Times are tough. The working people of this country are not just losing their jobs, they are losing their homes and in some cases, their entire way of life. Their dignity. Their respect. Men can't earn a decent living so that they can raise their heads with pride around their children. Women can't get a break from their increasing burdens. Children are piling up their disappointments. Our great men of commerce are weak and corrupt. Our defenders are weathered by war, deployed far from home. The political institutions that are tasked with governing are broken. The men who lead them are inadequate to the challenges before them. It is very difficult to look at the state of our union and find it strong. We the people have got to do something about it and it has to start now.
This isn't just about winning an election, although that is a part of it. After suffering a defeat in 1992, the conservative base of the Republican party demanded that the party return to first principles. In two years, they won big. After suffering an even more convincing defeat in 2008, the Republican base demanded that they adhere even more ardently to the party's core values. There were rewarded for that. Yet, we know that when it comes to Democrats, the media and political elite in Washington always return to the same failed advice: Don't fight for traditional Democratic values. They have a "new third way" that is basically the Republican way without the bigotry and sexism. While they tend to come to power when Republican governing fails, Democrats never last long. As fake Republicans, they'll nearly always meet defeat to the real thing. The real question, however, is who will lead the Democratic Party back to its traditional values?
Back when political conventions and party platforms meant something, the Democrats of 1932 stated with clear conviction what being a Democrat was all about. The first couple of paragraphs could easily be adopted today:
In this time of unprecedented economic and social distress the Democratic Party declares its conviction that the chief causes of this condition were the disastrous policies pursued by our government since the World War, of economic isolation, fostering the merger of competitive businesses into monopolies and encouraging the indefensible expansion and contraction of credit for private profit at the expense of the public.
Those who were responsible for these policies have abandoned the ideals on which the war was won and thrown away the fruits of victory, thus rejecting the greatest opportunity in history to bring peace, prosperity, and happiness to our people and to the world.
They have ruined our foreign trade; destroyed the values of our commodities and products, crippled our banking system, robbed millions of our people of their life savings, and thrown millions more out of work, produced wide-spread poverty and brought the government to a state of financial distress unprecedented in time of peace.
The only hope for improving present conditions, restoring employment, affording permanent relief to the people, and bringing the nation back to the proud position of domestic happiness and of financial, industrial, agricultural and commercial leadership in the world lies in a drastic change in economic governmental policies.
We believe that a party platform is a covenant with the people to have
faithfully kept by the party when entrusted with power, and that the people are entitled to know in plain words the terms of the contract to which they are asked to subscribe. We hereby declare this to be the platform of the Democratic Party.
Progressive taxation. Sound money. Fair trade. Support for farmers. Work and retirement benefits. A small peacetime military. Antitrust enforcement. Justice for veterans. "Rigid supervision" of high finance. It is all in there and it is brief. By contrast, the 2008 platform reads just like most modern platforms: a campaign document of little meaning manufactured by a political consultant. Those 1932 Democrats were clear about whose side they were on because they knew the working people could not wait any longer. There had to be a party that was going to fight for them, and the individuals who wrote that platform were probably the same sort of people as those of us reading this blog.
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2010/11/14/920400/-We-cant-wait-any-longer:-Time-to-rebuild-the-Democratic-Party
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