The Center Must Hold

You can’t always get what you want.*

As the midterm election cycle begins to heat up, the molecules of the Democratic Party are vibrating and gyrating with greater energy, and greater agitation. And the party’s principal source of agitation—its perennial question, really—is whether to hew to a set of progressive ideological principles or to tack to the center and capture those formerly reliable blue-collar voters who went for Trump in 2016.

There are strong arguments to be made for either strategy. The centrist argument values winning elections above all else, since a minority party is powerless to achieve any of its ideological goals in Congress—increasingly so in these hyper-partisan times. The purists point out that having a majority is of dubious value if the party is too fractured to vote as a coherent bloc.

I think the Left-Right dispute misses the point, at least partly. For one thing, these are midterm elections, in which candidates are vying to represent specific districts or states, each of which is characterized by a particular demographic mix and particular local or regional issues. And some are so gerrymandered that a candidate has to really customize his or her message to fit the interests of the local populace. For example, in pro-Trump Missouri, where I live, Democrat Claire McCaskill can’t keep her senate seat by championing transgender rights and reducing military spending.

But also, the traditional Left-Right continuum doesn’t conform to party demographics the way it once did. Sure, the Republicans are still the party of bankers and corporations, but they now hold sway over a large portion of the laboring class as well—and have gotten many of them to reject unions. Meanwhile, the Democrats are the darlings of the new economy—media, entertainment, Silicon Valley—and thus have become associated with glitz, fast money, and artificiality.

Still, the purist vs. big-tent problem is a real one, even though it is not a solely Left-Right one. It will create some bloody primary fights through the spring and summer. And while each candidate has to appeal to the state’s or district’s demographics and issues, I believe the Democrats have the advantage in many of the contested races—but only if they capture those centrist and independent voters. The good news is that the core values of the Democratic Party are well matched to the values of those voters.

The great majority of the voters in the great majority of districts:

• don’t like people being screwed by their bank or employer or insurer.
• want work to be rewarded.
• value education for their kids.
• want sensible gun control.
• would rather ignore what goes on in people’s bedrooms.
• want the U.S. to be respected internationally.
• value their privacy.
• want their government to be effective.
• want some sort of universal health care.
• want to believe the criminal justice system protects everyone.

 

How hard is this? Ignore the culture war issues that have divided the party and the country, since you won’t lose many of those voters to the Republicans. What reliable element of the Democratic base would be alienated by this platform? What LGBTQ, Black, Hispanic, female, blue-collar, intellectual, or immigrant voter would the party lose? And on the other hand, Republicans have in their actions and their words rejected every single one of these tenets, emphatically and repeatedly.

Finally, there’s another reason why Democrats should embrace these more fundamental core values of the party: to begin the restoration of orderly government. This is not the time to swing for the fences in hopes of getting everything we progressives have dreamed of. Such a victory would be a Pyrrhic one anyway, continuing and probably exacerbating the gridlock, division, and nastiness that have brought American politics to ruin.

We should keep in mind the Rule of the Stones: You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometime, you’ll find you get what you need.

* I still don’t understand how this song became Donald Trump’s campaign anthem, played during his introduction at every appearance. This has Cambridge Analytica’s fingerprints all over it.