The following excerpt by Democratic strategist Mike Lux, author of The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
…The many losers on the Republican side were to my mind some of the people and groups who have degraded our politics and policies in the worst kind of way — the biggest names among them besides the actual candidates including Karl Rove, the Chamber of Commerce, Sheldon Adelson, the Koch brothers, the Wall Street money boys, Big Oil and Big Coal, and the extremist anti-gay and anti-choice groups. It is a pleasure to see these people, corporations, and groups unhappy for a while — not out of any sense of vindictiveness, but just knowing that if they were feeling happy the rest of us would be suffering mightily because of their terrible agenda for America.
But there is one other set of people and groups who lost in this election as well, and it is important to note that as well: Democrats who don’t want to have a populist “class warfare” kind of message. The Obama team, after wandering for two and a half years in the unproductive vineyards of D.C. centrism, finally planted its flag last fall in the populist turf of Teddy Roosevelt’s legacy and reframed the election as a make-or-break moment for the middle class, campaigned aggressively on more taxes for the wealthy and more regulation for Wall Street, and ripped Romney apart on the way Bain Capital hurt its workers and out-sourced jobs. Obama was in trouble before making that turn, but once made his poll numbers started rising and he was able to rally both the democratic base and swing vote working class voters to his side. Meanwhile, most of the Senate candidates who won tough races were flaming populists, people like the Wall Street accountabilty crusader Elizabeth Warren, the working class champion Sherrod Brown, Tammy Baldwin who bragged in her stump speeches about opposng the repeal of Glass-Steagall, the fiercely anti-big money in politics Chris Murphy, and Heidi Heitkamp who bragged in her ads about suing big corporations as ND Attorney General.
But it wasn’t just the candidates who were populists, the voters clearly were as well — especially the swing voters. One of the most fascinating findings of post-election polling by Democracy Corps and CAF was that swing voters who ended with Obama were actually even more populist than Democratic base voters. Swing voters mentioned the 47 percent video as one of their top three doubts about Romney more than base voters 31-26, they mentioned Bain Capital more often by 24-16, and they mentioned that Romney would follow Bush trickle down policies more often by 22-16 percent. And for both swing and base voters on this three top doubts question, over half of all the responses were about Romney being for the rich and out of touch with regular folks, while the next highest basket of concerns related to fears about Romney cutting social insurance (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare). And voters strongly oppose cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid as part of the budget deal; they think creating jobs is a higher priority than cutting the deficit; they oppose cuts in college aid and education, programs for children, worker training; they are overwhelmingly in favor of public financing of elections and other proposals to take corporate money out of politics. There are plenty more statistics in the poll and memo, it makes for great reading, I’d encourage people to check it out.
This is an old argument. It started when D.C. Democrats close to the business lobby, mostly Southerners, started the DLC after Walter Mondale lost to Reagan in 1984. Populism never works, they claimed, although their old chair Bill Clinton won the ’92 race with a campaign based on taxing the rich and fighting for the forgotten people who “work hard and play by the rules”, which sounds oddly like populism to me. Pollsters like Mark Penn carried the no-populism for Democrats torch for many years, ending with Hillary’s campaign digging herself into too deep a hole to climb out of in the 2008 primaries before turning to working class populism to win most of the contests at the end of the primary season when it was too late. Third Way — the younger, hipper version of DLC — now is the leading advocate in the party of the no-populism cause. They decried Elizabeth Warren’s “catastrophically anti-business message” at the Democratic convention, then watched as the speech helped boost her from a couple points behind Scott Brown to a few points ahead of him, never to get behind him again in the campaign.
Now to be clear, I think the progressive populism message needs to be tempered (as both the President’s message and Elizabeth Warren’s was) in some important ways that would not muddle their progressive policies. For example, an understanding that cutting the deficit over the long run is important is both good policy and good politics. I think Democrats should have specific proposals that cut waste in government such as subsidies to huge profitable agribusinesses and energy companies that don’t need to be subsidized, and clean up the weakly written federal government contracting policies that allow cost over-runs with no penalties. I also think Democrats should do far more than they are doing, both in policy and in their message, to focus on helping small business start-ups, and helping small business compete on a level playing field with the corporate behemoths who are trying to run them out of business in order to destroy the competition. Beefing up anti-trust enforcement, breaking up the big banks so that smaller community banks and credit unions have more ability to give loans to small businesses, giving the Small Business Administration more money for loans to small business, enforcing trade laws to make sure countries like China aren’t cheating medium and small companies here, and creating contracting and procurement rules that make sure the federal government doesn’t do most of its business with big companies are all ways progressive populists Democrats can promote small business.
So, yes, Democratic populist candidates need to be clear that they are for lower deficits, reducing waste in government, and helping small business. But none of these points takes away from that populist message of fighting for the middle class against Wall Street and other big money special interests. I think anyone looking at the message and electoral coalition for candidates like Obama, Warren, Sherrod Brown, Tammy Baldwin, Chris Murphy, and Heidi Heitkamp, and doesn’t see populism there is smoking some strange weed bought from their friends on Wall Street. The argument that populism doesn’t work for Democrats comes out of the 2012 elections in about as good a shape as Karl Rove’s reputation.

