OPINION

BRUMMETT ONLINE: Liberalism's slow fade

Liberalism never amounted to much in Arkansas. The state's most-noted left-of-center politicians--Bill Clinton, Dale Bumpers, David Pryor--finessed liberalism with cults of personality.

They thrived from the state's post-1957 interest in modernizing the economy, moderating the politics and presenting a better image, not from any interest in traditional liberalism as reflected in Bumpers' and Pryor's voting records and Clinton's rise to the White House.

Our rural state's populism of poor people's advocacy and resentment of powerful institutions was grounded more in conservatism than liberalism. It also was infected by racism in that the poor people's advocacy was mainly by and for white folks.

All of that is to say that, when the soft underpinning of liberalism in Arkansas began to give way, the collapse was instant and vast.

Today liberalism in Arkansas is reduced to several streets in Little Rock and Fayetteville.

Columnist Ross Douthat in The New York Times helped me see Sunday that, at long last, Arkansas leads a modern trend. Liberalism is losing ground everywhere--Australia, India, Europe--to nationalism and conservative populism and, as Douthat explains well, strategic and tactical ineptitude.

Douthat's essay pointed out that liberalism actually is stronger in the United States than most other places. That's because the identity groups within our society compile a majority, or at least a leading plurality. It's also stronger because Donald Trump doesn't have enough sense to behave himself and reap the political benefit he ought to get from a thriving economy.

But Douthat says American liberalism is lured into a false sense of optimism by that plurality and the Trump excuse--and by its reliance on the fair point that it has the numbers, but the conservatives are winning only institutionally, primarily by the electoral college.

Mainly, Douthat explains that liberalism's numerical advantage is anemic and shallow and can't easily hold together.

He quotes interesting Democratic Party data showing that, on nine major issues, considered individually, American majorities choose left-of center positions on each, but that the percentage of those supporting all nine crashes to 18 percent.

Democrats lose a few at each pairing--on the economy and immigration or climate change, most clearly, but also on guns or gay rights or abortion or taxes or more government-centric health insurance--particularly when the Republicans, with their dark-money groups and agents at Fox News, do a good job exploiting the weak links.

Douthat writes--and I have long believed this to be so--that Democrats invite failure when they insist on running on all the sub-group advantages in the thought that the broad composite will prevail.

That happened twice but was special. That was Barack Obama, hope and change, and super-charged excitement.

Bill Clinton won first because Ross Perot took George H.W. Bush's votes and won the second time because Bob Dole just didn't have it.

Hillary Clinton got millions more votes than Bill. But we know what happened there. Iowa, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, states that Bill won by Republican weakness and Barack won by hope and change, saw their Democratic coalition break at the pressure points. Mainly that happened where climate change met the economy, though cultural issues like abortion and same-sex marriage, as well as guns, played a part.

Douthat faults Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for advancing an unabashed quasi-socialist counter to Trumpism. He also faults Pete Buttigieg for contending that there is a thoughtful and carefully explained way to encapsulate all these left-of-center values into singular appeal.

I agree about Ocasio-Cortez, but believe Buttigieg's fault is merely being ahead of his time. What he is saying will bear out in 10 or 20 years through reason and generational advancement.

But, for the time being and the immediate task, liberals must refine, prioritize, focus and compromise.

They must arrive at three or four non-contradicting priority issues--my best nominations being health insurance reform, higher education cost relief, infrastructure and picking out the Dreamers as a focused immigration reform priority.

The cultural issues such as abortion and gay rights aren't negotiable, which means you don't talk about them unless asked.

But guns, climate change, taxes, trade, and immigration more broadly--all at least as moral and vital as the others ... you don't believe in those any less, but you run on them a lot less.

It's better to address them in time--as the fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth initiatives of an otherwise successful administration--than to live with a second term of the current madness.

That's why stovetops have back burners. What's simmering back there will taste good. It's just on a different timer.

John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Web only on 05/29/2019

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