Adam Clymer has an article

in today’s New York Times about the Democrats’ search for a

broad and coherent message. The party is a coalition of disparate,

often antagonistic interest groups, according to this article—not

a movement inspired by coherent principles. The Republican pollster Ed

Goeas made the same charge at a public event I attended recently.

Democrats have had this problem for over a century: they used to be a

completely incoherent coalition composed of liberals, Northern white ethnics,

and Southern segregationists. The New Deal was much criticized for lacking

principle and merely representing the aggregation of these groups’ demands.

From that period until the 1990s, the Democrats consistently held a national

majority and controlled the House. This situation prolonged their reliance

on coalition politics—for two reasons. First, since they had a majority,

their leaders didn’t have to develop a broad, coherent agenda to win.

Instead, they tended to fight over the spoils of their regular victories.

Second, the House (with its 435 independently elected members) teaches

and rewards coalition politics, whereas the presidency is usually the

source of broad ideas.

In my view, the historic character of Democrats as a coalition party

was not a serious impediment until a separate phenomenon developed: the

intellectual collapse of the left. Conservatives

win elections, I believe, not because they cheat (that is, spend more

money, or get more support in the media), nor because they are better

than liberals at communicating their message. They win because they have

broad, coherent principles, which boil down to this: "Families use

their discretionary income to buy things that make them happy, to exercise

their freedom, and to enrich their spiritual lives if they so choose.

Therefore, we should maximize the aggregate disposable income of American

families. Government does not create income and tends to waste it, so

its size should be minimized."

The left has a set of cogent criticisms of this position. Contrary to

what conservatives say: (a) Government does create wealth by providing

necessary public goods such as universal education, research, and transportation.

(b) Maximizing aggregate wealth is not an adequate goal, because we can

achieve that end by making the rich much richer while leaving the poor

where they are—and this does not increase happiness or freedom. (c)

We should care about the prosperity of future generations, not about short-term

growth, and therefore we should not cut taxes if this will increase the

deficit. (d) All wealth circulates through households, but it most of

it also passes through corporations. Large firms have great power and

are not accountable to citizens unless regulated by the state. (e) Maximizing

aggregate wealth is not sustainable, because human consumption degrades

the environment. (f) Maximizing aggregate wealth is incompatible with

preserving traditional human cultures and cultural diversity. (g) Maximizing

disposable income should not be our only goal; we should also be concerned

about how safe, available, and rewarding work is. (h) Private goods

are not the only important things; nature, science, and art also matter,

and they require public support. (i) Unregulated capitalism is not meritocratic:

over time, it creates a class of wealthy and lazy heirs.

These are sensible criticisms, but they are somewhat at odds with each

other, and each appeals to a different set of Democratic constituencies.

Moreover, Democrats cannot conceal their differences by uniting in support

of a concrete national policy. Despite their criticisms of conservatism,

they do not believe in the traditional mechanisms for generating equity,

sustainability, safety, and the other progressive goods. Above all, they

do not believe in centralized state bureaucracies. Thus they fight fairly

half-heartedly in defense of traditional institutions, from public schools

to unions to the EPA, while failing to articulate a coherent, principled

message. And this is why they lose. In short, the problem is intellectual-ideological,

not merely tactical, and thus it will not disappear soon.

When I spoke a few weeks ago at Berkeley, Philip

Selznick made an interesting point about the value of commercial

firms that are not profit-maximizers. As he noted, the genteel old

publishing houses needed to cover their costs, and probably wanted to

make a comfortable profit, but they were at least as committed to producing

public goods in the form of high-quality literature. By contrast, a publicly

traded firm must maximize profits, so if it generates public goods, they

come as unintentional collateral benefits (at best). My friend Harry

Boyte has promoted a whole philosophy of "public work,"

which prizes the ability of every citizen to generate public goods, often

in collaboration with others. One hallmark of public work, it seems to

me, is an intentional focus on public benefits. That is what is

missing in profit-maximizing firms, but it’s very evident in certain less

economically efficient private enterprises. Boyte’s schema is useful,

in part, because it allows us to reshuffle the traditional categories

of state/market/civil society. Public work can take place in any of these

sectors, or it can be absent or suppressed in any of them. For example,

if a state apparatus becomes heavily bureaucratic and rigid, then civil

servants will stop performing public work. Likewise, if traditional publishing

houses are bought by international conglomerates that relentlessly aim

at efficiency, then their editors must cease to do public work. (Obviously,

I owe an argument here about why public work is valuable. In brief, I

think there are objective benefits to the community and subjective or

psychological benefits to public workers.)

I attended a meeting of a committee of the American Bar Association today.

