What's The Product?

Kevin Drum has a good post up listing some successful liberal efforts at framing in the past. What struck me about the list was that both of his examples pertain to areas where liberals had some pretty clear, positive goals in mind. This latter bit, rather than any failing of framing, is, I think, what's really ailing liberalism. The main topic area where liberals are basically agreed amongst ourselves on a fairly clear goal is health care. There's a wide variety of programmatic and tactical disagreement, but at the middle level of analysis liberals think that all Americans should have health care and that the government should spend and/or regulate in necessary and proper ways to achieve this goal. And I don't think it's a surprise that health care is consistently the Democrats' strongest issue. At times, this very strength has become a source of trouble for the party, as in 2002 when there was an effort to make the election "all about" health care even though the dynamic in the real world essentially precluded that possibility. But where there's clarity, strength follows. Not because framing is irrelevant, but because when you've got a clear and reasonably compelling goal in mind, a good frame tends to follow over time, by trial and error if nothing else.

The problem is that in most other topic areas, I don't think liberals have this kind of clarity and consensus. I've written about this on the national security front several times but I think it generalizes. On education policy, all liberals want "good schools" but that's obviously far too generic a goal to build a compelling message around. At the programmatic level there's plenty of disagreement (about standardized tests, about various forms of school choice, etc.) but most damaging of all is the mid-range disagreement bordering on incoherence. What kinds of things do we want the school system to accomplish?

Part of the problem is that, as Kevin wrote in an earlier most, liberals have achieved most of what we set out to achieve when contemporary American liberalism (as distinct from both classical liberalism and socialism) began to take shape in the first half of the twentieth century. Health care is a major exception and, as a result, we maintain clarity and consensus. Gay equality isn't something we set out to achieve at the beginning, but it follows pretty logically from prior commitments, so liberals have a pretty clear consensus, and even though this isn't a great electoral issue at this point the trends have been going our way and almost certainly will continue to do so in the future.

This, at any rate, is what worries me a bit about the trend toward what Ruy Teixeira calls "newer Democrats". Like Ruy I'm glad to see the tiresome New Dem/Old Dem disputes calm down, and like Ruy (and an increasingly large number of people on both sides) I think it's vital not to engage in self-destruction intra-factional disputes while the demented New Model GOP wrecks the country. But at the same time, I think it's important to remain aware of the fact that such unity as exists is largely driven by fear and loathing of the other side rather than a positive agenda. Fear and loathing of the other side is, in my view, an excellent basis for a political coalition but it's not at all an excellent basis for expanding the size of a coalition. That requires appealing frames and that, in turn, requires you to have a rough, but real, agreement about what you're trying to do. Now if we fail to effectively combat the Republicans they may well dismantle enough of what previous generations of progressives have put in place to make it easier to think of forward-looking goals (since the more there is to accomplish, the easier it is to think of the proverbial "big ideas") but that would be a pretty crappy way to win elections.