This article by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
Sunday’s morning shows featured some astoundingly stupid comments from Republicans who claim to believe that on Election Day voters gave them a “mandate” to continue their attempts to obstruct President Obama’s agenda.
Apparently some Republican pundits are still living in the same parallel universe that allowed them to convince themselves that by now, President-elect Mitt Romney would be organizing his transition.
It really is mind-boggling. Notwithstanding all of the available evidence, they still believe that the American people want them to stand in the way of increases in taxes for the wealthiest 2 percent and to cut Medicare and Social Security benefits for future retirees.
Who got a mandate for his policies on Election Day?
The presidential campaign focused like a laser on the question of whether tax rates should be increased for the top 2 percent of Americans or whether we should adopt Romney’s proposal to lower tax rates for the wealthy by another $5 trillion, and inevitably increase taxes on the middle class.
The campaign centered on the Ryan-Romney budget that would have slashed spending on critical services for the poor and middle class, reduce funding for education, do away with Medicare and replace it with a voucher program that would increase out-of-pocket costs for seniors by $6,500 per year.
And it was clear throughout, that the Republicans continued to favor privatizing Social Security.
The Republican presidential ticket lost by 332 electoral votes to 206 electoral votes. Obama got 50.6 percent of the popular vote and Romney got 47.6 percent of the popular vote.
Democrats took two additional seats in the Senate and now hold a 55-45 edge. The Senate Democratic caucus now includes more Progressive members and fewer Conservative members.
Democrats picked up at least 7 and probably 8 seats in the House, and nationwide got over a half a million more votes for their House candidates than did the Republicans — even though the Republicans continued to control the chamber.
And the verdict that was rendered at the ballot box could be seen in virtually every national opinion survey.
The election was a battle over the future of the middle class, and Obama won that battle.
A Greenberg-Quinlan Research poll found that by 51 to 42 percent the voters said Obama would do a better job restoring the middle class.
They found that by almost two-thirds, voters believed Social Security and Medicare should not be cut as part of a deficit reduction deal.
A November 15, 2012 Hart Research poll for Americans for Tax Fairness found that:
By a strong 17-point margin, voters favor ending the Bush tax cuts on incomes over250,000 (56 percent) rather than extending the tax cuts for all taxpayers (39 percent).
President Obama now holds a commanding position in the debate over tax policy. When voters hear President Obama’s position on the Bush tax cuts — that he will sign a bill continuing them for 98 percent of Americans but will veto a bill continuing them for incomes over 250,000 — fully 61 percent agree with this stance. By contrast, when voters are read congressional Republicans’ position — that they will pass a bill continuing the cuts for all income levels, but will block any bill ending the cuts for those making over 250,000 — only 42 percent agree while a 53 percent majority rejects its plan.

