Nicholas Weininger: “It is worth remembering that right-wing Republicanism as it emerged after Goldwater bears little substantive resemblance to Goldwaterism…. [N]o Republican politician save Ron Paul has, at any point in the last twenty or so years, seriously advocated anything close to Goldwater’s program[.]” I haven’t read either Perlstein’s book or his essay, but based upon what I’ve read about them, this strikes me as a very telling objection, and I’d be interested to see how Perlstein would respond to it.

It’s true that many of the leading bloggers are really upset at Democratic turncoats who seem more interested in staying on the good side of President Bush than in representing the traditional constituencies of their party. But that observation doesn’t mean that the netroots leaders have no interest in ideology.

What is true, however, is that the netroots consists of many people who would like to see a bare minimum of honesty and competence from government. But there’s still a belief system in place that competence tends to correlate with a liberal belief system.

Let’s put it this way: if the netroots were solely focused on winning as opposed to ideology, they wouldn’t get quite so worked up about things like the Alito nomination.

In ‘64, Right-wingers set out to make their ideology the dominant one. They didn’t just define themselves, they launched a full-out attack on liberalism and identified it as the root cause of all of today’s problems.

In ‘72, Democrats, on the other hand, decided that they couldn’t win an ideological debate. They abandoned the field of “ideology” for “competence,” and decided to go with whatever small left-leaning ideas they had that polled decently. This was a dumb move.

At this point, we’re completely polarized between a Republican party whose every public action—however incoherent or inconsistent—is seen as a part of a potent and appealing ideology, and a Democratic party with very popular policies & white papers out the wazoo, that is constantly mocked as “flip-flopping,” “adrift,” and with “no new ideas.”

I think it’s time for Democrats to realize that we’re not going to win elections with better policy papers or press conferences. There’s a declining marginal return to one-offs or changes in the fine details of various policies, and we’re at a point where tweaks are more likely to hurt us on the “flip flop” than they are to increase our substantive appeal.

It’s time for us to re-engage on the battlefield of ideology. We’ve got to attack CONSERVATISM and define our ideology in contrast to conservatism’s least appealing features. Also, it’s a good idea to call our new ideology “progressivism”—less because liberalism is a tarnished brand, and more because a) a new name means a new idea and b) it has the word PROGRESS in it! That’s KICK ASS! Everybody loves progress!

We really have to stop pretending that ideology doesn’t matter. It does matter. It matters a great deal, because it’s the storyline that all your other public actions—from policy positions to initiatives to your personal character—will fit into.

Where progreessives want to emulate Goldwaterites.

“And let me close by saying this: we will all win, eventually. With few exceptions, all of the challengers who ran against the party establishment today will prove victorious in the long run. While victories such as mine were rare, all of the progressive and reform defeats will eventually succeed as long as the people who participated in those losses keep trying. If there is one thing the establishment is not prepared for, it is a dedicated group of people who will keep trying to win even after temporary setbacks. Even if our victories are few, our victories will keep multiplying as long as we keep running. Hell, that is probably how the establishment came to power in the first place. As soon as it is clear that you will win sometimes, and that you will not be deterred even when you do not win, eventually those in power have no choice but to accept that you have a role in determining the future of the party. Give up easily, and be defeated easily. Never give up, and eventually you will govern.”

So if the left tries to come up with its own version of the Goldwater movement, it may well end with the triumph of a deeply corrupted welfare-mercantilist movement dedicated to handing out spoils and special protections to pliant interest groups while pompously mouthing the rhetoric of “social justice”. The netrooters ought to ask themselves if that’s really what they want.

I believe the migration of the white Southerner to the Republican party completely tracks the move to the right of the Republican party. This was a somewhat gradual process but by no means 16 years in the wilderness. Right wing ideas were completely acceptable and current in the South even in 1964. (I was there and heard it on the radio, in the newspaper, and in the speeches of preachers and local community leaders.)

