Infrastructure envy

"Don't mourn--organize!" It's a classic battle cry of the progressive left, but it's also become a truism about the history of conservatism in America since Goldwater. After fronting an unabashedly conservative candidate and getting stomped by Johnson in 1964, goes the story, the Republicans dug in for the long haul, to move the country right.

Here's former Senator and Democratic presidential candidate Bill Bradley re-telling the story in the NYTimes:

As part of this effort, they turned to Lewis Powell, then a corporate lawyer and soon to become a member of the United States Supreme Court. In 1971 he wrote a landmark memo for the United States Chamber of Commerce in which he advocated a sweeping, coordinated and long-term effort to spread conservative ideas on college campuses, in academic journals and in the news media.

To further the party's ideological and political goals, Republicans in the 1970's and 1980's built a comprehensive structure based on Powell's blueprint. Visualize that structure as a pyramid.

You've probably heard some of this before, but let me run through it again. Big individual donors and large foundations - the Scaife family and Olin foundations, for instance - form the base of the pyramid. They finance conservative research centers like the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, entities that make up the second level of the pyramid.

The ideas these organizations develop are then pushed up to the third level of the pyramid - the political level. There, strategists like Karl Rove or Ralph Reed or Ken Mehlman take these new ideas and, through polling, focus groups and careful attention to Democratic attacks, convert them into language that will appeal to the broadest electorate. That language is sometimes in the form of an assault on Democrats and at other times in the form of advocacy for a new policy position. The development process can take years. And then there's the fourth level of the pyramid: the partisan news media. Conservative commentators and networks spread these finely honed ideas.

At the very top of the pyramid you'll find the president. Because the pyramid is stable, all you have to do is put a different top on it and it works fine.

Democrats, as has become painfully obvious in the last dozen years, have no such structure--are years from having such a structure. The result, says Bradley:

Democrats who run for president have to build their own pyramids all by themselves. There is no coherent, larger structure that they can rely on. Unlike Republicans, they don't simply have to assemble a campaign apparatus - they have to formulate ideas and a vision, too. Many Democratic fundraisers join a campaign only after assessing how well it has done in assembling its pyramid of political, media and idea people.

There is no clearly identifiable funding base for Democratic policy organizations, and in the frantic campaign rush there is no time for patient, long-term development of new ideas or of new ways to sell old ideas. Campaigns don't start thinking about a Democratic brand until halfway through the election year, by which time winning the daily news cycle takes precedence over building a consistent message. The closest that Democrats get to a brand is a catchy slogan.

Now you can take it any of several directions from here. Bradley argues for the obvious course: Start today, getting the money and creating the infrastructure, building the stable long-term organization.

This is path the Dems go down with some frequency -- if it helped the Republicans hand us our heads at the last election, shouldn't we be doing it next time?

But Matthew Yglesias objects that, for all of its evident electoral success in the last decade, the conservatives' machine hasn't accomplished much of the ideological work it was created to perform. In fact, in many ways, and despite the Bush administration's campaign to phase out Social Security (currently floundering), the policies and programs that conservatives abhor have advanced as much under conservative administrations as liberal ones in the last three decades:

[...] it's really not the case that the Goldwater Republicans "didn't try to become Democrats" after losing in 1964. Goldwater ran on a platform of eliminating Social Security, opposing the Civil Rights Act, opposing the creation of Medicare and Medicaid, and opposing a federal role in education finance. By the time Ronald Reagan brought the conservative movement to power in 1981 he had abandoned all of those planks and also had to accept the existence of the EPA and various other innovations of the 1970s. What he did once in power was basically scale back to some extent programs that didn't even exist when Goldwater ran.

The Bush administration, obviously, has returned to Social Security phase-out, but this looks more like an instance of the right shooting itself in the foot than deploying its infrastructure to good effect. He's expanded Medicare, and needed to accept various expansions of Medicaid, the creation of SCHIP, and other Clinton-era boosts in public-sector health care. The environment is less well-regulated than it was in 2000, but much better protected than it was in 1993. The federal government spends more money than ever on public schools for poor kids.

"Assuming that liberals don't just want to build an infrastructure so that Democrats can govern in corrupt, power-for-power's-sake, GOP style," concludes Yglesias,

there are real limits to how much you want to imitate their methods. The past 30 years of right-wing infrastructure have served the financial interests of their financiers very, very, very well but they've achieved remarkably little in terms of advancing core ideological principles.

And Kevin Drum takes it the rest of the way: Not only are there moral and ideological problems with building a conservative-style machine, there's a case to be made that the idea has political and strategic problems as well:

The Democratic response to all this has been simple: build foundations of our own, fashion a competing liberal way of framing issues, fight back on judges, create liberal talk shows, and remind lobbyists that Republicans won't be in power forever. Which is all fine. But in a way, I think it misses the point.

What conservatives really did was to exploit new levers of power in ways that no one had thought of before. Their answers turned out to be foundations, language, judges, talk radio, and lobbyists, but there's nothing sacred about those particular levers. So while creating our own foundations and talk shows is important, what's more important is that we should be constantly searching for new and underappreciated levers of power and figuring out creative ways to exploit them. Howard Dean's campaign did this in a minor way with its use of internet MeetUps, a new way of organizing grassroots support that took everyone by surprise.

Merely mimicking conservative strategies is a strategy for staying in second place forever. Closer, perhaps, but still in second place. What we need in addition is to stay relentlessly on the lookout for new ways of mobilizing public opinion that no one has thought of before.

Building a long-term financial, intellectual, and media base is important, of course. But there's considerable evidence that slavishly imitating the GOP example invites ideological and political trouble down the road.

Nor should the Democrats get so caught up in infrastructure envy that they miss obvious bets on the table right in front of them, right now. Here are three, at no charge:

• Bush has hitched the Republicans to the ever-more-unpopular plan to phase out Social Security--one of the most expensive, popular, efficient, and successful programs the government has ever produced. It's a simple message to staple to the Republicans' foreheads at every opportunity: Bush and his team want to take your retirement safety away from you. And from your children and grandchildren. Mr. Bush, why do you hate our grandchildren?

• The congressional Republicans overreached beyond anyone's wildest dreams in their involvement with the Terri Schiavo affair. As a result, approval ratings of the congress, and Bush, have sunk to historic lows. By the fact of their involvement as much as the way they handled it, they have painted themselves as hypocritical opportunists who consider themselves politically beholden to the most radically conservative Christian segment of their party. If the evident public disgust at this performance doesn't embolden Senate Democrats during the upcoming judicial nominations, what will?

• DeLay, already in the public eye as the proud architect of the Schiavo debacle, is also about to become much more--the poster boy for corruption and abuse of the system, as Texas grand juries steadily crank out indictments of his closest circle of aids, protégés, and partners. The trail of indictments is leading straight to DeLay, every one knows it, and the Democrats don't need a huge ideological infrastructure to remind everyone that he stands for everything that is wrong with Republican leadership today.

What these are, of course, are straightforward messages hanging on straightforward liberal/progressive values and history. It's not that hard, fellas.