Read more…

A lot of election commentary has focused on the formidable predicament Dems face as a result of GOP gerrymandering in the House of Representatives, resulting in fewer and fewer swing districts. The general consensus is that it has screwed us out of a decent shot at retaking a House majority and dims prospects for moving legislation forward.
Nate Silver, for example, paints a pretty bleak picture of Democratic prospects going forward in his FiveThirtyEight post, “Democrats Unlikely to Regain House in 2014,” explaining:

…Democrats did regain some ground in the House. Although several races remain uncalled, Democrats would wind up with 201 seats in the House if all races are assigned to the current leader in the vote count – an improvement from the 193 seats Democrats held after the 2010 midterm elections. That would leave Democrats needing to pick up 17 seats to win control of the chamber in 2014.
Although 17 seats is not an extraordinary number, both historical precedent in midterm election years and a deeper examination of this year’s results would argue strongly against Democrats being able to gain that many seats.
There is also reason to suspect that Democrats are unlikely to sustain the sort of losses in the House that they did in 2010. But odds are that the electoral climate in 2014 will be somewhere between neutral and Republican-leaning, rather than favoring Democrats.
In midterm election years since World War II, the president’s party has lost an average of 26 seats in the House, as shown in the chart below. The president’s party gained seats only twice, in 1998 and 2002.
…This year, there were only 11 House seats that Democrats lost by five or fewer percentage points. Thus, even if they had performed five points better across the board, they would still have come up six seats short of controlling the chamber.
In other words, Democrats would have to perform quite a bit better in House races in 2014 than they did in 2012 to win control of the chamber – when usually the president’s party does quite a bit worse instead.

As Rob Richie and Devin McCarthy report at Fairvote.org that “52% of Voters Wanted a Democratic House,” yet the GOP kept a comfortable majority of 54% of seats in the House despite Democratic candidates having an overall 4% advantage in voter preference over their Republican opponents.”
At The Hill, Cameron Joseph notes,

According to a recent study by the Center for Voting and Democracy, Democrats start off with 166 safe districts while Republicans start off with 195. There are only 74 true swing districts where the presidential candidates won between 46 and 54 percent of the popular vote, down from 89 before redistricting.
That means the GOP needs to win less than one-third of competitive House seats to stay in control — something that shouldn’t be too hard to accomplish, barring a huge Democratic wave. In a politically neutral year Democrats are likely to have around 203 seats, a number that’s only slightly higher than the number they’ll have once the remaining 2012 races are called.

While historical precedent has been a dependable factor to consider in predicting House election outcomes, there are exceptional elections that bust precedents. Also, the Republican party is more divided than it has been in many decades, and it could get a lot worse. Dems are more united than in a long time, and we can build our edge while Republicans work through their internecine squabbles.
Many pundits were surprised by the pivotal influence of demographic transformation on November 6th and the microtargeting prowess and intensity of Democratic GOTV. Republicans will eventually catch up on microtargeting, but there will be a learning curve of some duration for them, during which Dems can gain ground in swing districts.
One significant obstacle is that many of the most skilled Dem GOTV operatives will be deployed defending Senate seats, with a very tough map for 2014. But with adequate training for new GOTV workers and volunteers. Dems will be better prepared to leverage our informational edge.
According to CNN Politics data, Republicans won 41 of the 435 House Seats being contested with 55 percent or less of votes cast in each district. Here are 27 U.S. congressional districts that Republicans won with 53 percent or less of votes cast: CA31; CO3; FL2; FL10; IL 13; IN2; IN8; IA3; IA4; KY6; MI1; MI3; MI7; MI11; MN6; MT1; NB2; NV3; NY11; NY19; NY23; NY27; NC9; OH6; OH16; PA12; and TX14.
Advantages and disadvantages for both parties will pop up in those districts in the two years ahead. But, with our informational advantage, Dems may be better prepared to exploit new developments and incumbent blunders as they emerge. Of course, Dems will have to be equally-energetic in defending House seats they won by close margins.
Democrats ought to be able to pick up 17 Republican seats with a combination of better candidates, state-of-the-art micro-targeting and a more focused and energetic GOTV program targeting pro-Democratic constituencies in those districts – small though they may be. There should be an equally vigorous ‘front porch’ campaign to sway persuadable voters. Further, if Democrats can do as well as we have with 7.9 percent unemployment, an improving economy should boost our chances in ’14.
Too much focus on historical precedent is debilitating. History is never made by entertaining defeatist memes or those who are daunted by precedent. Indeed, all that President Obama has achieved has resulted from his determination not to be discouraged or in any way deterred by historical precedent. With a similar bold vision — and some muscle behind it, Democrats can retake a House majority in the 2014 midterms. If we decide that we aren’t going to be ruled by history in 2014, then we can make it.

