"Republicans fear their base, Dems hate their base…" do we see this here? [View all]

[nashville_brook]

Interesting bloggy post here from The American Prospect, which has gotten amazingly good lately.

We wonder a lot why "the center" has moved so far to the right, and this might be the reason: Dems tend to shut down their activists (the NSA/Snowden/Greenwald debate is evidence of this) before a left-ward drift is allowed to take hold. As the author here observes, at the local Dem Executive Committee level it's considered naive to bring (some) national politics into focus. There's clear, bright lines of who is "inside" and who is "outside," and never the twain shall meet.

Just wondering if you recognize any of this analysis -- either locally or in national forum environments. Do you think we'd be better off with a stronger "think national vote local" voice in our party?




The Politics of Polarization: Not as Simple as They Seem

http://prospect.org/article/politics-polarization-not-simple-they-seem


(snip)

Political scientist Hans Noel, fresh from a conference on polarization, reports that his colleagues may be paying too much attention to the relationship between voters and legislators, and not enough to activists, since the activists are the ones who exercise real influence over what politicians see, perceive, and understand:

Members of Congress are not polarized because voters are now better sorted. And voters are not polarized simply because legislators now are. The missing piece is ideological activists, who now dominate the political parties. In short, policy demanders. These politically engaged activists are the base that legislators are increasingly playing to, because they are the ones who provide campaign resources and who threaten primary challenges. Their polarization also filters to voters, through elected officials but also through the media and informal networks.

One thing that Noel doesn't mention is that the relationship between politicians and those “policy demanders” is profoundly different for Republicans than it is for Democrats. You may have heard the saying that Republican elected officials fear their base, while Democratic elected officials hate their base. The latter part may be a bit of an exaggeration, but there's a fundamental truth there. The problem left activists have is that they haven't been able to make Democrats fear them—or perhaps it would be more accurate to say they haven't really tried, at least not in the way right activists do.

(snip)


Conservative activists think nationally and act locally...And it's pretty effective—if they can become a giant pain in the House Majority Leader's behind, keeping him always looking over his shoulder to make sure he's not making the activists in his district angry, they will have exercised a substantial amount of leverage for a small group of ordinary citizens.

But when liberal activists act locally, their focus is usually on local things. There are issues they care about in their town or in their state, and they organize around those issues. Maybe it's an environmental effort, or passing a minimum wage increase or marriage equality. What they don't do as much is use their local activism as part of a nationally-focused effort to control the Democratic party's ideological tilt. There are all kinds of progressives doing all kinds of progressive activism in all kinds of places. But if you're the Democratic equivalent of Eric Cantor—let's say Chris Van Hollen, the congressman from liberal Montgomery County, Maryland, who is close to Nancy Pelosi—nobody's showing up at your town meetings to heckle you for not being liberal enough, or pushing out your candidate for the local Democratic committee. You're not feeling that pressure.

For liberals, is that lack of grassroots pressure good or bad? I'm not really sure. But the difference in how the two sides' activists behave is one of the major reasons we have the kind of polarization we do.