The casualties of the Republican hegemony in Washington are mounting. The toll includes an erosion of the historic liberal faith in society's obligation to help the vulnerable and a collapse in our commitment to equity across class and generational lines. The greatest cost, however, may be the shrinking of the vital center in American politics: There is now an ascendant, radicalized right and an embittered, reactive left. The
invective they trade has diminished the space for a constructive middle ground.
Yet, even in this cynical atmosphere, there is a market for New Democrats to reassert themselves as a strategic and philosophical force. If we seize the moment, we may rebuild what we valued in the 1990s -- a strengthened, centrist Democratic Party that renews its commitment to public education, job growth, and the removal of unfair barriers in American life. In fact, such a revitalized center could rescue the progressive cause and its promise of a more just society.
New Democrats have played this role before. In 1992, Bill Clinton made the South competitive again for Democrats and made unprecedented inroads among suburban professionals. President Clinton's substantial policy legacy reflects the New Democratic
synthesis: welfare reform that reduced poverty and retrained workers; fiscal discipline and balanced budgets that simultaneously strengthened the essential safety net; a renewed emphasis on national service; and a principled promotion of trade and global responsibility in the face of assaults from both left and right.
Yet since Clinton's departure, New Democrats have lacked the resources of the presidency to demonstrate the soundness of their model. The increased extremism of the Republican right, especially in the U.S. House of Representatives, has narrowed the space
for bipartisan solutions. New Democrats have gone into a purely reactive crouch. Pressure from the right has pushed House Democrats toward a tighter embrace of party orthodoxy. New Democratic approaches to tort reform, trade, and health care have been
rejected in the name of party unity.
To regain our relevance, New Democrats must first establish a coherent governing philosophy, consistent with core Democratic values, that connects our various positions. To offset the liberal refrain that the New Democrats' agenda is too cozy with corporate interests, we should reemphasize the pro-growth, pro-education aspects of our platform, and the link between these values and the traditional Democratic faith.
New Democrats must point out that declining job skills and substandard education threaten the social equity that progressives value at home; that these forces weaken our competitive standing abroad; and that if we are serious about what we owe each other as citizens, individual responsibility must be balanced with greater corporate accountability.
New Democrats should aggressively advance both public and private initiatives to counter rural poverty in the South. On foreign policy issues, New Democrats should align themselves with the internationalism of the Clinton presidency and its shrewd commitment to using both military and economic might to promote democracy and the expansion of economic and political freedom.
If we act boldly enough, New Democrats can fill a creative space in our party. The reality is that precious few competing forces within the party seek to offer new strategies for government. At best, the Democratic leadership has confined itself to a necessary but defensive mission: sustaining the entitlement structure and propping up existing government programs in the face of Republican budget assaults.
Moreover, the current political dynamic within the party is oriented along conventional, unappealing lines: Do we abandon some part of our core or do we become more strident in defense of our most liberal positions?
Answering that question will mean overcoming a deep-seated aversion to the risk that comes from staking out new ground. It will also mean that New Democrats cannot limit their engagement to the internal debate within the House and Senate, or within the narrow
K Street donor constituency. Instead, it is critical that in the next two election cycles New Democrats develop a set of ideas and policies that reflect our own agenda about the character of our country. While there are obviously numerous variations, I would suggest a few general themes and possible ideological approaches.
Rural poverty: Although parts of the South have grown prosperous in the past two decades, most of the rural communities in Southern states are
still entrenched in poverty. We should promote a new brand of enterprise zones for these declining rural areas. Corporations should be provided incentives and tax breaks to locate and invest in distressed communities and to sponsor job-training initiatives for potential employees. The top-heavy structure of regional development authorities should be redesigned to give community decision-making boards authority over a designated
portion of grant spending.
