by Terry Michael

Re-claiming our Jeffersonian liberal heritage,
with a back to the future re-branding
of the Democratic Party

In the several decades since most of our candidates began treating the “liberal” label like a bastard child, those of us who consider ourselves card-carrying Democrats have been wandering in an ideological no man’s land. We’ve been unable to gather around an informing set of core beliefs that both energize and motivate us, and which attract the center of American politics. As Republicans embraced “conservative,” our standard bearers drew closer to their pollsters and media consultants.

Since the end of the Sixties, the party that boasts the oldest continuing national committee in the world, formed in 1848, has been experiencing a problem not uncommon to venerable institutions: a loss of brand equity.

In the marketplace, a brand is a story wrapped around a product to differentiate it from similar stuff, so you feel good when you buy for reasons beyond the utilitarian. My Jeep isn’t transportation, it’s a toy for a middle-aged boy.

The Democratic Party label, which evolved during the early decades of the republic from Thomas Jefferson’s “Democratic-Republican” version and Andrew Jackson’s “Democracy,” is suffering a branding dilemma similar to the Episcopal Church after the 1950s.

You didn’t go to the American branch of the Church of England just to visit god. Being Episcopalian was a statement about your old-line, blue blood heritage. But then, along came the egalitarian Sixties, and Episcopalian membership lost cachet. Professor James Twitchell, whose excellent “Branded Nation” provides useful insight into this problem of mature institutions, notes that the American Episcopal church brand lost value, with membership slumping from about three-and-a-half million in the early 1960s to a little over two million today.

Agrarian story, re-fashioned in an industrial age,
seeking an information era renewal

Born in the Agrarian Era of its founder, Jefferson, the Democratic Party’s original story was of a limited central government serving self-sufficient “little people” (farmers, artisans, shop keepers) prizing and preserving individual liberty – juxtaposed against the elitist federalists, and their seemingly monarchical, big central government ambition.

The Democratic Party narrative was refashioned in the Industrial Era, particularly with arrival of the New Deal, when one-size-fits-all, central authority, wealth re-distributive policies were appealing to many of those little guys. Most had traded self-sufficiency for wage labor that would have distressed Jefferson. Their economic lives revolved around big centralized economic units, corporations, against which they eventually were represented by big centralized labor unions.

But somewhere around the middle of the 20th Century, with the advent of a post-industrial Information Era, the little guys, from the working class to the great middle class that Democrats have always claimed to represent, edged back toward more self-sufficiency. They benefitted from the democratization of technology, finance and information, which Tom Friedman describes in “The Lexus and the Olive Tree.” This paradigm shift, from used-and-abused workers to empowered, share-holding, producer-consumers, allowed our “little guys” to make — tailor-make, in fact — choices for themselves. To use a trivial, but instructive example, a few years ago I built my own Nikes online; a hundred pairs at Foot Locker weren’t enough. The “Central Authority Solutions” story offered by Democrats, from the late-19th century populists to mid-20th century social welfare liberals, lost luster. With significant implications for the economic frame of political issues, the average American’s relatively successful quest for food, clothing and shelter was at least partly displaced with a focus on amusing our well-fed selves and seeking the psychic rewards of “the good life and its discontents” (see Robert Samuelson’s superb book with that title.)

While the industrial era story lost appeal relative to economic security concerns, when it came to lifestyle and personal choices — the social-cultural issue frame — Democrats, by the end of the 20th Century, still retained some juice from our original Jeffersonian story, which made individual liberty, with privacy and choice, central to party ID. We could fire up the base with messages about body and bedroom freedom. But the economic left-liberal reactionaries among us, with their minds still in the industrial age, couldn’t give up the ghost of oppressed workers of the world, even after the Berlin Wall crashed down, so they were unable to share a story that rationalized the desire for options in the bedroom with choices in the marketplace.

Liberals disappear, morph to "progressives"

People still vote Democrat, of course — they still buy the product — but the old-time Democratic religion lost its revivalist energy sometime after Nixon resigned and Carter failed. Nowhere is that reflected more than in the abandonment of our party’s old auxiliary label, liberal, which all but disappeared in the 1970s and was replaced by the soft, safe descriptor: progressive.

