Speaking Frankly

My greetings to Dan’s readers as well. As I hope some of you will know from my columns for Slate and elswhere, I am less of a foreign policy expert than Dan or Suzanne (though not averse to offering thoughts on the subject). I’m a historian and political writer — like Dan, I enjoy joining debates on political affairs not necessarily connected to my scholarship — and I appreciate your indulging my areas of interest this week. One of which is the Democratic party’s struggle to find direction. For 35 years everyone has been aware that Democrats have lost working-class voters because of ?social? issues — from ?acid, amnesty, and abortion? in 1972 to prison furloughs and the pledge of allegiance in 1988 to gay marriage in 2004. Last fall, Tom Frank won attention as the latest commentator to pick up this theme, catapulting himself to mini-celebrity. Now his book is out in paper, with a new afterword analyzing the 2004 election, well worth reading, which appears in the NYRB. I?ve always thought Frank (a fellow historian) to be shrewd about many things, and he makes a convincing case that in nominating Kerry, the Democrats guaranteed they?d again have an uphill battle in refuting the stereotype of their party as in thrall to “cultural elites.” Frank’s especially good on why the Democrats perennially struggle on issues of war and the military:

What makes national security such a winner for Republicans is that is dramatizes the same negative qualities of liberalism that we see in the so-called “values” issues, only much more forcefully. War casts in sharp relief [the popular image of] the inauthenticity of the liberals, the insincerity of their patriotism, and their intellectual distance (always trying to “understand” the terrorists’ motives) from the raw emotions felt by ordinary Americans?each quality an expression of the deracinated upper-classness that is thought to be the defining characteristic of liberalism. … If you relish chardonnay/lattes/ snowboarding, you will not fight. If you talk like a Texan, you are a two-fisted he-man who knows life’s hardships and are ready to scrap at a moment’s notice.

Now, the solution of Frank — and many others of his ilk over the last 35 years — is to return to “economic populism,” stressing the bread-and-butter issues on which the Democrats? stands are naturally more appealing to most voters, including the Silent Majority-Reagan Democrat-Nascar Dad-types, than are the Republicans?. The only problem with this argument is that the Democrats haven?t abandoned their economic populism. This charge has been leveled from the left at every losing Democratic candidate since the 1980s, and it?s just wrong. Economic populism was a key ingredient in the campaigns of Dems from Walter Mondale onward — incluing John Kerry, scourge of outsourcing. The reality is that economic populism is a necessary but not sufficient element for a Democratic victory. In 2004, foreign policy was more salient in the news almost every day than were economic issues. The issue environment consistently favored the Republicans, and no Democratic candidate could have changed that. What Democrats can change is how they’re viewed by the public on foreign policy.