Democrats have observed with a great deal of puzzlement the extent to which conservatives are currently pushing the notion that the events in Benghazi represent a major, potentially game changing and reputation-destroying scandal for the Obama administration.
After all, from a Democratic perspective it seems entirely obvious that the administration had no possible motive for stripping its own ambassador of sufficient security protection nor any cynical election campaign reason to attempt to conceal the fact that the attackers were an organized terrorist group. Democrats logically assume that an impartial investigation will indeed reveal significant failures to properly anticipate the danger somewhere in the military-diplomatic chain of command and also clarify why the initial public description of the attackers by the CIA was revised as time went by. But Dems have great difficulty understanding why conservatives imagine that such an investigation will somehow deeply discredit the administration.
As several progressive commentators have recently asked: “Do the critics really think Obama and his administration deliberately exposed their own ambassador to assassination?” “Do they really think there was some huge political benefit for Obama in describing the attackers as ‘extremists’ rather than ‘terrorists’ for two weeks during the campaign? ” “My god, just what the devil are they actually implying – the whole thing simply doesn’t make any sense?”
Unfortunately, however, it actually does make perfect sense. Conservatives have four very important objectives they can realistically hope to achieve, even if not one of the parallel investigations now planned find even the slightest culpability at the top levels of the administration’s foreign policy team where Obama or his major military and diplomatic advisors could be directly implicated.
1. the narrative destroys the image of Obama as the tough, competent President “who finally got Bin Laden.”
It is impossible for Democrats to fully visualize how hideously painful and infuriating it is for conservatives every time the man they genuinely and seriously imagine to be a cowardly, anti-American radical who gleefully bows to our enemies and sabotages our friends is described as “the President who finally got bin laden” and whose authorization of drone warfare is widely credited with effectively weakening the terrorist threat.
The conservative Benghazi narrative — if one accepts it – undermines this image and replaces it with a story of incompetence, weakness and timidity. Specific facts may add some detail and texture to this story but in reality, for conservatives there really does not need to be any concrete proof that this description is accurate. Conservatives already “know” it is true by a process of infallible logical deduction: The image simply must be true because a spineless president like Obama and his appointees could not possibly have responded in any other way.
This alternative right-wing narrative of incompetence, weakness and timidity also serves to finally overwrite the lingering memory of the massive intelligence failures around 9/11 and Saddam’s nonexistent nuclear weapons. Although fair-minded observers will think it absurd to treat the Benghazi attack as a failure of equal magnitude to those fiascos, even the briefest perusal of conservative commentary will reveal that this is precisely what they now choose to passionately believe.
2. The narrative exonerates the inflammatory anti-Muslim documentary of any responsibility.
Religious conservatives in particular were outraged when it became obvious that an anti-Muslim documentary produced in America had generated widespread anger and protest across the Middle East and was being criticized even in America as an distorted and unnecessary provocation. When the early descriptions of the attacks on the embassy linked those widespread spontaneous protests against the video to the assault, it was doubly infuriating.
From this point of view, the fact that the attack on the embassy was in fact premeditated and not directly part of the spontaneous protests against the video is a vital concept for religious conservatives to assert in order to defend the much more general principle that attacks on Islam, no matter how inflammatory or distorted, must never be considered irresponsible and must never be held responsible for any negative consequences they may produce.
3. The narrative creates a permanent anti-Obama headline-generating scandal machine.
Back in the 1990’s, in the 10 year, multi-million dollar “whitewater” real estate investigation that never found any evidence of criminal wrongdoing by Bill or Hillary Clinton, conservatives perfected the tactic of what might be called the “permanent vacuous investigation.” They perceived that producing any actual crimes was entirely unnecessary. The process of investigation itself was hugely effective in undermining an administration.
