Beautiful Losers: What’s the Matter with Democrats?
It’s that time again, isn’t it—and, really, when is it not?—when liberals of all stripes and hews gather round the table and ask themselves that perennial question: How’d it all go so wrong? Two years ago Barack Obama swept into office riding the “Yes, we can!” wave. Well, the tide has turned: “No, we can’t!” “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is still in place. Bush-era tax cuts for the rich are extended. Joblessness in America is close to ten percent. Indeed, how did it all go so wrong?
Politicians and pundits will have their say. Few seem to have the right answer. Time for a throwback to another era—one that many thought had ended when Obama took office. I put great stock in what Ellen Willis says in an essay entitled, “Escape From Freedom: What’s the Matter with Thomas Frank (And the Lefties Who Love him)?” Frank, in his book, What’s the Matter with Kansas?, attributes Democrats’ political woes to their inability to provide economic security to average Americans and thereby stave off a “culture war” with the religious right.
Willis, smartly, doesn’t buy this line of reasoning. She died in 2006, but the main thrust of her essay is timeless: Democrats simply don’t want change bad enough. And while she didn’t live long enough to see Obama’s presidency, it’s not difficult to think how her words might apply to him, too. She writes:
If an ambivalent public hears only one side of a question, the conservative side, passionately argued—if people’s impulses to the contrary are never reinforced, and they perceive that the putative spokespeople for feminism and liberalism are actually uncomfortable about advancing their views—the passionate arguers will carry the day. Why would anyone support a movement that won’t stand behind its own program? But the left did not learn the obvious lesson—that to back away from fighting for your beliefs on the grounds that you have no hope of persuading people to share them is to perpetrate a self-fulfilling prophecy. On the contrary, the appeasers could see in their defeats only a confirmation of their pessimism. This scenario has been repeated countless times as the country has moved steadily to the right, yet it appears to have inspired no second thoughts. The stubborn failure to rethink a losing strategy can’t help but suggest that its proponents at some level do not really care to win.
Or maybe Obama and Democrats only care to lose. It’s a hypothesis that certainly makes sense in light of recent events. The trouble is that when Democrats lose, so do Americans, if not in the short-term then certainly in the long-term. Not such beautiful losers, after all.
