The New Democrats

There is an article in the Guardian that got me thinking about what the Dems need to do to begin thinking like a ruling party again, a party that considers the best interests of all of its citizens.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/midterms2006/story/0,,1944311,00.html

I think the Dems (and the centre left parties in Canada too, incidently, so I’m really thinking about the trends in both countries) slipped into a special issue type mentality in recent years, and perhaps even recent decades. As a result I think they’ve slipped into rut defined by comfortable old rhetoric and entrenched, and now dated, positions. These used to be the forward thinking, progressive, parties, and I think they need to become that again if they are going to win the hearts and minds of enough citizens to become a strong governing party again. So, like with most progressive thinking, I think what’s needed is for them to start looking objectively at both sides of these entrenched issues and finding the elements on each side that have merit and then synthesizing a new progressive understanding of the problem and its solution.

Here are a couple of examples I propose. The Dems have always thought of themselves as the human rights party, correct? That’s a noble principle that should be held on to, but our understanding as a society of what constitutes human rights changes as our society changes. Women were quite restricted and oppressed for much of the last century initially due, at least to a significant extent, to the practical limitations of the lack of effective contraception and the importance of physical labour in the society of the day. Later it become more the old established altitudes toward women that were the barriers, and liberals became active in breaking them down and achieving more rights for women. Part of this was the issue of reproductive rights. Fast forward to the 21st century and the gains that women have made are great and should be loudly applauded, but a problem area has arisen as well that needs a second look. The problem is around the issue of abortion, and the crux of that problem is the growing awareness that at the point of conception a new human life has been created that if left to natural processes with either be born a live human being or die in the womb of natural causes. So while the fight for equal rights for women was and is laudable, I think there is now a general understanding amongst the public that the abortion issue doesn’t fit nicely under that category, because the life of another human being is clearly at stake as well. The two lives are clearly tied together so the issues is not easy, but a party or a person who fancies themselves as a defender of human rights can’t legitimately just brush off the fundamental rights of a certain group of humans. This is one of the areas where the Dems clearly need to do some forward thinking.

Another, I suggest, is around the issue of gay marriage, and it is also human rights related but looks at a different aspect of it. Liberals have traditionally been the group that respected minorities and their cultures. They condemned the right wingers who scoffed at the first nations people and called their culture backward, for example, and they stuck up for the rights of minorities to be able keep their own cultural practices and have them respected. Fast forward to the 21st century and we see that there is a cultural group that has had a certain tradition that dates back hundreds if not thousands of years. The tradition involves a certain kind of relationship defined by a certain word, and yet we see many liberals trying to take that word away from them and redefine it to suit themselves. That’s the kind of thing the conservatives of last century may well have tried to do to break a minority culture. There are several sides at least to this issue but I think the majority on one side don’t care very much if at all about rights being given to same sex couples. They just care about what they perceive as an attack on their centuries old cultural tradition called marriage which is defined as a union between a man and a woman. On the other side I think most are most interested in legal rights being grated to same sex couples. I’ve heard many people say that they don’t care if it’s called marriage or not, and why would they? Unfortunately there is group within the liberal movements on both sides of the boarder that is essentially launching a cultural attack on the concept of marriage that would make the right wing, culturally intolerant, bigots of the last century proud. What is the point of bullying and kicking sand in the faces of the little old ladies and men who only want the right to their own cultural traditions? I think it’s an ill thought out reaction. I think some people have become so narrow in their focus that they’ve lost sight of the rights of another group in society. If all you stand for is the rights of your group and the people who are your friends then you are a traditional conservative, not a liberal. This is another area where the Dems need to do some serious forward thinking.

There are others I can think of, but let’s see how this goes first.

 

I agree with most of this, but I think it’s more about progressive thinking than about moving to centre, if you get my point. I think it’s about moving forward, about dealing with issues in 21st century context, not a 20th century context. Having another look at abortion and gay marriage doesn’t mean that one is moving to the right. I think it’s about realigning policies with core values in a new context. We don’t live in the 1960s or the 1970s or the 1980s anymore. This is the 2000s now. If liberals stay stuck in the old entrenched positions that were developed then and that are now out of step even with their original underlying values, then liberals will continue to marginalise themselves. The right, as purely self-interested as much of it is, has in may ways been more progressive on some of these issues than many liberals, and that’s how it captured the votes of a good slice of the middle. It’s easy to stay stuck in old, well worn in, positions, but the price of doing that will be handing power back to the conservatives, imo. It’s harder work to open up some old issues and take a serious look at them, and to so the work to seriously grapple with new ones, but I believe that’s what it’s going to take if the liberals want to be leaders again. The door is wide open. The corruption and incompetence and lack of vision of the neocons has them at death’s door, but if there’s nothing of value to replace them people could turn back to them. I think liberals today need to think of themselves as being part of a new movement that is grappling with issues anew and having open discussions and coming up with a new vision for what we want our new, global, 21st century society to look like.

 

And that’s where a stand has to be taken. To some extent a break has been made on both sides of the boarder with respect to ties with unions, I believe. I’m certainly not against unions in principle, but many of them have needed serious reform as well, and their relationship to the Dems and the liberal parties in Canada was too close and became an anchor that perhaps held both sides back.