After all, the staging and theatrics of an investigation inherently provides endless opportunities for conservatives to pose as fearless seekers of truth and investigators of wrongdoing, for delivering withering speeches implying that vast crimes are soon to be exposed and for generating a permanent flow of media headlines, sound-bites and TV reports all critical of the administration. The simple fact that an investigation is occurring ironically appears to many people as proof that some kind of wrongdoing must have occurred. And, of course, there is always the possibility that a wide-ranging “fishing expedition” might accidentally turn up something that can be exploited.
The mechanics of exploiting the investigation process are not complex. Each witness, each testimony and each question necessarily establish the basis for demanding additional witnesses, testimonies and questions. This process can already be seen developing in the Benghazi investigation. General Petraeus in his testimony indicated that the decision to change the term “terrorist” to “extremist” was made within the national security apparatus and was not ordered by the oval office. Republican congressmen who had implied such direct interference quickly switched to demanding to know “who” within the security apparatus made the decision and who in the White House might have known about it. From here, the entirely predictable next stage will be to ask if the person or persons who made the decision to change the wording “were in contact” with anyone in the White House. E-mail records and sworn testimony will be described as vital to answering this question. If the individuals were only in contact with individuals in the White House with whom they were properly supposed to be in contact, the next question will then be who were those proper individuals themselves in contact with. What e-mails did they send and receive. And so on.
In short, the investigation will become a perpetual motion machine, one that places the targets of the investigation in an inescapable double bind. If they object to a “fishing expedition” they can be charged with engaging in a “cover-up,” if they agree, each testimony and record release simply sets the stage for the investigators to pose additional questions and seek additional disclosure.
In the meantime, the “fearless and intrepid truth seekers” are provided with endless opportunities to crank up the investigatory cliché machine, “I promise I will not rest until we get to the bottom of this,” “these new revelations raise more question than they answer” “this new material proves that something very wrong going on,” “the whole truth has to come out” etc, ad nauseum. This is a process that – as Whitewater demonstrated – can go on for months and years.
The perpetual investigation machine serves two ongoing purposes for the conservative media. It continually reinforces the conservative framing they seek to impose on the administration and it provides a constant stream of new material for conservative columnists and commentators.
It can, in fact, be quite confidently predicted that, if the investigation is allowed to extend indefinitely, two years from now there will be over 200 segments on Fox News devoted to the subject and 3000 major references to it in speeches by conservative spokesmen and Republican politicians. Even if not a single “smoking gun” is found, it will become a major, permanent part of the national political narrative.
4. Weakening Obama’s position in relation to Netanyahu.
There is deep concern among conservatives and the GOP that Benjamin Netanyahu’s unprecedented partisan intervention in the 2012 election has deeply weakened his influence with Obama and his level of support in the United States. Attacks on Obama based on the Benghazi attacks, although they do not have any direct bearing on U.S. Israeli relations or U.S. policy toward Iran and the occupied territories, can be used as partisan wedges against Obama. The conservative and GOP sound-bites are predictable: “The Obama administration — its utter and total incompetence exposed by the Benghazi scandal — is certainly in no position to lecture the Israelis on the Middle East” “Obama, the incompetent ‘bungler of Benghazi’ should do whatever a “real” anti-terrorist like Netanyahu wants him to do” And so it will go.
What Can Dems Do?
As this makes clear, even in the absence of any evidence of White House or top advisor error in the Benghazi attack, conservatives and the GOP have four very real and practical reasons for prolonging and inflating the inquiry.
But what can Dems do? A legitimate, non-partisan investigation is entirely appropriate and necessary as it is in all cases of military and/or security failures. But how can Dems effectively object when conservatives and the GOP attempt to turn it into a right-wing propaganda-fest and partisan fishing expedition?
One key tactic should be to carefully challenge conservative and GOP figures to distinguish between legitimate inquiry and fishing expedition. This can be accomplished by demanding clear answers to questions like the following:

1. Will you publically apologize to any government officials whose reputations are impugned in the course of the investigation and who are later shown to be innocent of any wrongdoing or error?
2. Describe what specific measures will you take now to make sure this investigation does not become another Whitewater – a 10 year multimillion dollar boondoggle and waste of taxpayer money that turned up no evidence of criminal wrongdoing.
3. Will you insist that the investigation be at least 50% focused on developing recommendations for preventing such tragedies in the future or will you try to make it entirely devoted to seeking scapegoats and assigning blame.

The answers to these questions will “smoke out” the partisan warriors from among the legitimate investigators. People seeking legitimate answers to what happened in Benghazi should have absolutely no problem providing acceptable answers to all these questions. Partisan warriors seeking only to score partisan debating points, on the other hand, will twist, slither and turn like political Burmese pythons to avoid directly answering them.

As the final late votes dribble in, Greenberg Quinlan Rosner/Democracy Corps produced the most accurate national polls during the last three weeks of the presidential election, according to Nate Silver of NYT FiveThirtyEight, with “a smaller error than any national pollster – less than 1 percentage point.”
Romney appears to have learned nothing from being defeated in his bid for the presidency, bizarrely placing the blame on President Obama’s “gifts” to women, minorities and youth, which sounds like more of Mitt’s ‘moochers’ meme. But Gov. Bobby Jindal apparently has a clue. Politico’s James Hohmann and Jonathan Martin explain the emerging rift inside the GOP. However, Jindal dodged the issue of Republican-driven voter suppression. It’s not just about talking nicer — there has to be some policy behind it.
AP has an update, “Dems, GOP fight brewing over curbing filibusters.”
Carla Seaquist’s HuffPo post “This Time, Democrats Need to Keep Control of the Narrative” provides an eloquent take on the meaning of the election, a cautionary note and a prescription for moving the Democratic agenda forward. Here’s a bit of Seaquist’s view of the outcome: “…Not only was the American way of life reinforced, so in a way was our soul: In the teeth of Tea Party extremism, Obama-hatred, and off-the-wall pronouncements from Republicans about women, minorities, gays, and immigrants, the majority of the American electorate pushed back and voted for fairness, tolerance, and sanity…It’s America at its best and we got a bit of it back…”
Tim Murphy of Mother Jones has yet another peek “Under the Hood of Team Obama’s Tech Operation.”
David Moberg’s “Unions Played Major Unsung Role in Obama Victory” in In These Times has this to say: “While exit polls showed that Obama lost white voters by more than in 2008, the Hart surveys found that Obama won by 9 points among white union men without a college degree. In contrast, he lost by 47 points among white non-college men who were not union members…Romney did better with older voters overall, but union members over 65 favored Obama by 28 percentage points, while non-union voters in the same age group favored Romney by 17 percentage points. And while non-union voters making $50,000 to $100,000 a year favored Romney by 8 points, union members earning the same amount broke for Obama by a margin of 33 percent…In Ohio, the most hard-fought battleground state and one with above-average union membership, Obama won union voters by 70 to 29 percent…”
Tova Wang notes at Demos: “The right to vote is just that — a fundamental freedom at the cornerstone of American democracy. In the 2012 election, that sacred value was challenged in a way we have not seen in a couple of generations, perhaps since the civil and voting rights movements of the 1960s… The measures taken were so blatant and widespread that they served to energize coalitions of citizens to fight for voting rights harder than ever, and made many voters more determined to vote and have their vote count.” Wang follows up with the best detailed analysis of voter suppression in 2012 and successful efforts to challenge it yet published.
At ABC News/Univision Emily Deruy reports that Senators Mark Warner (D-Virginia) and Chris Coons (D-Delaware) have introduced legislation to “make voting faster and more accessible…The bill, called The Fair, Accurate, Secure and Timely (FAST) Voting Act of 2012, would award states grants based on how well they improve access to polls. That would be judged by a number of factors, including how flexible the registration process is, whether early voting is offered at least nine of the 10 days before an election, and whether absentee voting is offered.”
The Economist corrects Speaker Boehner’s assertions that the election had “no mandate” for raising taxes on the rich: “Did not! The Democrats won 50.6% of the votes for president, to 47.8% for the Republicans; 53.6% of the votes for the Senate, to 42.9% for the Republicans; and…49% of the votes for the House, to 48.2% for the Republicans (some ballots are still being counted). That’s not a vote for divided government. It’s a clean sweep…The only viable method for Democrats to reinstate the House’s democratic integrity is to win a healthy majority of state governments in 2020, threaten to gerrymander to their own advantage, and then use that leverage to extract a deal from state Republican parties for a non-partisan districting process.”
Politico’s Maggie Haberman cites a new poll by Hart Research’s Geoff Garin, conducted for Americans for Tax Fairness which indicates “Democrats have changed the landscape on an issue that has eluded them for years – taxes. The survey found that has most want the Bush-era cuts on top earners to expire, but that Republicans will shoulder blame if all of the Bush cuts, including those on the middle class, expire because a deal can’t be reached.”