As all of that was happening, Republicans found themselves in an ideological wilderness a few decades after the New Deal was embraced by the late industrial age political center. Their wandering was reflected in Eisenhower’s declaration of “modern” Republicanism, which basically acknowledged some of the more moderate social welfare policies of the New Deal, similar to the “new” Democrats who emerged in the 1980s, accepting some of the free market principles of Reaganomics.

But the intra-party reactions to Modern Republicans and New Democrats yielded very different ideological results. With the arrival of Barry Goldwater and then Ronald Reagan, Republicans coalesced around a clearly defined and labeled ideology, while many Democrats gathered around our pollsters and press secretaries for centrist, “third way” messages to create temporary electoral coalitions. We elected the politically crafty and seductive Bill Clinton twice, but then failed to win with the (then) personality-challenged Al Gore (he’s gotten better) and the have-everything-every-way empty suit John Kerry (he’s gotten worse.)

Republicans universally embraced an ideology by name. Whether they were economic libertarian, Main Street balanced-budget, interventionist Neo-Con, or politicized religious right in perspective, they called themselves “conservative.” The “stickiness,” as marketplace brand managers would call it, of the Republican Party label was in a story enthusiastically shared by Republicans of all stripes: government, with its taxes and regulation, is the problem, not the solution.

Two stories -- one clear, the other equivocating

You might reduce the resulting GOP brand, which helped produce Republican victories in seven of the last ten national elections, to this: “Government bad. America good. The marketplace will provide. In God we trust. Meritocracy, but not equal outcomes, for all.”

What’s the story behind today’s Democrat brand? I continue to be a partisan Democrat, but I’m not sure. I believe it’s something like: “Government isn’t all that bad; look at Social Security and Head Start. America isn’t always that good; we try to impose our will on a multi-cultural world. The marketplace is full of bad guys who need to be restrained, including their greed-driven political speech. Hey, we’re religious, too. And, not just equal opportunity for all, but re-distributive social justice entitlements for special “minority” victims, because, except for me and my friends, racism endures.”

Voters in the center find some of each party’s message appealing, some appalling. The last two presidential elections and the partisan split in Congress reflect that.

Believe what you will about each message, the Republican story had clarity going for it. The Democratic narrative -- as I have caricatured it, but I think accurately – sounds like a Hillary Clinton or John Kerry speech, a little of this, a little of that.

It wasn’t always so. From Jefferson, to Jackson’s Democracy, the party of the people had an energizing little government for the little guy ideology, firing up the base and attracting the center. And from FDR to LBJ, the message was pretty clear; we’ll use government to protect the little guy from those greedy bastards.

Two flawed prescriptions for renewal

The usual prescriptions for Democratic Party renewal come in two forms. Centrists, like the Democratic Leadership Council, continue to propose triangulation tactics that divert attention of persuadable voters from the Washington-based politics of interest and identity group-dominated left-liberals. DLC Democrats offer government as a tool, not an end, to provide middle-class economic opportunity. They’ve been good at talking to the center on pocketbook questions, but haven’t offered a coherent energizing philosophy for the base. They can’t seem to fully understand that today’s political middle is dominated by moderate-to-liberal Baby Boomers on social-cultural questions, rather than by the more conservative Depression Era voters who filled the center when the DLC was formed in the 1980s. And their foreign policy prescriptions are a kind of Neo-Conservative Lite, which resulted in their collusion with the disastrous elective war policies that have so rightfully infuriated much of the party’s base.

The second approach, offered by the economic policy reactionaries overly represented in the party’s congressional wing, preaches a return to an “old-time religion,” “complete-the-New-Deal” ideology. That Fifties and Sixties battle cry might have made sense once. But it is mis-matched for today’s smarter voters, who want to make decisions from their homes, or at least their states. Social welfare left-liberals often peddle a kind of middle-class neo-populism, a William Jennings Bryan appeal to folks with SUVs and satellite TV, with selective-memory imagery of the good life of the 1950s (again, see Bob Samuelson’s book.) Sometimes they push class warfare, a version of which the ultra-ambitious John Edwards now seems to be selling as the self-appointed trial lawyer for the underclass. Old-time religion seems to move (or at least receive lip service from) the Dupont Circle, K Street and AFL-CIO Washington-based wings of the base, but usually leaves the hinterland center cold. And the Beltway-based lefties have lost their nerve on non-interventionist foreign policy, so afraid of that “soft-on-defense” Cold War scarecrow the DLC neo-cons have been peddling for two decades that they allowed Bush’s elective war to commence without engaging any real debate.

