for the Dems: Rx for Change

Max Sawicky has an important post up that reacts to the Confederate Flag flap - and makes a powerful critique^[1] of the Democratic Party:

What's at stake is whether we are going to have class politics in the U.S. Cultural conservatism, which in the South can include some type of sentimentality for the Lost Cause, or resentment of what is perceived as excess in the name of civil rights, should not be treated as an enemy ideology. I am not talking about adherence to segregation in public accommodations, denial of the right to vote, or other obvious breaches of democracy that nobody in good faith could endorse.

Coalitions are about reaching understandings through dialogue and/or compromise with people of different views. The Democratic Party needs to be a coalition of working people. It needs to ease up on cultural and social liberalism. I mean fetishes about gun control and tobacco. It needs to stop pretending that Southern whites are more racist than other people. It needs to welcome the "seamless web" Catholics who oppose both abortion and the death penalty. It needs to stop overselling rehabilitation and underselling punishment. It needs to find ways of establishing reasonable environmental regulation other than on the backs of workers. What it endorses as a party is ideally the outcome of a rational debate and compromise on these issues. For some, one or another such compromise could be a 'deal-breaker.' So be it. That's the process we need. The constant and lodestar should be an unwavering commitment to the living standards of working people, and opposition to the corporativist, war-mongering ways of the Republican Party.

Without class politics, the Democratic Party becomes cats-paw of the big donors, a party of well-to-do white liberals lording it over second-class minorities organized by race and ethnicity. The economic policy of such a party boils is neo-liberalism (balanced budgets, free trade, smaller government, and Federal Reserve supremacy in monetary policy), with tokenism and crumbs for the minorities.

(emphasis mine)

At the end of his post, he endorses Dennis Kucinich, but I think that he's fallen prey to the same disease that he so clearly warns us against. Kucinich's supporters are exactly the ones who the other Dem candidates were pandering to in trying to paint Dean as a right-wing racist - it is Kucinich supporters who have all the deal-breakers and litmus tests, and Kucinich's niche appeal is tailored for them.

Dean, however, is the candidate who is knitting together a coalition of principle, not issues and ideologies. And Dean is the personification of Max's sage advice.

[1] This is real advice, not the disingenous "abandon your principles and surrender" kind.