It’s traditional in our system that once the votes are counted and the winners and losers announced, we enter a period where analysis of what happened quickly gives way to ax-grinding and elbowing for position among factions in the losing party, and sometimes the winning party. This happened quickly, but not very deeply, in the GOP, as I’ve written about extensively at Washington Monthly.
By and large Republicans have “searched” for the factors that left them without the White House or control of the Senate in places that are not threatening to their basic conservative ideology. That’s exactly what they did after their 2008 defeat, which made it easy for the GOP to go on a right-wing ideology bender soon afterwards. Don’t be too sure the same thing won’t happen again.
Another familiar meme from the not–too-distant past has been the claim that an exciting new cadre of Republican leaders are rising up from the states, where they are solving problems and promoting “new ideas.” That’s precisely the meme that led to the nomination of George W. “Reformer with Results” Bush in 2000.
Meanwhile, Democrats are at the moment maintaining their impressive level of pre-election unity. But it may not last, given the long-simmering differences of opinion over domestic and foreign policies that go back to the Clinton administration, and could even re-emerge quickly if the Obama administration makes what progressives consider excessive or principle-violating concessions during the upcoming fiscal negotiations.

Although it is only a few days since the 2012 election ended, the national media is already settling into a familiar political narrative regarding the GOP, a narrative that goes as follows: the Republican Party, having suffered major setbacks at the polls, is now “reassessing” its approach and seeking ways to “moderate” its image and positions.
This is a profoundly comfortable and comforting narrative – one that reflects a kind of ceremonial ritual in American politics. A political party, chastened by defeat, is widely praised by mainstream commentators as it moves back toward the center, re-establishing the basic “balance” and “moderation” of American political life.
But in this case there is one overwhelming problem with this narrative: it is profoundly and dangerously wrong.
Beginning last spring, a growing chorus of influential observers and commentators – political moderates and centrists rather than partisan progressive Democrats — began to express a very different view of the GOP – a view that the Republican Party was no longer operating as a traditional American political party. Rather, they argued, it had evolved into an extremist political party of a kind not previously seen in American political life.
During the presidential campaign this perspective was temporarily set aside as journalists and commentators tried to keep up with the almost daily twists and turns of Mitt Romney’s reinventions of himself as a conservative, a moderate and then a conservative once again. But now that the election is over, the underlying issue must be squarely faced.
The first major statement expressing the view that the Republican Party had embraced a dangerous extremism appeared in a very influential Washington Post article, “Let’s just say it, the Republicans are the problem” written by the well known and widely respected congressional scholars Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein. As the article’s key paragraph said:

In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party. The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition… [It has] all but declared war on the government….

The two authors quoted Mike Lofgren, a veteran Republican congressional staffer, who wrote an anguished diatribe about why he was ending his career on the Hill after nearly three decades.

“The Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe,”

