Democrats Must Become republicans

"The old liberalism got America out of depression, won the war against fascism, built the middle class, created global alliances, and made education and health care far closer to universal than they had ever been. But there were things it did not do; its conception of the common good was narrow--completely unacceptable, in fact, to us today. Japanese Americans during World War II and African Americans pretty much ever were not part of that common good; women were only partially included. Because of lack of leadership and political expediency (Roosevelt needing the South, for example), this liberalism had betrayed liberal principle and failed millions of Americans. Something had to give.
"At first, some Democrats--Johnson and Humphrey, for example, and even some Republicans back then--tried to expand the American community to include those who had been left behind. But the political process takes time, and compromise; young people and black people and poor people were impatient, and who could blame them? By 1965, ’66, ’67, the old liberalism’s failures, both domestically and in Vietnam, were so apparent as to be crushing. A new generation exposed this 'common good' as nothing more than a lie to keep power functioning, so as not to disturb the 'comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom' that Herbert Marcuse described in 1964 in one of the more memorable phrases of the day. Activists at the time were convinced--and they were not particularly wrong--that the old liberalism, far from nurturing a civic sphere in which all could deliberate and whose bounty all could enjoy, had created this unfreedom. The only response was to shatter it."

In an important article in The American Prospect, Michael Tomasky diagnoses the problem and offers a prescription.


"So would liberals be willing to go whole hog? At the very least, they'd probably be willing to embrace common-good type appeals when it comes to economics--things like healthcare and the minimum wage. They'd probably also unite behind a common-good approach to certain social issues like immigration and affirmative action (e.g., the argument that we all benefit from immigration, not just immigrants), both of which Tomasky discusses. In each of these cases, the challenge is to rethink the rationale behind policies liberals already support, not to rethink the policies themselves. But what about stickier social issues, where a common-good approach might lead you in a substantively different direction? (To say nothing about foreign policy, which is an entirely separate can of worms.) Would liberals get on board with that? My hunch is no."

In The New Republic, Noam Scheiber points to problems for the Democrats in emphasizing communitarianism over libertarianism.