I know it’s a little immodest for me to offer a history lesson—for those of you who don’t know, I’m twelve years old —but I want to stop Conor from buying into a liberal version of history that’s just wrong. He links approvingly to this piece by Tim Fernholz:
. . . people on the left, especially during the dark days of the early oughts, and, historically, in the eighties with the New Democrats, have shown a willingness to say, "Whoa, something isn’t working here." Sometimes that took the form of saying that liberals need to be more pragmatic, more conservative, etc., and sometimes it took the form of people calling for a return to and revitalization of core progressive principles. Obama certainly has borrowed from both of these exercises in redefinition: He’s pragmatic in many respects, shading toward conservative in his understanding of family and faith, but also has made forthright defenses of liberal ideas on civil rights and investment.I have it on good authority that liberal circles spent the late nineties and early oughts buzzing with envy of conservative "ideas." We had ‘em, and they didn’t; the left had no new ideas to offer the American people, and that’s why they were losing! Unsurprisingly, plenty of liberals rejected this narrative. No, they said, Republican are winning because they have talented strategists who are extremely adept at manipulating middle- and lower-class anxieties into electoral success.
But I, for one, would like to see a better conservative opposition, if only because I’d rather spend my days arguing about policy than trying to convince readers that liberal political candidates aren’t terrorist sympathizers. Maybe this is simply a symptom of the final days of a long and strange election, but it often feels like conservatives and liberals are talking past each other; not in the usual way, where fundamental differences in values make our various proposals incompatible, but because there are conservatives who are focusing on Obama’s imaginary "utopianism" while so many liberals are focused on asking why we’re in Iraq or what will be done about the economy. It’s certainly a metaphor for the campaign, where Obama’s bread-and-butter approach has seen a success while McCain’s character-driven campaign has thus far failed to resonate.
I tend to think that people pulling the lever for Republican candidates had real reasons for doing so—conservatism’s pretty appealing, after all—but the Left’s cynics were right that victory isn’t about fresh ideas. Does anyone think that the liberal upswing we’re living through is attributable to a revitalized progressive platform? Isn’t it more that the war tanked, Bush nosedived (nosedove?), and Karl Rove’s Mary Poppins bag ran out of tricks? Heck, Fernholz himself scoffs at the idea that Obama’s popularity has anything to do with a revitalization of liberal ideology: "This for the liberal whose platform is tax cuts for 95 percent of people, who is likely to put Republicans in high Cabinet positions, who is still mistrusted by plenty of folks who are ideologues on the left . . . "
I don’t mean to suggest that ideas don’t matter, but I do want to drive home the point that, just as Democrats and Republicans are caught in a cycle of infrastructure envy ("The Right has all the think tanks!" "The Left has all the netroots!"), we’re also caught in a cyclical pattern of thinking that the other side has all the fresh ideas. If this mistaken line of thinking leads the Right to engage in lots of ideological soul-searching, then I’m all for it, but let’s not pretend that this "Whoever Has the Best ‘Substance’ Wins" narrative is any kind of true. Just ask the Left; they spent the last decade at this point on the sine curve, and it wasn’t "fresh ideas" that got them past it.
