Log In | Register
Although I have argued this case informally on a number of occasions, since the rock and the hard place are here at last, the rubber is meeting the road, the push has been shoved, the fishing or cutting of bait must now happen, and the time has come for the pot to have its business done or to be gotten off of, I thought it was time to formalize my case.
Blue Dog Democrats are essentially doomed. There's no place left for them to hide. [Okay, okay, I promise to reduce the cliche to total-word ratio from now on.] Their careers are over, or all but over, even if a few of them hang on this November. Their force in national politics is about to collapse. And that will be the case regardless of the outcome of the vote on Health Care Reform upcoming in the next week or so and regardless of whether the Democrats keep control of Congress in the elections in November.
There are four phenomena at work destroying the Blue Dogs, and while they have for many years faced some combination of those, I don't think they can survive all four at once. At the electoral level, they have to fight at either a tactical or strategic disadvantage, or both, and at the ideological level they have both an American problem and a philosophical problem.
- The Tactical Problem
Let us first map the territory. In all but a very few instances, the Blue Dog Democrats are not perfectly suited to their districts. Assuming a competitive or swing district, in most cases, the House Member represents either a leans-Democrat district for which they are slightly too conservative for their constituency, or they represent a leans-Republican district for which they are slightly too liberal. Before now that didn't matter much because the disjunction wasn't large enough to offset all the other factors favorable to the Blue Dog. Now it does matter. A lot.
Consider the fate of a Blue Dog in a leans-Democrat district. If that Member votes Nay on Health Care Reform, they will outrage the base voters in a leans-Democrat district, draw a primary challenge and quite possibly lose. A Democratic House Member helps defeat the primary domestic policy program of the Democratic party and expects the Democrats of their district to shrug it off? Ain't gonna happen. So that Member votes Aye to get by the primary. And things are even worse for that Member to vote Nay in a leans-Republican district because the smaller number of Democratic voters means Democratic activists and partisans are more influential. It'll be easier to beat a Blue Dog in a Democratic primary in a Republican district.
- The Strategic Problem
But those are just the tactical considerations. Things are if anything worse at the strategic level in the general election.
If and when the Blue Dog does what they have to do to survive a primary, they still have to face a Republican in November. Simply because of gains the last two elections and the general rule of the party holding the White House losing seats, this election is already structurally awful for Democrats. A Blue Dog in a Republican district has to convince Republican voters that the Blue Dog is preferable to the Republican as a means of opposition to the party in power? Even if they voted Nay on Health Care Reform? It's to laugh. That Blue Dog will be fit for a Korean dinner, maybe, but they won't be in Congress anymore.
Similarly, if somehow the Blue Dog had voted No and survived a primary and made it to the general election in a leans-Democratic district, what does that Member think is going to happen to their base voter after having betrayed the highest priority domestic policy program of the Democratic party for the last five or six decades? Maybe they'll vote for the Blue Dog and maybe they won't, but maybe it'll rain that day or American Idol will be on. Eh.
Jeffrey H. Anderson of National Review posted a detailed and highly optimistic (for opponents) whip count, Three Reasons Why Obamacare Isn't Likely to Pass, based on those electoral tactical and strategic considerations. It's extremely well-informed and well-argued. It might even prove to be correct come next week. But that does not change the fact that those considerations don't matter anymore. If Anderson is proven right, that will simply mean that some measurable portion of moderate-to-conservative Democrats mistakenly believe that we still live in a political world that we don't live in anymore. And those Blue Dogs will pay the price for that delusion. Because even if the Blue Dogs succeed in navigating the tactical and strategic electoral obstacles, they still have to face two other problems, the American and philosophical problems mentioned above.
- The American Problem
This 661-pixels-wide chart captures the American problem better than any 661-word disquisition could: 
Chart by Keith Poole, UCal San Diego, used with permission.
I call this the American Problem because it's unique among Western democracies (because of the Civil War, Jim Crow and various and sundry other related nastiness). In a nutshell, that chart shows the degree of partisan, and hence, ideological, cohesion in American politics from Reconstruction to the present. As the Democrats re-built themselves into a national party from their sectional roots and shook off their well-deserved reputation as being treasonous insurrectionists, there was a long period of loosely coalitionist politics, from about 1925 to about 1985, where neither party was especially ideological, partisan discipline was low and both parties had liberal and conservative wings. Not only was there room for Blue Dogs in national politics during this period, for much of the time they ruled the kennel. Top Dogs.
