Herding Cats

The response to Feingold's censure motion tells you everything you need to know about how contemporary politics functions. A Democrat attempts to take advantage of Bush's vulnerabilities. He is assailed by Republicans as being unpatriotic. He is attacked by other Democrats who think that this position makes the party look "soft." And the media gleefully reports boths critiques, furthering the "Republicans tough, Democrats in disarray" meme. Meanwhile the substantive argument the Democrat was trying to make is entirely lost.

We have seen this story play out over and over and over. Now we know that press is partly at fault, because of their simplistic and easily manipulable character. And the Republicans are to be congratulated for their ability to dominate the agenda - although having all 3 branches of government tends to make that pretty easy. And of course the Democrats deserve some criticism for their lack of unity.

But the problem is more complicated than it might appear. The source of the Republican advantage and the Democratic disadvantage really boils down to one thing - message discipline. We were able to achieve a stalemate in the 1990's because we had the Clinton White House. Once we lost it, we lost any central leadership and have been on the rhetorical defensive every since.

It's not that there aren't good strategies proposed for Democrats. There are tons of good strategies, any of which might work. But what we have now is NO strategy, because there is no one to make the decision and then follow through. Instead we have polite requests that our party members follow along. They make a different calculation, pursue a different path, and the result is verbal anarchy.

The Republicans don't have this problem. In power or out of it, they are equally adept at crafting and implementing a rhetorical strategy, with the members of their coalition relentlessly pushing a single point of view on any issue.

What explains the difference between Democratic and Republican message discipline? One word - organization. The Republicans have built an old-style political machine, based on contract patronage & media institutions, but with a hard-core activist base. The leadership of this machine can punish any Republican who doesn't toe the line. If they resist central directives, they are punished with primary challenges are the withholding of campaign funds. Furthermore, this machine is imbued with a fanatic right-wing ideology that gives the structure internal legitimacy and pscyhological cohesion.

The Democrats have nothing resembling this kind of organization. This is not the fault of Democrats. It's been rare for a major national political party to blend machine and ideological politics - I can't really think of one, to be honest. The closest historical examples are the Bolsheviks and the Fascists. I would argue that it is not that the Democrats are particularly disorganized and incompetent. They are behaving the way most political parties have behaved at most times. What is remarkable is what the Republicans have created - a political structure without parallel in national politics.

The Republican structure is not going to just collapse on its own - it must be destroyed. Until the Democrats build a political organization of their own, we are going to continue to lose. I'm not suggesting we ape the Republicans in building a top-down, inherently corrupt, quasi-fascist party structure. What I am saying is that until we develop central institutions that enable us to develop and execute political strategy, we are going to keep getting our heads beat in.