A Return to Liberalism's Jeffersonian Roots

Terry Michael, former press secretary for the DNC,in an editorial calls for the DEMS to return to their roots. He makes some valid points. What if a 'Jeffersonian' firebrand stood up and promised to lower taxes, reduce government, and keep the government out of our lives. Sounds good to me.//JW sends.

The Democratic Party label -- a two-century-old moniker -- is suffering a branding dilemma similar to the Episcopal Church after the 1950s. You didn't go to the American branch of the Church of England just to visit God. Being Episcopalian was a statement about your old-line, blue blood. But then, along came the egalitarian, meritocractic '60s, and Episcopalian membership no longer had cachet. Professor James Twitchell points out in his recent "Branded Nation" that church membership slumped from 3.6 million in the 1960s to 2 million today.

Born in the agrarian era of its founder, Thomas Jefferson, the Democratic Party's original story was of a small central government serving self-sufficient "little people" (farmers, shop keepers, frontiersmen), prizing and preserving individual liberty -- juxtaposed against the elitist federalists, and their monarchical, big central government ambition.

The Democratic Party story was refashioned in the industrial era, particularly with arrival of the New Deal, when one-size-fits-all, central authority, wealth-redistributive policies were appealing to those little guys. Most of them had traded self-sufficiency for wage labor. Their economic lives revolved around big impersonal corporations, against which they were represented by big labor.

But in a post-industrial, information economy, the little guys, who Democrats have always claimed to represent, are again more self-sufficient, empowered to make -- tailor-make, in fact -- choices for themselves. (I built my own Nikes online; a hundred pairs at Foot Locker weren't enough.) The "Central Authority Solutions" story offered by Democrats, from the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries, lost luster. That's especially true with regard to economic issues. On the other hand, when it comes to lifestyle and personal choices -- the social-cultural issue frame -- the party still has some juice left from that original Jeffersonian story, which made individual liberty central to party ID.