There was a panel on civil liberties after September 11. Civil

liberties are not a core interest of mine, although listening to professional

advocates and litigators always scares me, since their job is to tell

us about the egregious cases that do arise. The experts on the panel today

pointed out four worrying trends that I hadn’t fully understood before:

1. The material witness statute was designed to allow the government

   to hold witnesses who might be expected to disappear, until such a time

   as they could be deposed. Since 9/11, it is being used to hold people

   indefinitely without any claim that they witnessed any specific crime,

   and without notice that they will be deposed or otherwise interviewed.

2. Search warrants are traditionally executed in the presence of the

   person being searched. This is a safeguard, since the person can complain

   if his rights are violated, if the police are in the wrong house, etc.

   But under the Patriot Act, federal agents can execute "sneak and

   peek" warrants that are clandestine searches never disclosed to

   the person whose property is searched. This power applies to all cases,

   not just those connected to terrorism.

3. The proposal for TIPS (Terrorism Information and Prevention System)

   would have enlisted huge numbers of volunteers, including cable-TV installers

   and others who routinely enter our homes, as a source of tips on possible

   terrorists. This program would have promoted volunteerism; but it would

   also have undermined the fourth amendment.

4. Just yesterday (or so I was told), legislation passed Congress that

   will require judges to notify the Attorney General whenever they use

   discretion to impose sentences lower than the minimum recommended in

   federal sentencing guidelines. The three federal judges who were in

   attendance today are certain that this will have the proverbial "chilling

   effect," since judges will be afraid of public exposure and censure

   by John Ashcroft. I would hope that federal judges would have backbones.

   We give them life tenure as well as nice salaries and high social status,

   so they should be willing to stand up to criticism from the political

   branches of government. However, hope is not a good basis for legislation.

   The judges in attendance predicted that their colleagues will fear criticism.

   They are probably right, which means that the legislation is a blow

   to judicial independence.

My article on "The

Legitimacy of Labor Unions," which originally appeared in The Hofstra Labor

and Employment Law Journal, is going to be translated into Chinese

for the Global Law Review, a quarterly law journal published by

the Institute of Law of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. I’m excited

because an argument in favor of unions is especially important in a country

where the right to unionize is barely recognized.

Here’s a quote to make you angry. According to an article

in the New York Times, after a White House meeting on the Bush

economic plan, "Lizann Sonders, the chief investment strategist

at Charles Schwab & Company, said the tax cut is ‘the answer to the

economy, is the answer to the stock market and maybe most importantly

it’s the answer to bringing back trust and fairness and faith in the system.’"

So a representative of a profession that has squandered public trust has

the gall to say that "trust and fairness and faith" can be restored

by granting her industry a massive tax break that would necessitate deep

cuts in programs benefitting the poor and disadvantaged.

I spent almost all of today at a good Democracy

Collaborative conference on "engaged," or "collaborative,"

or "community-based" research (i.e., research in which academics

and members of a community work together, at least to frame a common research

agenda and sometimes to conduct the whole project.) There was a lot of

talk about potential research involving University of Maryland faculty

in our own community, Prince George’s County, although many of the speakers

came from elsewhere. (One of the best was Gary Cunningham, who runs the

Hennepin

County African American Men Project in and around Minneapolis, MN.)

I was generally impressed and inspired, although a couple of worries stick

with me.

First, this was the kind of conference in which everyone quickly feels

comfortable with one another and starts to talk as "we." For

example: "We need to convince young people to work in the World Bank,

so that they can bring our perspective inside that place." But no

one ever exactly says what defines "us." I suspect this is partly

because everyone in the room is on the left, and that’s their most fundamental

identity. That’s why they all feel confortable with one another. But the

agenda and purpose of the meeting are officially non-partisan and non-ideological:

we’re supposed to be talking about research in partnership with communities.

The fact that everyone is on the left is an unacknowledged but crucial

fact.

Second, one graduate student gave a presentation on an extremely disadvantaged

group that she had studied. No one asked the kind of questions that would

routinely arise after a presentation at a regular academic event. For

example, individuals had volunteered to participate in her focus groups,

and no one asked whether these volunteers were representative of the whole

population being studied. Also, many of the individuals claimed to have

given up drugs, but no one asked whether this claim was tested or credible.

I wondered why these questions didn’t come up. (I didn’t ask them, either).

Here are three guesses:

• She made a good presentation about a terribly oppressed group, and

  everyone was moved and sympathetic and didn’t want to appear skeptical

  in any respect. or

• People who do action-research are not primed to think about such matters

  as the representativeness of their samples. or

• This was a middle-aged, female, African American graduate student

  and no one wanted to ask the tough questions that they would naturally

  pose of a young, white student who was starting on the standard academic

  career path.

If the last hypothesis is true, than I worry about what one of my least

favorite presidents calls "the soft bigotry of low expectations."

In other words, I hope we are not afraid to ask tough questions of middle-aged,

black, female graduate students because we think that they will be unable

to answer effectively.