Yesterday I objected to Jonathan Chait’s claim that ideas are overrated on the grounds that, contrary to his assertion, it is quite possible to concisely state general but meaningful ends around which Democratic governing philosophy ought to be organized. Today I want to address Chait’s argument that “big ideas” have neither been important in the Republican ascendancy to power nor are likely to be important in reviving Democratic prospects.
Consider the forty-year realignment of the electorate toward the Republican Party. Since the Nixon Administration, the GOP has proposed a number of original and bold policy ideas that have advanced their agenda and shifted the balance of political power:

• The neoconservative confrontational foreign policy toward the Soviet Union
• Deregulation
• Welfare reform
• Supply-side fiscal policies
• Block grants to states and cities
• Faith-based service delivery

Democrats generally oppose these policies or their conservative details, but they have been successful electorally.
It is true, as Chait notes, that the Democratic Party has had no shortage of ideas themselves during this period. Many of these ideas have been both good on the merits and successful:

• Environmental protection
• Tax simplification in the mid-eighties
• Deficit reduction in the nineties
• Work supports such as the expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit
• Reinventing government
• Incremental health care coverage expansions

What is striking is how many of these policies tend toward the incremental and moderate. The fact of the matter is that those are the types of policies that have produced success for the Party. Consider an analogous list of unsuccessful proposals or unpopular policies:

• Universal health care
• Federal support for smaller class sizes or more teachers, national education standards
• More money for housing, job training, and unemployment
• Affirmative action and busing
• Greater international cooperation and strengthening the United Nations (though this has grown more popular over time and will likely continue to)
• Stronger regulation of business and greater worker protection
• Strategic industrial policy
• Maintaining or raising taxes on the wealthy

The point is not that these are bad ideas, just that they have failed to resonate politically or have proven enormously difficult to advance. Republicans have succeeded not because their ideas have been somehow more creative, beneficial, or up to the task. They have succeeded because popular preferences are more sympathetic to them.
Recognizing that ideological disadvantage faced by Democrats precedes tactical and candidate weakness – rather than attributing under-performance to tactics and candidates themselves – leads to a rather different prescription for reviving Democratic prospects. It points to the importance of new ideas that address electoral weaknesses while staying true to progressive principles.
For starters, the Party needs to develop a tighter over-arching vision about what it stands for. I argued yesterday that an emphasis on equal opportunity and security would be particularly effective. Democrats also should adjust their priorities, devoting more attention, for instance, to national security. Some counterproductive (and arguably non-progressive) stances and policies ought to be downplayed or even jettisoned. We also need to think about electorally viable ways to find the money to pay for programs we wish to create or expand.
In addition, the Party must propose new means of achieving long-standing policy goals. For example, many Democrats have a knee-jerk reaction to voucher-type programs such as those sometimes proposed for elementary and secondary education, social security, and Medicare. On the other hand, progressives support food stamps and Section 8 housing, which are essentially voucher programs. It is not the case that vouchers are simply always preferable to provision by the state, but there is a lot of gray here. One can propose education voucher programs limited to public institutions, for instance.
Finally, the party needs to develop new ideas for new problems. Terrorism is obviously the most important of these. Economic insecurity may also be such an issue, and the advance of biotechnology will dramatically transform debates over opportunity and values.
Ideas matter, though not in isolation from voter preferences. The story of the past forty years is one of economic, geopolitical, and social change favoring Republicans, producing a realignment that was abetted by unpopular Democratic ideas and some popular Republican ones. Democrats need not change dramatically – recent elections have, of course, been remarkably close. But new ideas that are consistent with progressives’ core values can help win over more voters and shift the electoral map decisively in the Democrats’ favor.