So no, “had to lose in order to win” is inaccurate. I would suggest that a good analogy to the truth is a chemical process whereby a precipitate settles out of solution. The right wing consolidated in a single party due to race.

1) The Republican Party and the Democratic Party have never been isomorphic. The difference is not, however, that the GOP has tended to extremism, while the Democratic Party has tended toward the center (however much that description might fit today). The more general, longterm difference is that the GOP was, from its start, a fundamentally ideologically unified party, though its ideology has obviously changed a lot since the 1860s. It was created largely in opposition to slavery (and in favor of a particular free labor ideology). The Democratic Party, in contrast, has historically tended to be an odd coalition whose parts often disagree greatly on ideological questions (hence Will Rogers’ famous quip that “I’m not a member of any organized political party…I’m a Democrat!”)

In the 1930s and early 1940s, the Democrats were simultaneously the party of the New Deal and the party of Jim Crow. In the 1970s, they were the party of Scoop Jackson and George McGovern.

Obviously there have been moments of relative ideological diversity within the GOP (the 1910s and the 1950s – early 1970s being two good examples), and perhaps of relative ideological unity within the Democratic Party (harder to identify these moments…any nominees?). But each party has a tendency to revert to type. Attempts to impose ideological unity on the GOP have historically been much more successful than attempts to impose ideological unity on the Democratic Party (FDR’s failed attempt to oust anti-New Deal Dems in the late 1930s being just one example).

Though it’s hard to identify what exactly accounts for these tendencies in the long run, if one takes them seriously, then what worked for the right within the GOP post-1964, might not work for the left within the Democratic Party.

2) The Democratic left had its 1964 in 1972. And it responded very differently to its lost wager. By and large, progressive Democrats have been team players ever since 1972. Rather than continuing the fight against the party’s center and right that (arguably) began in Chicago in 1968, progressive Democrats have by and large gone along as the party has drifted steadily rightward. Progressives have accepted party reforms designed to limit the ability of the progressive grassroots to control the presidential nomination (e.g. Super Delegates and Super Tuesday Southern primaries), and have by and large supported center-right candidates that the party has tended to nominate since 1976. Compare the traction that Reagan’s candidacy got in 1976 to that garnered by Kennedy’s candidacy in 1980.

3) The story of the conservative movement post-1964 is a story, first, about a fight within the GOP. There’s simply no analogic situation for Democrats today. It’s not just kos and the “netroots” crowd who have not joined in a similar ideological fight within the Democratic Party. There is no such fight going on. If anything self-identified progressive campaigns go out of their way to emphasize their loyalty to the current direction of the party. Yesterday, for example, I heard a report on NPR about the Pennsylvania Senate primary. A representative from one of the two progressive candidates’ campaigns emphasized that part of the point of their campaign was to make progressives feel that they’d had a say in the race, so that they would then feel more comfortable supporting the anti-choice Bob Casey, who’s the likely Democratic nominee, come November. Nearly everyone in the Democratic Party is more invested in covering up ideological differences within the party (or suggesting those differences are a strength), than in bringing them to a head and insisting on their resolution in favor of one side or the other.

4) Since at least the mid-1980s (and arguably since 1972) the center-right of the Democratic Party has understood that it will have a hard time convincing the grassroots of the party of the merits of its positions. So it has tended to couch its arguments in terms of electability. As a result, the last thirty or so years of internal Democratic politics has been dominated not by a discussion of ideology and policy, but rather by a discussion of electoral strategy. Kos and company are very much in this tradition. And it makes them fundamentally unlike movement conservatives of either the 1960s or today.

I don’t think anything Perlstein describes is reproducible, as Joel Turnipseed observes above. What is important for the Democrats is to not be seduced by casual dismissals or callow summaries of the Republican base, and to look carefully at the historical roots of post-Goldwater conservatism for signs of deep structural stress or contradiction in the coalition the Republicans eventually assembled under Reagan.

Yes on both counts. More on the substantive issues later …