Will Marshall argues that instead of bashing conservatives, Democrats should “Raid the Red Zone,” which is the title of his article in the premiere issue of The Democratic Strategist. With the GOP collapsing due to its own ineptitude, now is the time.
How to seize the opportunity? There are basically two choices. One, favored by many liberals and lefty bloggers, sees partisan belligerence as the key to mobilizing a Democratic majority. The idea is that by intensifying attacks on our opponents, we can galvanize the party faithful while also projecting the strength of conviction that swing voters have supposedly found lacking among Democrats.
But this approach is based more on wishful thinking than rigorous electoral analysis. The party’s core problem is not a pandemic of cowardice among its leaders, it is that there are not enough Democratic voters. Since the late 1990s, Democrats have been stuck at about 48 percent of the vote in national elections. Moreover, polarizing the electorate along ideological lines plays into Karl Rove’s hands because conservatives outnumber liberals three to two. Democrats need to win moderates by large margins, but moderates by definition resist strident partisanship and ideological litmus tests. The politics of polarization repels them.
To successfully raid the political red zone – the South, Mountain West, Great Plains and lower Midwest – Democrats instead need a politics of persuasion. It starts by acknowledging that moderates and independents have substantive reasons for swinging Republican in recent elections, including persistent doubts about Democrats on security, taxes and the role of government, as well as moral questions.
We start by addressing the moral issue head on. We need to acknowledge that there are moral problems. Many corporations are corrupt. Half of all marriages end in divorce. Millions of children live with only one parent. These are moral issues. And our media and public discourse is, well, course.
…[C]consider the proliferating number of alternative platforms for foul language and coarse content: video games played on Xboxes and GameCubes and PlayStations; music downloaded to iPods and other MP3 players; and — most vexing of all — the array of opportunities for mischief on the Internet, from click-to-view pornography to chat rooms to social-networking sites.
All of which adds up to a need for a national discussion about solutions — what part legislative or regulatory, what part old-fashioned parenting combined with 21st-century techno-savvy?
I’ve maintained for some time that Democrats need to take on Hollywood. Anyone has the right to produce misogynist music, salacious sitcoms and morally relativistic reality shows. And the industries that make money off them have a right to do so. But that doesn’t make it right. And it doesn’t excuse Democrats from bowing at Hollywood’s altar with their hands out.
Marshall cites the work of Barbara Whitehead, the Co-Director of the National Marriage Project.
Parents have a beef with the popular culture. As they see it, the culture is getting ever more violent, materialistic, and misogynistic, and they are losing their ability to protect their kids from morally corrosive images and messages. To be credible, Democrats must acknowledge the legitimacy of parents’ beef and make it unmistakably clear that they are on parents’ side.
Marshall continues.
Whitehead advises Democrats to begin simply by honoring the vital work parents do in teaching their kids right from wrong. We should also equip parents with better tools to shield their kids from the onslaught of the consumer culture and aggressive corporate marketing campaigns. And there is no good reason for progressives to exempt the entertainment industry from the same kind of accountability we demand from corporations in general (emphasis added).
V-Chips and web blocking software only go so far. Clamp down hard enough on your kids at home and guess what? They hang out at their friends’ homes. You can’t shield kids from media’s blasts. But you can demand accountability and boycott the business that advertise alongside questionable programming.