As liberal bloggers go back and forth on the future of the Democratic Party, the question of big issues necessarily comes to the fore. While the discussion has correctly reasoned that conservatives don't really have any new ideas to offer (Social Security privatization, deficit spending and big-money military boondoggles are all at least 20 years old at this point), the collective seems unsure of what big ideas Democrats should pursue, what qualifies as a core principle, what's actually new, etc.

Kevin Drum writes:

Some say privacy is the next big thing, some say economic instability, Drum says it's something we can't yet see. But look to what he says earlier in the post -- we, as liberals, have accomplished much of what we set out to accomplish 70+ years ago, and we, as Americans, are mostly pretty content with what we've got; as Drum has argued recently, the fights that are actually happening these days are mostly around the edges. When someone comes around and really tries to get rid of Social Security, it simply doesn't work, for instance. So if we're happy, if there's no mass of discontent in America -- and I tend to believe that, absent the Bush Adminstration as a target of vitriol, there isn't -- how can we possibly expect there is a big issue coming down the pike, let alone figure out what that issue will be?

What if it's not coming from within? The last big issue-paradigm shift was the sudden appearance of the military approach to counter-terrorism as an issue; this was a totally exogenous force. Whatever arguments can be made about "knowing" things ahead of time about the attacks, they were certainly not part of anyone's issue calculus until they happened.

So what if all of our policy approaches don't matter, and the next big thing is something we can't predict? Making markets is one thing, but the genuinely new additions to the issue space in the past have tapped real concerns that could readily be related to political outcomes. Right now, the Democrats are in no position to take advantage of something like economic instability, because they've spent the last 10+ years showing us what great friends they are to the business community, and the last several months showing us what great friends they are to MBNA.

Essentially, what I'm saying is that the Democratic leadership is not in a position to take over new issue space that will be workable right now. Between now and the time the leadership rights itself, the party needs to rediscover the importance of real economic populism, without getting dragged into tangential debates about wedge issues and whatever the beltway media are squawking about this week.