AVAST, YE SCURVY BILGE RATS!

Simply put, Dan Drezner is my hero. I feel really lucky to be here. Now I will abuse this privilege with a long, rambling post that will alienate almost everyone. Some speculative thoughts: There was a letter to The New York Times Magazine that struck me as interesting. It was from a Hannah Clark and it read as follows: As Matt Bai points out, the Democratic Party has been focusing on winning individual elections. But winning an election generally requires an appeal to the political center. Since the center has been moving steadily right, the Democrats have drifted in that direction as well. We need a long-term strategy with the ultimate goal of moving the center to the left. There’s something to this. My strong sense is that demographic trends coupled with the decreasing salience of (a) the federal income tax burden and (b) crime, welfare, and racial preferences in national elections will create a kind of “perfect storm” for the aging Reagan coalition. The rise of right-leaning exurbs and the continuing growth of emphatically conservative religious denominations notwithstanding, I’d bet that John Judis and Ruy Texeira are, in broadest outline, correct: there is an emerging Democratic majority. The Rove strategy may very well succeed in reelecting the president, but it could represent the last hurrah for the Republicans. Partisan gerrymandering will probably serve to entrench a Republican House majority in the medium-term, but even that’s vulnerable further out. But will this do the trick for Hannah Clark, i.e., will it achieve her “ultimate goal of moving the center to the left”? Before I continue, I should point out (indulgently) that I’m in a funny position: for a whole host of reasons, a nontrivial proportion of which have to do with a thoroughgoing contrarianism and the experience of growing up among incredibly smug lefties, I identify as a man of the center-right (unconvincingly, a lot of the time). My gut instinct is to root for the John Sununus and the Marc Racicots. But my ideological lodestone would be the neoconservatives of the early 1970s, particularly Irving Kristol and the Daniel Patrick Moynihan who served as head of Nixon’s Urban Affairs Council—which places me in the vanishingly small “Tory Men, Whig Measures” camp. And so, strangely, I agree with Clark, provided “moving the center to the left” means building a consensus in favor of a large and permanent role for the federal government in facilitating social mobility and eliminating poverty. Right. Back to the original point. Will Democratic hegemony move the center to the left? It probably will, but, if there’s no effective opposition, the newly triumphant Dems will do it in the most odious way. In February 2001, Jason Zengerle wrote an insanely perceptive essay in The New Republic on Zell Miller and, to use the saucy language of the subheading, “Why Zell Miller screws the Democrats.” Right now, Zell Miller is, for all intents and purposes, a committed, fervent Bush Republican. But in the early 1990s, as governor of Georgia, he was one of the most innovative and shrewd New Democrats, with a keen appreciation of the needs and wants of suburban professionals. Miller first ran as a classic populist. Over time, he became a pomo populist. Zengerle’s take follows: Miller changed his political strategy, abandoning his coalition of blacks and poor rural whites in favor of a new alliance between blacks and middle-class, traditionally Republican white suburbanites. In the process, he abandoned his commitment to progressive economics. Miller put on hold his campaign pledge to repeal a highly regressive sales tax on groceries (he would eventually repeal it in his second term) and instead pushed through a less progressive $100 million tax cut for the elderly and families with children. More importantly, he curried favor among middle-class voters with the hope scholarship, one of the education initiatives funded by the new state lottery. Beginning in 1993, any Georgia resident whose parents earned $66,000 or less per year and who completed high school with a B average could attend any public college or university in Georgia for free. At the beginning of 1994, Miller bumped up the income cap to $100,000, and by the end of the year he removed it altogether. In effect, Miller created an enormous middle- class entitlement on the backs of the poor, who buy a disproportionate share of the state's lottery tickets. That November, while Republicans were routing Democrats throughout the South, Miller eked out a two-point victory, primarily thanks to the new votes he'd picked up in the Atlanta suburbs. Miller is, for obvious reasons, persona non grata among Democrats these days, but his past quite possibly represents the Democratic future. The income tax burden will be shifted off of the median voter and onto the very affluent. The costs of generous new subsidies for the middle class, or rather working families, will thus be borne by a small minority likely to become more unpopular over time. If the subsidies take the form of Jacob Hacker’s “universal insurance” (which I hope to revisit) or the family subsidies proposed by Elizabeth Warren and Anne L. Alstott, among others, the costs are likely to be very, very high. Because a serious commitment to “the underclass”—which to my mind would involve an income strategy, but also a sustained effort to address deeply-rooted cultural pathologies (“What the hell can the government do about that?” is a fair question)—ain’t exactly a big vote-winner, it’s easy to see this getting shunted to the side. This rather cynical approach to domestic issues (definitely an improvement in some respects over the Bush approach, thought that’s another matter) will be coupled with an approach to global trade I like to call “polysyllabic protectionism.” The amazingly sharp Barack Obama is its most skillful practitioner. Basically, it combines soaring rhetoric on democratizing the global economy and helping poor nations with tariffs or onerous non-tariff barriers. There you have it, folks, a glimpse at a possible future. If the Republicans continue with their dunderheaded allegiance to the Norquistian fantasy, AKA “What Would Reagan Do?,” they will rule the suburban fringe of Denver and Nashville with an iron fist while leaving the country to pomo populists who will overindulge the relatively affluent, overregulate the entrepreneurs, and underserve the poor, both here and abroad. That they’ll probably hew to a “Come Home, America” approach to power politics should also give thoughtful observers pause. So what should Hannah Clark do? Targeting people like Chris Shays or Connie Morella (who lost in 2002) isn’t the smartest move. If she wants to move the center left, she should consider joining the Republican Party. The GOP badly needs centrist infiltrators who will shift the party back to the “wouldn’t-be-prudent” prudence of George H.W.—if you’ll recall, 41 proposed solutions to the health care crisis that made George W.’s narrow focus on association health plans and medical savings accounts look like the joke it is. (Clark is almost certainly not a centrist, but you catch my drift.) We can beat some sense into the Republican Party now—by hoping Bush loses to the hilariously mediocre John Kerry and getting behind Rudolph Giuliani in manic Deaniac fashion before 2008—or later, when President Patrick Kennedy (heaven forfend) is reelected to his third term in a landslide. The Third Way is it. Game over. Drowning government in a bathtub simply will not happen. The Republican Party is going to be ripe for takeover, and thoughtful centrists should think about playing pirate.