Wanted: An Opposition Party

In repose to a previous post, commenter Steve writes:

I wouldn’t like it either if I were in your shoes.  But the answer isn’t to nitpick every little thing along the way.  The answer is to come up with some ideas, come up ways to implement them, and become more palatable to the American public and take back the President’s office, the Senate, and the House.

Actually, that’s only half right. Democrats also need to become a real opposition party.

First, like I said before, I don’t think we have any way of knowing just who these people are ideologically, because they won’t say and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to ask and get real answers. Senators are even declaring that specific issues should be off limits in hearing. Thus, Biden’s questioning whether we should even bother to have confirmation hearings anymore if they’re not nothing more than resume reviews. It’s getting to the point where we don’t know what these people believe and we can’t know until they start making rulings that no one can do much of anything about.

On the second part, I don’t have a problem with saying that Democrats need to come up with ideas to address public concerns in a way that’s in harmony with progressive values. However, I don’t think that necessarily means rolling over and giving the president and his party whatever they want because they happen to be in the majority. Joe, here, explains it pretty well if also pretty bluntly.

If we’re ever going to take power away from Republicans, we have to stop acting like them, and the first step is to get rid of these appeasers and apologists. Frankly I don’t understand why we didn’t just kick these people out of the party years ago. If you want to be a Republican, just switch parties. If you want to be a Democrat, then get with the program.

I’ve said it before and I’ll repeat it. If Democrats don’t get a program that distiguishes them from the Republicans, and then “get with the program” as a party, they will wake up to find they have handed the Republicans the biggest victory in their “revolution”: a more conservative Democratic party, nearly indistiguishable from their own.

If that’s the case, then the Democrats don’t even need to bother showing up for votes. They can just go off and form a think tank and develop ideas, and leave the governing to the ruling party. That’s the logical extreme of a winner-take-all political system like ours anyway.

I tend to agree with Noam Chomsky (here I’ll probably lose what few conservative readers I may have; oh well) that the Democrats need to be an opposition party.

George Bush would be in severe political trouble if there were an opposition political party in the country. Just about every day, they’re shooting themselves in the foot. The striking fact about contemporary American politics is that the Democrats are making almost no gain from this. The only gain that they’re getting is that the Republicans are losing support. Now, again, an opposition party would be making hay, but the Democrats are so close in policy to the Republicans that they can’t do anything about it. When they try to say something about Iraq, George Bush turns back to them, or Karl Rove turns back to them, and says, “How can you criticize it? You all voted for it.” And, yeah, they’re basically correct.

Part of the Democrats’ problem is that they think making themselves “more palatable to the American public” means being more like Republicans. Meanwhile they’re ignoring a significant segment of the population that would actually side with them on some issues if they would only articulate a vision and a plan for getting there.

But that’s only part of the problem. Democrats need to show some of the party discipline that got Republicans where they are and realize that compromising with the Republicans isn’t going to get them anything but permanent minority status. Quite simply, they need to stand together and oppose the agenda presented by the president and his party while simultaneously presenting their vision and their plan for America as an alternative, and in a way that resonates with a as many Americans a possible. Even if they can’t get anything passed, it plants the seed that there’s an alternative to what we’re seeing now.

A party of ideas and  an opposition party. The two are not mutually exclusive, and both are desperately needed.