First name what you're for (e.g., "economic justice," "a health care safety net"); then accuse the Republicans of being against it. It's called politics, and it doesn't get much simpler than that.

Frist!

As long as Democrats make having their hands extended toward the special interest lobbyists as their main funding efforts, there is absolutely no reason for them to reach out to their constituents (the people who actually elect them, and the people they're supposed to represent). As long as that goes on, the politics of principle is out on its rear.

The list is depressing: sops to the banking industry, the pharmaceuticals, torturers. Re the last, my senators Lautenberg and Menendez absolutely disgust me.

I agree we vote ALL of them out of office!

"In an age of dramatic change in the relationship among workers, families, employers, and government, what should be the next social contract that unites Americans and carries them together into the next American century?"

That next social contract should be the person of one Johnny Reid Edwards.

To me, the issue is crystallized in the recent atrocious bankruptcy bill, in which arguments for the middle class, for working people in debt, and the struggling poor were thrown overboard for an ill-defined value named "personal responsibility." How do Democrats argue successfully against that? Middle-class voters seem less interested in voting for their own economic interests than they are for "values" like that. How can we compel conservative Dems in Congress to make the case against?

It's almost a tired cliche by now, but this whole business of internalization of Republican talking points by the Democrats, and especially by the so-called intellectuals of the Democratic party, has gotten completely and ridiculously out of hand.

Anybody who starts with complaint was right either does not understand the history of the Democratic Party or is willfully ignorant of it.

A political party is built on principles, and not on a thousand page treatises on how to get there. And anyone who does not think that the Democratic Party does not have a core set of principles should join Rove and his minions.

Sorry, got lost in the double negative territory there.

anyone who does not think that the Democratic Party has a core set of principles should join Rove and his minions.

** *** We Work *** **
*** ** We Pray ** ***
** We Support Bush **
--- Yard Sign next to a run-down shack in Wisconsin.

Unless you can get the people in that shack to start caring about and voting about their economic security, what does it matter how you present the issues.

First things first. We need somebody like William Jennings Bryan, who can tie together the issues of faith, morality, and economics.

Well, not just like Bryan. It'd also be nice to have somebody who can beat the modern-day heirs of Hanna and McKinley.

But what is their overall economic agenda? In an age of dramatic change in the relationship among workers, families, employers, and government, what should be the next social contract that unites Americans and carries them together into the next American century?

In a society that is becoming so differse in so many ways so quickly, can we realistically speak of one agenda or one social contract?

John Edwards speaks of two Americas, but I think that for purpose of this discussion, there are three:

1. Those who earn most of their income from rents and investment.
2. The technical, trade and professional class
3. The scramblers-Those who are ever sure if, when, or what the next pay check will be.

There is now so much difference between even the top of the tech and professional class and its bottom that their needs are in some cases dependant on entirely different policies.

Rebups have done quite a job: (A) selling the snake oil of tax cuts the help every one and cause no hardships, (B) advancing a one-size-fits-all industrial policy that really only benefits the top group I mentioned above.

There is a huge void in American politics just waiting to be filled by the party and leaders that can speak to this potential, and speak to middle-class Americans anxious about their economic security

Perhaps. No, definitely. But a big part of the problem is that the void needs to be filled by a popular actor or sports figure. Otherwise, from all evidence, people just aren't paying enough attention to figure out what is really in their best interest.

(note to trolls: not saying they are stupid. Just saying they are not paying attention. Those are different things)

I know little, if anything about econ. But if you start by convincing 80% of the people that they are in the upper class, get them to really believe that they are rich (they have to believe it, because they bought in to the bullshit that if you aren't rich there is something wrong with you.) While they are maintaining their own suburban version of the Potemkin Village - everybody has to keep one McMansion going and a couple of SUV's in the driveway - The cars are planet killers, the houses are cardboard and the people are convinced there is a pony in there somewhere. If there isn't they were duped, and since they they don't want to admit to that, they work really hard to keep up the facade - because they have been made to believe a set of untruths that were sustainable only so long.

While the people have been busy maintaining this illusion, financed by ARM's that let people get in way over their heads in the period of lowest interest rates in recent history (you never hear of the damned things when rates are high and will likely go down) the powers that be have raided their pensions, shipped jobs overseas, ransacked all of the social safety nets and attached the stigmata of scorn on those who use them, no matter what reason and no matter how short the duration. Just for good measure, throw in an impending collapse of the healthcare pillar of the economy (and that one is rolling down the pike) it's going to get really interesting pretty quick. Health care is going to collapse if corrective action is not taken soon. We have maybe five years to change course. And I'm being generous. But convince everyone that it isn't going to get anywhere close to them, it will only affect that group over there, you know, them and really, don't they deserve it. (Problem is, everyone is someone elses them.)

Sell that bill of goods and you get a crack at governing. And once you get into power, the race is on, buddy. And this is the point where my head explodes and I throw my hands in the air and go running to the lab and do something quantifiable.

I'll shut up and learn something now.

"John Edwards speaks of two Americas, but I think that for purpose of this discussion, there are three:"

However many Americas there may be, there is an electoral majority out there for a Democratic Party dedicated to taking the steps to create One America.

And the messenger to non-sophisticated voters is, indeed, Johnny Edwards.

I saw him during the '04 campaign, and I agree Petey. He just might be the guy. I haven't picked a pony yet for '08, but he is one of my frontrunners.