(Parental advisory: in an effort to boost readership and move my blogging in a decidedly macho direction after references to Sex and the City and frappuchinos, I have included profanity in the following post. Viewer discretion is advised.)
I’ve thought Jonathan Chait’s claim that ideas are overrated was flawed since he first made it last year [subscr. only]. With the publication of Strategist contributors Ken Baer and Andrei Cherny’s Democracy, Chait has offered an updated version of this argument, here and here. Essentially, he thinks that conservatism lends itself to big ideas and bumper-sticker slogans in a way that progressivism does not:

Conservatives venerate the free market and see smaller government as an end in itself. Liberals do not venerate government in the same way, and we do not see larger government as an end in and of itself. For us, everything works on a case-by-case basis. Should government provide everybody’s education? Yes. Should government manufacture everybody’s blue jeans? No. And so on.
[snip] Everybody knows what [Republicans] stand for. They’re for lower taxes, strong defense and less spending — even if they habitually fail at the spending part and have royally screwed up the defense portion of late.
But nobody knows what Democrats stand for because you cannot, and should not, formulate sweeping dogmas when you’re operating on a case-by-case basis.

Of course we don’t view big government as an end in itself, but that doesn’t mean that there’s no end around which we can’t organize the Party. Chait’s example of Clintonomics is instuctive:

Consider the Clinton administration. What did it stand for on, say, economic policy? Well, progressive taxation, reducing the deficit (but not at the expense of Medicare, Medicaid, education and the environment), expanding health coverage, investing in technology, and … you see? We’re long past the point where it can be described by a single overarching theory, and I haven’t even gotten to the scintillating proposals for sequestering the Social Security-related budget surplus.

With all due respect, whatchutalkinbout, Willis? How about this for a “single overarching theory”: equal opportunity and security. We don’t value progressive taxation except to the extent that it helps us create more opportunity for the disadvantaged. Reducing the deficit is important to the extent that it increases economic growth (promoting opportunity in this generation) or reduces the share of future budgets that go toward interest payments on the debt (promoting opportunity in future generations). Health coverage – including Medicare and Medicaid – reduces insecurity. Education and technology investment promote opportunity. Environmental protection is vital for the opportunity and security of future Americans. “Saving Social Security First” was a brilliant tactical gambit by Clinton to simultaneously pay down the debt, preempt opportunity-limiting Republican tax cuts, and (debatably) shore up Social Security for future generations.
Chait notes that Clinton switched from an economic plan centered on investing in human capital and middle-class tax cuts to one focused on deficit reduction at the beginning of his first term. But this decision was made because Clinton ultimately decided that placating “a bunch of fucking bond traders”, in the memorable phrase attributed to him by Bob Woodward, would be more successful in growing the economy than the policies he campaigned on. That is, it was the best way to expand opportunities and increase security.
And opportunity and security can serve as the basis for governing in other policy realms. In foreign policy, progressives seek to ensure national security (there’s that word again), promote domestic economic strength (opportunity), and promote opportunities elsewhere through development. On “values issues”, progressives believe that gays and lesbians should have the opportunity to marry the one they love, that women should have the opportunity to control whether a pregnancy will alter their life plans, and that all Americans should have the opportunity to practice their chosen faith – or none at all – secure in the knowledge that the state will not discriminate against it.
I have more to say about the strategic importance of ideas, but I’ll save that for tomorrow. The point for now is that, contra Chait (and Yglesias), Democrats can succinctly state their governing philosophy clearly and concisely in a bumper-sticker phrase. And there is great strategic value to doing so. Policies can then be formulated to hang on the ends that we value and thereby create a coherent approach to governing.

By Alan Abramowitz
An op-ed by Peter Wallsten and Tom Hamburger in Sunday’s L.A. Times gives the impression that the GOP now enjoys a clear advantage when it comes to voter mobilization. However, the evidence from the 2004 election simply doesn’t support this view. According to the 2004 National Election Study, both parties dramatically increased their voter mobilization efforts in 2004 but Democrats did a better job of contacting voters than Republicans. According to the NES survey, the percentage of voters contacted by the GOP increased from 26 percent in 2000 to 29 percent in 2004 while the percentage contacted by Democrats increased from 23 percent in 2000 to 32 percent in 2004.
Ohio in 2004 is often cited as an example of the GOP’s superiority in the ground game but, again, the evidence doesn’t support this view. Between 2000 and 2004, the Republican vote in Ohio increased by an impressive 21.7% but the Democratic vote increased by an even more impressive 25.4%.
Democrats will need to work hard to match the Republicans’ GOTV effort in 2006, but the evidence from the 2004 election shows that the much-vaunted GOP advantage in the ground game is largely a myth.

