Post-Mortem

It's official: The Democratic Party does not understand political discourse.

Note what I said. I'm not saying that they don't understand issues. Or media theory. Or public relations. Or grassroots organizing. I'm suggesting that amidst the recriminations and soul-searching, the Democratic Party needs to think about more than their strategies. They're going to need to do some thinking about how they communicate and what their communication needs to do.

What I'm suggesting requires a level of abstraction in thinking about the relationship between politics and culture. Communication creates culture. Politics generates communication. Politics shapes culture by communicating. That is why we study political messages and speeches, also called "political discourse."

One of the important things to understand about political discourse, though, is that it includes more than Crossfire or the editorial page of the New York Times. As University of Colorado professor Gerard Hauser has argued, political discourse is often "vernacular," meaning that occurs constantly and everywhere, from shopping malls to bumper stickers, as people come to terms with the events in their lives.

Of course, pollsters tell us that average Americans don't care about politics, except every four years or so, when they are coaxed up to the polls like so many sheep. Hauser, though, argues that the disengagement pollsters find comes from the fact that they only look at polls. His "vernacular voices" don’t speak in statistics.

When we step away from the polling, he says, and we look at homes and churches, Internet chat rooms, talk radio, Weblogs and scores of other situations, we find politics happening. Howard Dean understood this, but his campaign couldn’t translate it into action because the people he found weren’t reliable voters.

Nevertheless, Hauser’s disenfranchised publics are important. For decades, they have been arguing in barber shops about their leaders, like neglected children quarrelling over adults who ignore them. If they can be located and tapped, they represent an extraordinary reserve of political power.

This election spoke in a deeply vernacular voice. Here in Pittsburgh, I heard stories of people whose political yard signs were stolen and whose cars were vandalized because they had the wrong bumper sticker. Near the election, two boys were suspended for changing the sign in front of their school to support John Kerry. While rebellious, these stories reflect a passionate political sentiment we often miss. In a way, those petty crimes were politics in disguise.

It's not that campaign commercials and newspaper endorsements aren't important. Hauser argues that they are. It's just that, from Hauser's perspective, media events become artifacts regular people interpret alongside their conversations with the people they know. John Kerry's performance in the debates was important, but as it turned out, it was not enough because it spoke to the needs of the media elite and the educated classes who enjoy nuance, not the plain middle of America, who want to be spoken to simply.

George W. Bush's rhetorical strength is his ability to speak to plain people plainly. This ability is crucial because it is the language his public uses everyday. They are simple people who work and live and die in small towns with strong and simple values. They live by common sense.

I do not mean that Bush's supporters are unintelligent, nor do I mean that political discourse should speak to the lowest common denominator. Political communication, from the days of Aristotle, has always aimed at helping people make decisions about important, but often complicated, things. Rhetoric makes the ideal concrete, and the best rhetoric deals with complexity in ways regular people understand and experts respect. This is difficult, but not impossible. If the elite left finds Bush incapable of making a coherent argument, it could be because Bush is a rhetorical one-trick pony. It could also be because he isn't talking to them and never will.

Bush's public forms around values issues like abortion and homosexuality because those issues are incredibly concrete. Unlike economic issues, which seem these days to be like predicting the weather, abortion and gay rights deal with real people and real situations. Terrorism reflects real fear.

Kerry's strongest issue was the Iraq war. Iraq, at least in my conversations with the people I know, presented an extremely difficult problem, and if there wasn't a sense of unease at the beginning, there was one as time went on. This was also an incredibly concrete issue, and it will continue to be one as more and more Americans come to know people who are fighting and dying there.

The problem, though, was that Kerry never spoke about the war or anything else in a concrete way. Moreover, his silence and fumbling on moral issues--his incomprehensible response to the abortion question at the end of the second debate reflected this problem--also prohibited him from crystallizing into a candidate that people could understand and talk about. From the start, the campaign was a referendum ON Bush and ABOUT Bush but never FOR Kerry.

Early this summer, some friends asked me what Kerry needed to do to win. I said that he needed to tell an alternative story to the one that Bush was telling. Bush's campaign told a story of warfare against terrorism and other moral forces threatening civil society. His story percolated into a variety of forums: A prominent local pastor, I heard, preached that the election was a struggle for the fate of Western civilization and suggested that a vote for Kerry was essentially a vote for the anti-Christ.

Kerry's story had to deal with the same issues and deal with the same past. But it needed to move into a new direction toward hope. Now, I know that Kerry and Edwards both proclaimed that "Hope Was On The Way," but they never told anyone what that hope actually was. Hope was a term standing out there in space, a Platonic form caught in the ether. It lacked critical power. It never crystallized around an image that allowed them to address terrorism in a realistic way while dealing with education and fiscal responsibility and that still made us want to get out of bed in the morning. It never spoke any of the values of justice and equality that drove the Democratic Party throughout the middle of the twentieth century.

Instead, we got a media blitz featuring a tired hero from a war we would rather forget. Kerry based his campaign around an image shattered by Karl Rove in about five minutes, no matter how much lying took place. When the image was gone, there was nothing more to do, and Kerry's campaign sat in stunned silence for three months as Bush redefined him. Only Bush's poor performance in the debates deterred his reelection, but only among independents. Bush's plain-speaking public always distrusted those smart-talking Yalies anyway.

The issue for the Democratic Party in the next four years is to recover a sense of purpose and a sense of story. What are you for? Not what WERE you for, but what ARE you for? What is your vision of the future? How does this vision fit with the past? What are its roots in the present? What values do you offer? How to you integrate these values into an increasingly conservative culture? And how do you speak this plainly to people? How do you put this in people's hands so they can touch it and feel it? How do you make people passionate for you again?

I am not suggesting something pie-in-the-sky. The issues are already there: terrorism, freedom, poverty, racism, jobs, fair wages, the environment. The question now for the Democrats is finding a way of putting those problems together in a concrete way that makes sense to people, elites and non-elites alike.

I am, however, describing something incredibly difficult, which is probably the reason why the Democrats haven't been able to do it. Organized labor is in trouble. People have lost faith in Progress. The religious coalition that drove the civil rights movement and gave Democratic politics its moral high ground has been abandoned. Our society is far more conservative than it was twenty-five years ago. The budget deficit puts significant limitations on what we can actually do. And the leadership has no answers. Recent Democratic candidates have gotten by on co-opting Republican principles and renaming them as their own. Democrats who live out the stories of the past risk becoming things of the past.

Yet, the past has examples. I think of William Jennings Bryan, who talked to farmers about economics by talking about silver and gold. I remember reading about a Depression-era farm girl whose prized possession was an FDR button, because hearing his voice on the radio gave her hope. I think of JFK and RFK, who were able to give people a sense that their problems could be solved.

Heady stuff. Instead of polls and electioneering, the Democrats need to put the art back into political science. It's the vision, stupid. But it's more than a vision. It's a way of looking at and living in the world. It means finding the highest ideals of society and making them live again.