Education reform: Conservatives famously contend that generous expenditures do not guarantee effective, accountable school systems. But the converse is also true: Impoverished systems are often predestined to fail because they cannot sustain the infrastructure necessary to educate children. Rural schools in the South and the Midwest are depressingly underfunded, often at levels of less than $600 per pupil per year. Urban-dominated state legislatures have refused to address these gaps. We should boost the historically low level of federal education spending, and we should target the new dollars toward districts that suffer from inadequate local funding. (Two
counties in my congressional district, Perry and Wilcox, spend less than $500 per student.)
New Democrats also should not be resistant to structural innovation. For example, credentialing requirements could be relaxed for qualified professionals who wish to take up teaching as a second career. School boards must also be given more authority to dismiss teachers for poor performance. Accomplished teachers should be rewarded with higher pay and more lucrative retirement options. To hedge against the misuse of performance-based standards, community boards, akin to civilian police review boards,
should monitor firing and promotion practices.
Retirement security: The current backdrop for the retirement security debate is a decisive preference by most employees for guaranteed benefits over saving and investing. This means that two-thirds of American workers are
almost exclusively dependent on Social Security to sustain them during their retirement. While I believe we should emphatically reject individual private accounts as a component of Social Security, New Democrats should favor investment incentives outside of it. We could propose reduction of student loan payments in exchange for participation in savings
plans, a radical idea that might capture the public's imagination.
Most employees do not avail themselves of investment or savings options outside the defined benefit plans offered by their employers. To promote more saving, for individuals
earning or retiring at less than $150,000 annually, Social Security benefits could be augmented for retirees who have accumulated additional private savings outside their
jobs. To encourage younger employees to save, FICA taxes could be reduced for young wage-earners, in direct proportion to the size of their personal savings accounts.
A burst of policy creativity would help Democrats reclaim the mantle of reform and innovation in American politics. But there is another important agenda at stake: reviving the public's confidence in government and in the ideal of civic purpose.
It is a paradox of our times that conservatives from Nixon to Bush have denigrated government while steadily expanding its powers to serve conservative aims. Nixon assailed the Great Society while scheming to build a domestic intelligence apparatus that
would have shredded American privacy. President Bush reviles big government but unleashes the tax code to reallocate the relative burdens of wealth and work. The government intervention in the Terri Schiavo tragedy is similar: It is the penetration of government into the most intimate of controversies, for the most theological of purposes -- all within a week of passing a budget that celebrates the minimizing of government,
even some of its most bipartisan creations.
The conservative case, therefore, is not a brief against government -- it is a brief against government trying to undo the conservative agenda. What is left of principled conservatism is a near-theological belief in an unfettered free market. But most Americans understand that the quality gap in our schools and the skill sets of our workers undercuts the competitiveness of the market. New Democrats should emphasize that a fair playing field that rewards innovation and work actually restores the market's
best values. Toward this end, New Democrats should press for greater transparency in our capital markets and for stricter regulation of anti-competitive practices.
Reclaiming our abandoned schools; offering investment incentives and an equitable playing field for all economic classes; attacking the corrosive residue of rural poverty -- these are civic ventures that the market alone cannot accomplish. At the same time, they
have also been beyond the reach of modern liberalism. The public is pragmatic enough to accept a political strategy that advances beyond these failures, in the name of empowering all Americans to be more competitive with each other.
One final proposition: New Democrats must reinstitute community and obligation as achievable goals in our balkanized society. The Bush years
have left us more divided in terms of our life prospects, our mores, and our vision of a good society. Fundamentally, we have become disconnected from one another and from the principle of a common destiny.
Realigning our political culture will mean having a conversation about what we share, and why it decisively trumps what we don't share. There is also a practical, strategic impact: Once a sense of common purpose is reestablished, Democrats will find an audience for the progressive work of overcoming educational and economic disparities.
Even if Bush conservatism is eventually undone by its own excesses and contradictions,
liberalism devoid of new ideas or values will not last long, either. The Democratic Party's and the country's best hope is a vital new center that reconciles our instincts of obligation
and responsibility. And, in the vast gulf between Tom DeLay and Michael Moore, Americans are yearning for it.
