Left Center Left

Carpundit, a Healey supporter, roots for a Deval Patrick primary win:

I hope its Patrick.  Massachusetts isn’t going to elect a black lefty to the corner office.  Maybe a black centrist, but not a lefty.

Now, his hyperbole could be intentional, a way of tarring a political opponent. But at some point, the labels you fling around should mean something. I’ll throw out my non-pejoritive definition of lefty: someone who believes that large-scale, non-incremental change in economic, political and/or social systems needs to happen in the short to medium term and that the need trumps more mundane political interest-trading or policy calibration. It usually involves a critique of democratic institutions (legislatures, mass media, party apparatus) as corrupted by the system needing overthrowing. Today, think WTO protestors or the International Socialist Organization. Hardly any elected Democratic Party politicians fit this mold, and instead are center-left: applying mildly redistributive, small-scale system-altering changes to problems, and organizing political support through traditional means to do so. Much of what we call progressives are somewhere in between, sharing some of the systematizing asssumptions of the Left, but allied with the center-left liberals in the political process. And of course, it’s relative: positions that are progressive here might rate center-right in Western Europe.

I spell this out in order to ask: How is Deval Patrick a lefty? You can look at his issues pages, for instance these recommendations for the economy:

• Cut Energy Costs and Develop Renewable Energy
• Support for Stem Cell Research
• Streamlining and Transparency of Business Regulation
• Access to Capital/ Small Business Encouragement
• Sign Economic Stimulus Package into Law
• State-wide "WiFi."
• Selling Massachusetts
• Reducing the Number of Working Poor / increase the minimum wage
• More Multi-Family Housing Starts
• Affordable Health Care

Some of these are liberal ideas, to be sure. But mostly they’re striking in their New Democrat "Third Way" feel… using market-based means to achieve social-parity ends. None of them, even affordable health care are majorly redistributive, system-altering or oppositional.

I will say I found this statement from Carpundit to be interesting:

Lastly, I think the utter failure of Reilly’s campaign shows that the Massachusetts political process has gone glossy.  We want big and expensive and beautiful, not local worked-your-way up.  I guess that’s what the voters thought Romney would be.

Reilly has self-destructed for reasons beyond his humble-ish beginnings. But Carpundit’s onto something: the breakdown in the cross-identification that was the basis of the ethnic political machine. Voters who were working class and powerless had a genuine identification with their more successful and powerful politicians, who in turn identified with those who put him in power. Some of it was performance, some of it genuine, but its effect was real.

Demographics, political alignments and events on the ground have broken that feedback loop, and opened the door for new kinds of charismatic identification with politicians, including the highly mediatized sort we see in national races.