Mann and Ornstein’s forceful critique provided the impetus for other moderates and centrists to follow their lead and directly address the growing extremism within the GOP. James Fallows, for example, expressed the view as follows in The Atlantic:

Normally I shy away from apocalyptic readings of the American predicament…But when you look at the sequence from Bush v. Gore, through Citizens United…and you combine it with ongoing efforts in Florida and elsewhere to prevent voting from presumably Democratic blocs; and add that to the simply unprecedented abuse of the filibuster in the years since the Democrats won control of the Senate and then took the White House, you have what we’d identify as a kind of long-term coup if we saw it happening anywhere else.
Liberal democracies like ours depend on rules but also on norms — on the assumption that you’ll go so far, but no further, to advance your political ends. The norms imply some loyalty to the system as a whole that outweighs your immediate partisan interest.

American politics has always been open to the full and free expression of even the most extreme ideas, but the profound danger posed by the current extremism of the GOP lies in one deeply disturbing fact: the Republican Party’s extremism goes far beyond support for extreme public policies. Instead, in three key respects, it deliberately seeks to undermine basic norms and institutions of democratic society.
The two very different meanings of political extremism
To clearly demonstrate this, however, it is necessary to carefully distinguish between two entirely distinct meanings of the term “political extremism.”
On the one hand, it is possible for a person or political party to hold a wide variety of very “extreme” opinions on issues. These views may be crackpot (e.g. “abolish all courts and judges”) or repugnant (“deny non-insured children all medical care”). But as long as the individual or political party that holds these views conducts itself within the norms and rules of a democratic society, its right to advocate even the most extreme views is protected by those same democratic institutions.
The alternative definition of the term “political extremism” refers to political parties or individuals who do not accept the norms, rules and constraints of democratic society. These individuals or parties embrace a view of “politics as warfare” and of political opponents as literal “enemies” who must be crushed. Extremist political parties based on a “politics as warfare” philosophy emerged on both the political left and right at various times in the 20th century and in many different countries and circumstances.
Despite their ideological diversity, extremist political parties share a large number of common characteristics, one critical trait being a radically different conception of the role and purpose of a political party in a democratic society. In the “politics as warfare” perspective a political party’s objective is defined as the conquest and seizure of power and not sincere collaboration in democratic governance. The party is viewed as a combat organization whose goal is to defeat an enemy, not a representative organization whose job is to faithfully represent the people who voted for it. Political debate and legislative maneuvering are seen not as the means to achieve ultimate compromise, but as forms of combat whose only objective is total victory.
It is this “politics as warfare” view of political life that leads logically and inevitably to the justification of attempts to attack and undermine basic democratic institutions whenever and wherever they present a roadblock to achieving the ultimate goal of complete ideological victory.
Three tactics of political extremism
The new moderate and centrist critics of Republican extremism have noted three specific kinds of attacks that the GOP has launched on basic American democratic norms and institutions.

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