When you're walking down a crowded sidewalk there’s a delicate dance that goes on as people seamlessly and mostly unconsciously pass through each other and avoid running into each other.
Part of what is going on in that process, is two things. One, you signal to people where you're planning to walk – to the right of them, to the left – by where you look. If you've never been aware of this, try it and you will see it's true. Second, you signal a lot by how forcefully and determinedly you walk. For example, if you are clearly not watching where you are going, which is one way of signaling that you won't be yielding, people will move more themselves to get out of your way. Everybody knows that if you go somewhere you're not supposed to be, but you walk confidently and determinedly, for all the world as if you own the place, you will as often as not be let in.
To begin with, this is a great metaphor for life. People treat you according to your own signals about where you'll be moving and where you belong. They take their cues about you from the direction you are looking, in a metaphorical sense. If you look this way, they will give you space there. If you look that way, same thing. If you look up, they will treat you up. If you look down, they will treat you down.
Now the political angle: this is the problem with the wimpy self-conscious Democrats; they are so anxiously watching everyone else on the "sidewalk," so self-conscious and so eager to accomodate, that they just end up just annoying people. Picking a path confidently and smoothly is a big dimension of what’s called “leadership.”
The problem is, many or most political analysts are in the grip of a false and illusory analysis of American politics. They analyze the political situation like this, with all the candidates (A through E) arrayed from left to right along a "spectrum":
The assumption that accompanies this vision is that a Democrat only gets the votes of those voters whose own political “position” on the spectrum lie to his left, while a Republican only gets the voters who lie to their right on the above spectrum. Therefore, the further you move toward the center, the more votes you get. If you can actually cross the center point and move into the other party’s side of the spectrum, all the better. This seems to be the operative theory behind the Hillary Clinton campaign (though they are of course gingerly trying to edge far enough to the left to make sure they win the primaries. They’ll shoot right as soon as that happens).
The problem with this is that a decisive population of voters doesn't understand political or policy differences, is not really politicized in any coherent way and in many cases doesn't have the foggiest idea what liberal and conservative even mean. I’ve met people who have told me for example, “I really liked that Howard Dean guy, but once he dropped out I voted for Bush.”
A lot of people just go with the candidate who signals confidence, conviction, strength and authenticity. From the point of view of politicized people, they are like a dog who understands his owner's tone but not her words.
One way I like to think about what’s wrong with this conventional picture is as a version of Plato’s cave. According to this famous metaphor, we are like people who are strapped in a cave, and all we can see are shadows cast on the wall by people out in the real world. Since all we can see are the shadows, we think they are reality, but Plato says that actually the reality we perceive is just a pale, one-dimensional shadows cast by a much richer and more complicated reality that we cannot access.
While the situation is of course vastly complicated, I believe the following schematic represents at least a much more accurate version of reality. While everyone focuses on the liberal-conservative dimension, there is another crucial dimension by which we should assess politicians: authenticity. And if we’re going to try to graph out politicians, it would be better to do it like this:
People like me who are politicized and partisan and view things in terms of right and left are prone to focus on the one-dimensional “shadows” of this two-dimensional reality, like this:
What this leaves out is the fact that, while there is certainly a chunk of the population who see the candidates in these terms, there is also a substantial chunk of the population who sees an entirely different projection of the candidates, like this:
According to the conventional “political spectrum” projection, candidate D is probably the strongest candidate, or perhaps C, while candidate A is far too liberal, and candidate E far too conservative, to make a good candidate. But for those looking at the “authenticity” dimension, candidates A and E are the top two contenders (even though they’re on opposite sides of the political spectrum). D, on the other hand, is weak.
I’m not certain that Authenticity is necessarily the best word or concept to capture the second dimension here, it could be “leadership” or “personality” or other things. But either way, my general point remains.
So this is why Ronald Reagan was considered far too conservative to ever win the White House during the primaries of 1980 and 1976. But he wasn't, and polling showed that on the top issues, the American public continued to disagree with Reagan throughout his presidency, to a degree inconsistent with his popularity. Today, some polling suggests that on many many issues, the US population remains far to the left of our recent presidents.
One key point about this principle is that the two dimensions – place on the left-right spectrum and place on the authenticity spectrum – are not unrelated. Candidates like Hillary Clinton and John Kerry who are constantly self-trimming and calculating and repositioning themselves in the center tend to sink on the authenticity scale, while some candidates like Ronald Reagan who seem the most authentic and leaderly, are not the most centrist candidates.
Of course this principle has limits. To return to my metaphor of walking down a street, the fact is a black man living in 1955 Selma wasn't going to get any respect from whites no matter how much confidence and aplomb he projected. The social arrangement was just too overpowering – in effect a giant agreement or conspiracy to keep him down. The "we must move to the center" DLC/Clinton wing of the Democratic party would probably argue that our political situation is analogous – a liberal who signals confidence, conviction, strength and authenticity will just be crushed by overwhelming opposition forces. Indeed many liberals (and many conservatives) have been. But when you imagine the right personally authentic liberal candidate who can capture the votes of people who are attuned to the “authenticity dimension,” those who disagree with him or her on the issues as Reagan did, as well as politically attuned liberals, it seems clear to me that the DLC-Clinton wing is wrong and (characteristically) lacking in imagination. This is why many of us were attracted to Howard Dean, he looked like that guy (Mr. "A" in the above chart) for a while there last time around.
