Last evening I talked to a friend of mine who recently ran for state wide office as a Libertarian (that's right a well intentioned if powerless Midwestern Don Quixote.) As our conversations sometimes do we drifted into politics and he said something that truly troubled me. He said there really isn't much difference between the elites running the major parties. They both believe they are masters of the universe and we folks out here in the countryside are merely their subjects. Elite Republicans and Elite Democrats alike have dedicated their lives to stealing from us. The difference he said was that Republican elites are single minded in their theft. Democratic elites will sometimes say something like, "let's tone down our stealing a little bit or the lower classes might notice."
This morning I read an article entitled The Rise of Seinfeld Politics & The End of Principles by David Sirota. The article bemoans the apparent effort of Rahm Emanual and some elite Democratic consultants to replace ideology with personality politics. He points to comments made in a New York Times Magazine article about David Axelrod's efforts as Barack Obama's consultant as proof that among big time elite Democrats personality matters, beliefs don't.
The argument goes that members of the Republican elite like George W. Bush view "conservative" ideology as nothing more than a communications tool used in their effort to shift ever more wealth into their pockets. It has failed because the Republican elite has never really believed in the ideology and has never really intended to deliver. The now rising Democratic elite doesn't want to fall into the trap of endorsing an "ideology" it truly doesn't believe so its members are replacing ideology with personality. If a candidate is pretty enough he will win even if he believes in nothing.
This answers Sirota's question:
How can a top campaign consultant - and really, Democratic elites in general - look at the 2006 election and come away claiming it was a mandate for personality to trump all ideology?It allows them to serve the democratic elite which desperately wants to either suppress or overlook the economic populism rising among rank and file Democrats. Quoting Sirota
Then again, I shouldn't be surprised. This isn't the sheer stupidity of people who don't understand these facts - this is the end stage of the disease I laid out in Hostile Takeover: a very deliberate strategy of people who have become part of a system where corruption has become innate. The effort to replace the Democratic Party's historic pro-little-guy ideology with a ruling class ideology (masked as "postideology" and "personality") has been a very shrewd, very deliberate strategy that starts with Big Money interests, filters down to the campaign consultants (many of whom are simultaneously advising Democratic candidates and being paid by large corporations), and is ultimately administered by candidates who are trying to woo both the voting public and a handful of superwealthy political financiers. Put another way, the people who shun the concept of "ideology" aren't anti-ideological - they are quietly pushing an elitist ideology they know that most of America doesn't support.I could have been quoting my friend the Midwestern Libertarian Don Quixote.
What say you? I know that comments are rare around here, but I really want to know your thoughts on whether there is a growing disconnect between the Democrats who attend the fancy dinners and the rest of us. Are we demanding something they are not willing to deliver? Are they trying to dazzle us with personality?
