OPINION
4A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • THURSDAY, DECEMBER 1, 2016
Founded in 1873
DAVID F. PERO, Publisher & Editor
LAURA SELLERS, Managing Editor
BETTY SMITH, Advertising Manager
CARL EARL, Systems Manager
JOHN D. BRUIJN, Production Manager
DEBRA BLOOM, Business Manager
OUR VIEW
EO Media Group/File Photo
The road between Seaside and Cannon Beach a century ago must
have been especially challenging in wet weather.
Can the Democrats
move to the right?
A pivotal time to
serve on parks
S
commission
By ROSS DOUTHAT
New York Times News Service
L
ast week’s visit by the Oregon Parks and Recreation
Commission to some of Cannon Beach’s many attractions
was a valuable reminder for commissioners and residents
alike of the North Coast’s attractions and the need to protect them
in light of 21st century challenges.
The accessibility of Clatsop beaches and other assets was a
motif of the meeting.
Elaine Murdy-Trucke of the Cannon Beach History Center and
Museum told park leaders of difficulties reaching the community
in the time before modern highways. Our rugged coastline backed
by the Coast Range is a treasure of worldwide significance.
Though the coast comprises only a small percentage of Oregon’s
land area, it plays an oversized role in defining our state’s image
for visitors and residents alike.
The fact that Gov. Oswald West a century ago began the pro-
cess of enshrining the coastline as public property places him in
company with his contemporary, President Theodore Roosevelt,
as a farsighted steward of the West. Theirs was a pragmatic and
selfless conservationism, which understood that natural wonders
properly belong to all Americans and must never be sacrificed for
private profit. Not that there’s anything wrong with making money
— the coast’s preservation protects the livelihoods of genera-
tions of Oregonians. But everyone can savor our coast, not just the
wealthy few.
Next year’s 50th anniversary of Gov. Tom McCall’s Beach Bill
will be a chance to reaffirm our belief in the philosophy of pub-
lic beaches. Accompanying publicity is likely to encourage even
more people to experience driving or bicycling the Oregon Coast
— a bucket list item for many Americans and an increasing num-
ber of international visitors.
The anniversary also will be a great time redouble our atten-
tion to the problems and threats
Parks and
confronted by the coast. Some are
directly related to its popularity and
beaches
the Pacific Northwest’s swelling pop-
belong to us
ulation, while others are of a more
natural origin.
— it’s up to
As this hectic century moves for-
us to pass
ward, coastal accessibility — getting
here in the first place and then getting them on to
around — is going to become more
the future.
challenging. Already, summer traffic
sometimes comes to a crawl on U.S.
Highway 101 and Oregon Highway 26. State, federal and local
officials must continue exploring ways to keep things moving.
Sometimes this will mean widening roadways and providing more
passing lanes, but this alone won’t be enough to stay ahead of the
crowd. Innovation is essential.
Besides continuing to safeguard beaches, Oregon must ensure
that state parks are maintained and improved to keep up with
demand. Park infrastructure built to serve Baby Boomers and their
families is in need of constant refurbishment, while steps must
also be contemplated to give new generations of park users the
up-to-date amenities they seek.
Profound threats to the Oregon Coast — a rising sea level, sub-
duction zone quakes and tsunamis, and more powerful storms and
erosion — all require continuing planning. Cost will limit what
can be done. But now is the time to envision how the seashore
will change and start taking steps toward protecting the vision
of a publicly accessible Oregon Coast long into the future. This
probably will mean gradually acquiring additional upland park-
land, along with steps like strengthening emergency evacuation
routes and facilities. Ultimately, we may confront a time when
rising waters will cut off some coastal communities from their
neighbors.
This is a pivotal time to be on the parks commission. We must
pay attention to their plans and try to help however we can, for
example by telling legislators about how much we value state
parks. Parks and beaches belong to us — it’s up to us to pass them
on to the future.
ince Election Day the great
intra-Democratic debate over
What Went Wrong has been
dominated by two visions of how
liberalism should
be organized —
identity politics
versus economic
solidarity — with
writers variously
critiquing or
defending each tendency, or arguing
that they are complements and that
any tension can and ought to be
resolved.
This is an interesting and fruitful
debate, but it has been mostly about
a debate about two different ways of
being (sometimes very) left-wing.
There has been much less conver-
sation about the ways in which the
Democratic Party might consider
responding to its current straits by
moving to the right.
That kind of movement is often
part of how political parties recover
from debilitation and defeat —
not just by finding new ways to be
true to their underlying ideology,
but by scrambling toward the cen-
ter to convince skeptical voters that
they’ve changed.
It’s what Democrats did, slowly
but surely, after the trauma of Ron-
ald Reagan’s triumphs; it’s what Bill
Clinton did after his 1994 drubbing;
it’s what Rahm Emanuel and How-
ard Dean did, to a modest degree,
on their way to building a congres-
sional majority in 2006. And it’s
also what Donald Trump did on his
way to stealing the Midwest from
the Democrats this year — he was
a hard-right candidate on certain
issues but a radical sort of centrist
on trade, infrastructure and enti-
tlements, explicitly breaking with
Republican orthodoxies that many
voters considered out of date.
