A Back to the Future Jeffersonian Liberalism

How the Democrats can thrive in the Information Age

Terry Michael | January 25, 2010

Hopes dashed by the first-year bumblings of Barack Obama and three big GOP victories in Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, Democratic campaign strategists, policy-mongers, and populist fire-breathers are touting formulas for party renewal. Nothing new here. Re-branding has been a cottage industry for Democrats since Lyndon Johnson dashed liberal dreams of wealth redistribution with his war in the 1960s, and mush-mouthed Democrats abandoned the toxic “L” word and started calling themselves “progressives" in the 1970s and 1980s.

While short-term thinking, focused on the November election, will dominate Beltway chatter about re-tooling Obama's legislative agenda, Democrats desperately need a new informing ideology to replace the 19th and 20th Century brand of statist programmatic liberalism rejected by the political center, in a choice-demanding information age.

Bill Daley, the smartest of Democratic icon Richard J. Daley’s seven children, a few months ago wrote that the party needs to “plot a more moderate, centrist course or risk electoral disaster.” In his first Washington Post column of the new year, democratic socialist Harold Meyerson did just the opposite, yearning for the “legislative torrents of the New Deal and the Great Society...templates that fire the liberal imagination.” And lefties on the Hill will be beating up on bankers to save themselves from their health care debacle.

Daley’s advice was good—for the devastated presidential Democratic Party of 1984. A near perfect distillation of economic left-liberalism admired on college campuses and in Latin America, Meyerson's vision might have been relevant in 1964, when party policy wonks demanded “Complete The New Deal!” READ MORE REASON