the Supreme Court strikes it down. We always had the Court backing us up. That is no longer going to be the case -the other side is going to have control. We'd better figure that out quickly, or we are going to suffer some major surprises. Three more years of Bush is going to give them a chance to consolidate their hold on the federal courts. And what if another Supreme Court Justice dies or retires, like John Paul Stevens? Or what if the Democrats lose in 2008?

We are going to have to come to grips with the reality of conservative domination of the Courts. What do we do when they nullify environmental laws, or eviscerate habeus corpus rights? What do we do when they undermine collective bargaining and the minimum wage? What do we do when they uphold religious indoctrination in public schools? As I have said several times before, when we finally do regain control, we might be forced into a major confrontation with the Courts. Do we pack them like Roosevelt? Do we try a Judge for impeachment just to send a message? Do we strip them of jurisdiction? Or do we just tamely watch them repeal the 20th century?

We need to think hard but fast about these problems, because we don't have much time to come up with solutions. As bad as things are, I have a feeling that they could get considerably worse. We all want to think that the worst is over, that they're bound to get better. A sentiment I'm sure was shared by Germans in 1932.