The Bulldozer and the Big Tent: Blind Republicans, Lame Democrats, and the Recovery of American Idea

[RamboLiberal]

By Todd Gitlin | bio
I proposed to write this book in the spring of 2004, when I called it Liberal Resurrection. (By the time I went to work in earnest, in the spring of 2005, that title seemed premature at the least, and probably foolish. Later I dumped the religious imagery altogether; and not a moment too soon.)

Partly to get my mind around the Bush emergency and partly to shore up my morale, I felt the need for a comprehensible history—not a detailed chronology but a conceptual one. Part of what was driving me was the need to get Bush right—not just to slime him, but to figure out how he did it. With that, also, came the question: How did we get rolled for so long? Some dumb mistakes, or was it in our political nature to lose? And then too: Were there limits? Several Swift Boats later, I felt even more strongly the need to see Bush’s bulldozer in its setting: the stunning career of the recent conservative movement, its advantages, its conception of leadership, all against a background of liberal failings.

At the same time I wanted, and want, to urge liberals beyond unproductive snarling, either about the irresistibility of the Bush bulldozer, the Democrats’ fecklessness, or Bill Clinton’s sins and errors. I saw MoveOn, the Dean campaign and the emerging netroots, blogosphere, whatever, as the rumblings of a new and indispensable force, carrying the movement spirit (younger, activist, energetic, amateur) into the Democratic Party (older, compromising, staid, professional). For all their respective limits, could it be that at long last liberals and Democrats would accomplish the movement-party synthesis that the Republican-conservatives had accomplished over the course of decades? For only if the two are in synch—the party harnessing the movement’s energy toward practical ends, the movement bringing the party to life—only then does big political change take place, one way or the other.

Even after the debacle of 2004, it felt imperative to think as if liberals could dig themselves out of our various traps, even if I can’t say I was sure that Bush’s Republicans, the party of the anti-Sixties, would crash and burn. The fragmented activists on the left side were coming to realize that if they did not hang together they would assuredly hang separately. The immense relief of the 2006 election vindicated my sense that the Bush crowd, in their manic overreach, had painted themselves into a corner, a Confederate one, and that (despite the pressing of panic buttons and the past and future efforts of Osama bin Laden) Karl Rove might be proved exactly wrong—Bush might turn out to be not William McKinley but Herbert Hoover.

http://bookclub.tpmcafe.com/blog/bookclub/2007/sep/03/the_bulldozer_and_the_big_tent