Funny to see the GOP go from "The Party that Prays for You" to one of "The Party that Preys on You."

Petey, you're right. The Dems need a candidate who can connect emotionally with middle class voters, especially moms. John Edwards and his family are an inspiration and model for the middle class. They come from the same place, not from the intellectual elite. I believe the middle class does care about the poor - they just care about their own kids first. Until Dems come up with fresh policies for a middle class safety net, they will continue to lose on 'values' to a cynical lying overclass.

jacob,

So far you have used a lot of text to say nothing. Are you proposing an agenda? If so tell us already. If you just want to whine that's not very useful.

The point being made by Hacker is the need for a compelling vision.

In question form:

What do you want the country to look like in 5, 10, or 20 years?

And of course most of the above commenters point in the correct direction:

That vision, whatever it may be, needs to be packaged and sold by a politician and a party.

The problem is that the country quite possibly is fractured beyond repair. It is also being dumbed downed at an exponential rate. Hell, no one even watches the same idiot tv shows anymore. About the only solid block of viewers out there are the Fox News watchers.

Enough said... eh?

In summary:
Hacker's ideas are solid but it could just be that things are falling apart. Cultures do that. Empires too. Is America moribund? Only time will tell, but certainly, "Her" stupid people are on the march...

"But a consistent complaint was that we didn’t pay enough attention to the Democrats’ failure to articulate a compelling alternative.

Well, you may be surprised to hear me say that the complaint was right—or at least half right."

I will never be surprised about concern trolls showing up on The Washington Monthly blog to bash democrats. Never. Its par for the course around here - Kevin loves to direct the focus on supposed democratic failures.

Of course, like every one of these posts, its bullshit. The domcrats are usually blamed for being TOO focused on the economy. Was it just a month ago that the hand wringers were out in force about how the Dems were shifting the focus too much towards economics, a completely inappropriate move in a "post 9/11" political world?

Isn't Kevin the first to claim that the Dems main problem is they don't have a counter to the hawkishness of the Republicans, even though he can never outline what such a thing would look like, and can never accept that anything the Dems propose will be out-hawked by the republicans who are more than happy to advocate nukes on Muslim cities.

The truth is that in spite of a lot of Democratic focus on economic issues, the media won't carry it. They want war and death and corruption, but economics is boring and way too data-oriented to make for good confrontation TV.

In short, the premise of your book now sounds like idiocy, and thanks for letting us know ahead of time so we can avoid it. Democrats talk about this exact thing constantly, you can hardly claim to have discovered something new.

Maybe you were hoping that by attacking the democrats on this it would make it sound like you had come up with something new and thereby sell more books, but its kind of like writing an "expose'" on steriod use in baseball, then promoting it with the claim that "No one is talking about it". Sorry, everyone is talking about it.

We want folks not just to work hard, but to take risks, to start businesses, to learn new skills, to try new things. That's where the greatest economic growth happens.

But for them to do that, they need to feel like they aren't hanging over the abyss, especially with regard to health care and retirement. How many people do you know who would have quit their job and tried to start something on their own if it weren't for losing their health care?

People need a secure foundation. Americans will try to reach for their dreams if they see there's something solid to build it on.

I think several points need to be internalized here.

1. Democrats have a core set of principles.
2. Far too many Americans believe #1 to be false.
3. Something needs to be done to change #2.

Writing boilerplate editorials accusing the Democrats of lacking core principles is precisely the sort of centrist pundit hackery that all right-thinking people disparage. But something really needs to be done about point #2, and accusing everyone who comments about it of "internalizing Karl Rove's memos" is just pointless.

They can release all the 50-point incrementalist plans they want, but unless they go right out and talk about changing our approach to economic and foreign policy in a profound way, they won't break through. They'll win an election here and there when the Republicans self-destruct, but they'll never become a majority party. Because no matter how false the GOP talking points are, people will believe them until we prove them to be false.

The devil is in the details, of course, but it's long past time for the Democrats to actually let Americans in on the secret that we stand for something tangible by running on our values instead of running from them.

But what do Democrats stand for?

Cradle-to-grave socialism, of course. Always have, always will. Why is this hard?

Their big difficulty has been trying to repackage this to sell to the average American. Euphemisms like "economic justice," "social contract," and many others make a valiant attempt at this, and frankly, Democrats are pretty good as slapping lipstick on this old pig.

Democrats hate "personal responsibity" approaches because there's no political power to be had that way. Self-reliance is the enemy. If you can make enough citizens dependent on the State for their livelihoods, you've got the key to permanent power.

It's no coincidence that many of the elderly, the most reliable group of voters, have been placed into this category, relying on the State for income and medical care.

exactly, hayek.. because if they would have had the financial foresight to empty their retirement accounts before the stock market tanked, or the fortitude to work til the day they died, if they could just have been personally responsible enough to not even get old in the first place.. then we wouldn't have to worry about taking care of their totally irresponsible asses.

whatever

Self reliance see...
Self reliance is what got me into Yale see...

Self reliance is why we want to stop the inheritance tax. 'Cuz inherting money is like being born on third after hittin a triple see...

We don't need an ownership society,
we need a give a shit society.

I am real god-damn sick of people throwing around the word "socialist" when they couldn't even define it on a ninth grade Civics quiz.

Socialism:n.
1.)A system in which the workers control the means of production.
2.) Not Communism
3.) A word most people would be well served to actually look up in a fucking dictionary.