If the idea of moving rightward
seems distinctly strange to today’s
Democrats, it’s partially because
until this rude awakening, much of
liberalism was in thrall to demo-
graphic triumphalism: convinced
that the party’s leftward drift under
President Barack Obama and candi-
date Hillary Clinton was in line with
the drift of the country as a whole,
and confident that with every birth
and death and naturalization and
18th birthday their structural advan-
tage would only grow.
Because Trump won without the
popular vote, a version of this the-
ory is still intact — but it shouldn’t
be. The Democratic coalition is a
losing coalition in most states, most
House districts, most Senate races;
the party’s national bench is thin, its
statehouse power shattered, its con-
gressional leadership aged and inert.
It has less political power than it did
after the Reagan revolution and the
Gingrich sweep. To repurpose an
aphorism often applied to Brazil: It
has the majority of the future, and
if current trends continue, it always
will.
So the incentives are there to
look for issues where Democrats
might plausibly move rightward,
back toward voters they have lost.
And so are the issues themselves.
The Democrats have ceded a lot of
territory in their recent gallop left-
ward, and it wouldn’t be that hard
to come up with a revised version of
the (again, Bill) Clinton playbook
suited to the present time.
For instance: Democrats could
AP Photo/Andrew Harnik
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi speaks to the media Wednes-
day following her re-election as Democratic leader.
attempt to declare a culture-war
truce, consolidating the gains of
the Obama era while disavow-
ing attempts to regulate institutions
and communities that don’t follow
the current social-liberal line. That
would mean no more fines for Cath-
olic charities and hospitals, no more
transgender-bathroom directives
handed down from the White House
to local schools, and restraint rather
than ruthlessness in future debates
over funding and accreditation for
conservative religious schools.
Without backing away from their
support for same-sex marriage and
legal abortion, leading Democratic
politicians could talk more favor-
ably about moral and religious plu-
ralism, and offer reassurances to
people who feel themselves to be
dissenters from a very novel cul-
tural regime.
The Democratic
coalition is a
losing coalition
in most states,
most House
districts, most
Senate races;
the party’s
national bench
is thin.
Democrats could also talk anew
about the virtues of earned bene-
fits, about programs that help people
who help themselves, about mov-
ing people from welfare back to
work. This (Bill) Clintonian rheto-
ric hasn’t entirely disappeared from
the party, but it has diminished,
and some of the Trumpian (and
pre-Trumpian) backlash against lib-
eralism in white working-class com-
munities was associated with wel-
fare programs — disability rolls,
food stamps, Medicaid — that seem
to effectively underwrite workless-
ness at a time of social disarray. It
would not require Democrats aban-
doning their commitment to the
social safety net to foreground pro-
grams more directly linked to work
and independence, and to acknowl-
edge the problems of dependence
and stagnation associated with
no-strings-attached support.
There is similar room for Dem-
ocrats to move toward the center
on immigration policy — to retain
their support for humane treatment
of migrants but reverse the creep
toward open borders-ism and abjure
mass amnesty by presidential fiat; to
support a path to citizenship without
supporting a perpetually ascending
immigration rate.
Likewise on crime and terrorism.
The party’s (laudable) support for
criminal justice and policing reform
left its leaders struggling to find a
language to address the post-Fergu-
son spike in lawlessness that pushed
public support for the police upward
and helped Trump on his path. And
Obama’s obvious preference for a
stiff-upper-lip approach to terror-
ism, similarly, made it hard for his
party to address the anxieties cre-
ated by San Bernardino, Orlando,
Paris and Nice, and the sense that
the Islamic State and its disciples
had ushered in a new and frighten-
ing status quo.
In each of these cases, I sus-
pect that the party wouldn’t have to
move that far or compromise that
much to end up in a stronger polit-
ical position. A centrist crime-con-
trol agenda to pair with sentencing
reform, a more incremental, Dream
Act-ish approach to immigration,
a stress on the most pro-work ele-
ments in the party’s arsenal of wel-
fare policies, a mild softening of
the party’s secularism and com-
plete-the-sexual-revolution zeal …
with the right leadership and sales-
manship, these moves might reas-
sure and win over a crucial fraction
of the many voters — blue-collar
and white-collar, male and female
— who pulled the lever very reluc-
tantly for Trump.
But these shifts would require
asking both identitarian and popu-
list liberals (and the many-if-not-
most liberals who identify with both
strands) to compromise some of
their commitments, to accept that
open borders and desexed bath-
rooms and a guaranteed income
and mass refugee resettlement will
remain somewhat-radical causes
rather than simply and naturally
becoming the Democratic Party
line.
This is a hard ask, since even
modest shifts require compromis-
ing deeply held (if, in some cases,
recently discovered) ideals. And it’s
made much harder by the fact that
liberals spent the last four years tell-
ing themselves that such compro-
mises were not necessary anymore,
that they belonged to the benighted
1990s and need trouble liberal con-
sciences no more.
But that was a lie. And harder
truths are what the buckling Demo-
cratic Party needs now.