The title is a failed attempt to show off my NASCAR creds. More fun polysci research to start off your week…
Of all the claims that the most alienated progressives routinely throw around, perhaps the most frustrating one is that there are no important differences between the two parties, or slightly less dismissively, that the Democratic Party is the lesser of two evils. In fact, political scientists are in agreement that the parties are ideologically more polarized today than at any time in the past 30 years.
The latest study to reinforce this conclusion comes from Sean M. Theriault in the latest issue of Party Politics. In “Party Polarization in the U.S. Congress,” Theriault shows that both parties have grown more ideologically extreme since 1973 and less diverse. He arrives at this conclusion using the well-regarded Poole-Rosenthal scores, which array all members of Congress from all years on an ideological scale based on the entirety of their voting record. Legislators are assumed to lie on an ideological continuum, as are voting options (yea or nay) for every vote. Each legislator chooses the option that is closest to them ideologically. Then scores are assigned to each legislator and vote option so that the number of “errors” made is minimized (with errors occurring when a legislator votes contrary to what we would expect given the initial assumptions).
Theriault’s results shed light on the nature of growing political polarization and Republican power. In the House, the two parties were roughly equally distant from the center in 1973, but by 2003, Republicans were more extreme. Democratic senators started out more extreme than their Republican counterparts, but by 2003 the parties were equally extreme. Polarization was more pronounced in the House, and by 2003 House Republicans were more “off center” than Republican senators or Democrats in either body.
What accounts for these trends? Two-thirds of the rise in polarization was a consequence of more moderate members being replaced by more extreme ones, either as the former died or voluntarily left their office or as a result of being defeated. The key elections on the House side were in 1972, 1984, 1994, and 1996, while on the Senate side polarization due to replacement jumped in 1972, 1980, and 1992.
What is more, much of this “replacement” involved Republicans succeeding southern Democrats. About 40 percent of greater polarization in the House was due to this phenomenon, and 45 percent in the Senate. Otherwise, in the House, 24 percent of polarization growth was due to replacement of moderates by more extreme members of the same party — particularly consequential on the Republican side. On the other hand, in the Senate, 25 percent of increased polarization arose due to instances where the incumbent was defeated but that did not involve a southern Democrat losing to a Republican.
Finally, about one-third of the increase in polarization was due to individual members’ increasing extremism over time. Increasing GOP extremism accounted for about one-fifth of the increase in polarization, while growing Democratic extremism accounted for 16-17 percent of the increase. Increases in legislators’ extremism after 1980 were particularly consequential in the House. Indeed, of the representatives with the ten biggest career-spanning increases since 1973, five are current members of the House.
The take-away point from the perspective of the Strategist is that the realignment of southern Democrats toward the Republican Party is the most consequential electoral development both for political polarization and for GOP power. Indeed, it is quite possible that this replacement phenomenon actually drove the changes in individual members’ ideologies that further increased polarization. On the Republican side, greater conservative representation weakened the hand of moderates and pressured them to toe the (increasingly right-wing) line. On the Democratic side, a stronger and more unified GOP may have led some legislators to moderate their views in an effort to win back swing voters. Hence, extremism grew less among Democrats than Republicans. But it still grew, and so the likelihood of keeping (or winning back) Congressional majorities has grown increasingly uncertain over time.
The result, one might argue, is a 51-49 Nation, resting at a right-of-center equilibrium corresponding to the professed ideological position of American voters. Of course, Democrats may win back one or both chambers of Congress in November, thanks to GOP incompetence and ideological over-reach. But there is little sign of a realignment back in favor of Democrats, so close elections will continue to be the rule until one of the parties breaks out of what Stan Greenberg has called the “Two Americas” paradigm or until outside events shift public opinion decisively.