We Democrats need something radically different from those two tired story-lines. And we need to stop fooling ourselves that we lose because the GOP outguns us with money and tactics. Former Democratic National Chairman Terry McAuliffe, in the 2004 cycle, did the party a huge favor by putting to rest that nonsense. We’re losing because of message, not campaign cash.

The past can inform our future

The answer is in our Jeffersonian roots. Knowing from where we came, in an era when individual liberty was prized much as it is today, we have the glue to make the Democrat brand sticky again.

The new desktop-empowered generations, convinced by Republican economic choice, but turned off by the social-cultural intolerance of the GOP’s Talibanic wing, could embrace Democrats if we return to our founder’s philosophy, a back-to-the-future Jeffersonian liberalism, now known as libertarianism.

Jefferson, who said the government is best that governs least, knew the era of big government was over two hundred years before Bill Clinton proclaimed it in the Nineties. If we listen to the man from Monticello, who advocated peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none, we can rediscover our anti-war, anti-interventionist nerve. We can be as insistent as Republicans that pluralistic democracy and free markets are noble and worth emulating; but we must equally assert that we don’t intervene in the affairs of the rest of the world unless we’re directly attacked or legitimately invited.

Jefferson can be an inspiration to our candidates, who need a better way to talk about religion and politics. Instead of mumbling some consultant-driven Religion Lite nonsense about restoring faith to public life, Democrats can find the courage to say what we believe: we protect religious liberty by keeping god out of government. Our Founders knew that, making not a single reference to a deity in the Constitution.

Rough cut of a new story....

We need a new story. Here’s a rough cut, a little more than can fit on a bumper sticker, assembled around the three fundamental issue frames of politics – economic, social, and foreign policy:

“Government: assure liberty by staying as far away as possible from our bank accounts, our bedrooms, and our bodies. Spread pluralistic democracy and free markets by example, understanding that neither can be planted by force on political real estate lacking indigenous cultivators for their growth. Restore the moral authority of mid-20th century “civil rights,” fashioning public policy around individuals, not tribal identity groups.”

The good news for Democrats is that the conservative era in American politics is coming to an end. In power for a decade, congressional Republicans, now joined at the hip with a two-term failed Republican president, have engaged in corrupt big government spending seriously undercutting the economic conservatism that has bound the party together. And the heavy internal party influence of social-cultural neanderthals is turning off the political center. Republicans have run the usual cycle of American politics: election, hubris, over-reach.

With those political atmospherics and without a cohesive shared story, Democrats are presently tempted to seek another win-by-default in mid-term elections and a poll-driven (Hillary Clinton) or personality-based (Barack Obama) victory in 2008.

But that will only be biding time, while Republican conservatives try to shake their cultural right wing, and re-group.

It won’t be easy for many Democrats to update our brand by embracing a 21st Century libertarian label (many Episcopalians won’t laser-off their old blue-blood tattoos, even after they’ve become egalitarian Unitarians.) So, “Jeffersonian liberal” might be a useful way-station for some. But, whatever you call it, Democrats need a new story, a shared, energizing, informing ideology.

I believe “libertarian” can inspire a 21st Century base and attract many voters who have come to believe both parties may be obsolete, and are seeking an alternative. We are going to get a new party in America, but not by addition. It will be in a way Shirley McClain might appreciate – through reincarnation.

My party, in an ideological desert for decades, is eager to find a well from which we all can drink. We’re at a tipping point, and ready, I believe, to adopt a new “L” word.

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Executive Director of the Washington Center for Politics & Journalism, Terry Michael is a former professional Democrat, who served as press secretary for the Democratic National Committee from 1985 to 1987. He came to Washington in 1975 with a man who had a core of beliefs that informed his Progressive Era soul, the late Sen. Paul Simon. This statement began as an op-ed piece published in The Examiner/Washington February 9, 2005. You can reach Terry Michael at his "thoughts from a libertarian Democrat blog," www.terrymichael.net or at his email address: terrymichael@wcpj.org