But those days are gone gone gone. And they ain't coming back. There used to be space for a Blue Dog to make a sincere and true case to their constituents that they were not a creature of the national party or not beholden in any way to their ideological adversaries within the Democratic party. Now you can bemoan the erosion of that space, or you can cheer its destruction, but you cannot deny that that space is all but gone. Handicapping the Health Care Reform vote as if that space still existed or resonated with voters is delusional. In fact, whatever tiny beachhead of space remains for Blue Dogs on which to huddle against the tide of partisan cohesion will be destroyed by the Health Care vote anyway. But none of these factors holds the power of the fourth factor.
- The Philosophical Problem
I call this the Philosophical Problem not because it's about some conflict between political philosophies, but because it drives to the heart of what political philosophy is and does, what it's for and how it works. People do politics to settle conflicts about the way society is organized and the institutions of social organization are administered.
I believe the one of the primal conflicts in politics is the struggle between the Provincial and the Cosmopolitan. I would tell you that that struggle can be seen going back to Aristotle's Politics, but I can't. But the only reason I can't is because the old Greeks pretty much had that worked out: The Cities ruled, the Provinces were subjects. But pretty much everywhere else a political dynamic has existed, Guelphs and Ghibellines, Whigs and Tories, Federalists and Democratic-Republicans, that clash of social visions has been the animating force.
I don't mean "Provincial" to be pejorative at all, despite such connotations as it may have. And I don't mean "Cosmopolitan" to mean "urban," although the two are frequently associated. Harvard historian Bernard Bailyn, drawing from critic Kenneth Clark's aesthetic definition of those terms and applying it to the political thought of the Founders and Framers, laid out the distinction between Provincial and Cosmopolitan in a lecture he gave in 1998, "To Begin the World Anew, which was later turned into a book. It's brilliant. Read that lecture. Or the book. Or watch him discuss it for an hour on C-Span.
In the 2008 primaries, Princeton historian Sean Wilentz, a strong Hillary Clinton supporter, wrote a widely circulated and discussed essay: Barack Obama and the Unmaking of the Democratic Party. Turns out he was very, very wrong and very, very right. After a detailed exposition of the historic connection between the Democrats and white proletarians dating back to Andrew Jackson, Wilentz predicted dire electoral consequences from Obama's singular lack of appeal to the white working class and working poor:
Obama, if nominated, is almost certainly destined to lose unless he can suddenly reverse the trend that his own dismissive language and his supporters' contemptuous tone has accelerated during the primaries.
That. Was. Wrong. But Wilentz was right about something else: His core hypothesis. Obama is indeed unmaking the Democratic party. Or to be more precise, I guess, Obama's election is the unmaking of the Democratic party as Wilentz describes it, since I don't think it's anything Obama consciously created or caused or controlled.
Wilentz's argument, although he did not say so explicitly, was also the history of the degree to which the Democrats were the party of the Provinces. The problem for Obama is that he's so not a Provincialist he can't even fake it the way Bill Clinton did. It's just not an option as a matter of personality and character. And because things like, you know, actual policy that benefits the white working class and working poor don't seem to matter anymore in our stupid political discourse, there's not a lot Obama can do to strengthen the ties of Democrats to the Provinces. It may have been simply a fluke of circumstances and confluences of forces that allowed the Democrats to nominate and the voters to elect the most Cosmopolitan candidate the USA could accept. But that fluke did circumstand and those forces did conflow, and now Provincial Democrats--the Blue Dogs--have to try to exist in a party that is definitively Cosmopolitan because the leader of the party is so.
I just don't think that's possible, not for this political generation or so. And when time enough passes that that again might be possible, the unknowable future will have occurred. For now, the fate of the Blue Dogs is sealed, their doom is at hand. They can't save themselves voting this way or that, or collecting money from this lobby or that, or running attack ads against this opponent or that. Their problem is far too profound to solve with such petty and trivial machinations. Maybe, for once in their lives, they could just vote their conscience. I end with a picture:
These Provincials used to be Democrats. Now they're not.
Photo Credit: Street scene, Kingwood, West Virginia.
Walker Evans, 1935
Library of Congress, FSA-OWI Collection
