Democratic doom, cont.

The Democratic infighting situation just isn't improving. A year ago it looked like it was the Republicans who were due for an ideological civil war; now they've united around a pro-immigration candidate while Democrats fight to the finish over whether a woman or a black man "deserves" the nomination. Is it just me who thinks that the Obama-Clinton fight is about to throw the general election to the Republicans?

No, it isn't just me. Mario Cuomo agrees. So does the mainstream media. And so does House majority leader Steny Hoyer, who says:

When they attack one another, it's not just an attack on the other candidate, it is taken I think by women and by African Americans in a more personal sense...To that extent I think the continued clash between the two candidates, which is inevitable, is not particularly helpful.

It's a bad sign when Noahpinion agrees 100% with the conventional wisdom. Doom is coming to the Democrats. The obvious solution would be for Hillary Clinton to bow out gracefully, but there's a hard core of Hillary supporters who don't want that, and Cokie Roberts explains why:

Here is this woman, she's worked hard, she's done it all the way you're supposed to do it, and then this cute young man comes in and says a bunch of sweet, you know, nothings, and pushes you out of the way. And a lot of women are looking at that and saying, 'There goes my life.'

Even as someone who's backed Obama from the start, I can sympathize with people who feel that way. And so this bloodletting - jilted women vs. jilted blacks allied with starry-eyed youth - will be a fight to the finish.

But then again, thats the whole problem here - the Democrats' reliance on tribal divisions.

Here's how I see it (translation: warning, rant ahead). Liberalism went into such ideological disarray in the 70s and 80s that the Democratic party lost its appeal to ideologically uncommitted voters and was forced to become a hodgepodge of minority tribal interests (kind of like the main opposition party in Malaysia). When liberalism ran out of gas, Democrats had to survive by telling black people, women, Hispanics, gays, etc., "Hey, the system's not treating you fairly because you're [insert tribe here], come join the Out-Crowd." Meanwhile, Republicans, regardless of their roots in Southern Baptist and rural white tribalism, kept emphasizing their ideology - work hard, get ahead, act right, and the system will reward you. Republican policies hardly lived up to that ideal - and often went directly against it - but they kept saying that message, and swing voters listened.

Now history presents the Democratic party with a (an?) historical opportunity. Republicans have not only screwed the pooch in terms of running the country, they've become fundamentally uncertain about what they really stand for ("Do we really want to give jobs and opportunity to all these brown people?"). But will the Democrats take it? The CW is that Republican pooch-screwing hasn't by itself given liberals a new ideological banner to rally around. What do we believe in? Do we want to help poor countries (investment being far and away the best way to do that), or do we want to protect our domestic industries from competition? Do we believe that fiscal discipline is healthy for the economy (and hence for poor people), or do we agree that "deficits don't matter" as long as the deficits fund programs we like? Were the Clinton years a recipe for a new, more compassionate free-market ideology, or a false dawn where the poor got poorer?

Give me clear, straight answers to those questions, my fellow liberals. No, you can't.

The truth is that the Republicans may have screwed the pooch, but we collectively have no idea how to un-screw it. And so we've fallen back on the good old tribal politics of supposedly marginalized groups.

And that, not the actions of any one person or small group of people, is at the root of the Democratic primary-season implosion. As Mario Cuomo says, "When you don't deal with what I'm asking you to deal with, which is the specifics of these hard issues in an intelligent and understandable way...you fill the space with this stupidity about race and gender."

Amen, brother.