I have been thinking a lot lately about how doomed the Democratic Party is, and how little I care about it as an institution. Even now, as they use this week’s bully pulpit to make the best pitch they can muster, they are still trying to recruit support from some phantom “middle,” and mostly giving the finger to their base. Not only is this a losing strategy, it’s one without a soul. And that’s why I think the DP is going to die, and why I kind of look forward to it’s inevitable demise.
I know this will create an unpleasant power vacuum on the left, not to mention in congress, but the fact is there are many national groups who I think see this disaster on the horizon, and they’re rising to the challenge. Or at the very least, they are gaining the loyalty of the progressive base by working to beat Bush and simultaneously building powerful grassroots political organizations.
For more about this, here’s a really great article by a “small-l libertarian Republican”about “the organizational revolution taking place among Democrat-friendly interest groups”:
The future of party politics?
…both in this electoral cycle and in their plans for creating an idea machine, these organizations aren’t talking about appealing to centrist voters — if anything, there’s a disdain for the Clintonite policies of the nineties. The goal in the short-term is to motivate those latent voters symapthetic to a liberal/progressive agenda. The goal in the long term is to generate the ideas that will pull the country in a leftward direction.