Don't Dis Dem

A disorganized party is just what this country needs.

During Franklin Roosevelt's first term, Will Rogers is said to have joked: "I belong to no organized political party. I'm a Democrat."

As the dust of this momentous midterm election settles, that joke has been resurrected — mostly by people much less funny than Rogers — to describe the dilemma of the incoming Democratic majorities in both congressional houses. After all, the new Democratic members of Congress seem to sit to the right of the Democratic leadership on a host of issues. How can these Democrats govern, wonders the punditocracy, since they are clearly so disorganized?

The implicit answer is: They can't. The new Democratic majority is too fragile to bear the weight of its own internal contradictions.

But this consensus seems to willfully ignore the history of Congress across much of the 20th century. Rogers said that his party wasn't well-organized; he didn't say that it was ineffective.

Between 1932 and 1994 Congress was ruled by Dem-ocrats except for a few years in the late 1940s and mid-'50s, and the Democrats who controlled those Congresses were always messy, unwieldy coalitions. As president, Roosevelt fashioned a Democratic majority that included labor unions, the elderly, urban ethnics, blacks, and white Southern conservatives. Strange bedfellows indeed.

Far from being the bastion of liberal special-interest groups, the Democrats in Congress were usually led by their conservatives and pragmatists. More often than not the Democratic House speakers came from places like Alabama and Texas, and the longest serving (1961-1977) Democratic Senate majority leader was Mike Mansfield from that left-wing stronghold of Montana.

Yet this motley assortment of Democratic politicians managed to work together enough to create the New Deal, including the Social Security program; fight and win the Second World War; pass the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts; and put a man on the moon. While the Democratic big tent might often have resembled a three-ring circus, those Congresses managed to advance the nation's agenda in historic ways.

Meanwhile, over this same period, the Republican Party was remarkably stagnant. In his 1936 speech accepting the nomination to run for a second term, FDR called the Republican Party the party of "economic royalists." The only significant demographic the party has added are those white Southern conservatives and evangelicals, many of whom finally did leave the Democratic Party, largely because of racial issues.

Otherwise the Republican Party's attempts to create its own "big tent" have faltered. George Bush was supposed to make the GOP a Hispanic-friendly place. In this last election Hispanics voted more than 70 percent for Democratic candidates.

During the 20th century, congressional Democrats may have governed effectively not despite, but precisely because of, their heterogeneity. Democracy, after all, is a process whereby people with lots of different agendas come together to define a common good. It is a process that involves compromise, deal-making and operating pragmatically rather than ideologically. Given their intraparty experiences, Democrats simply have more practice doing all this than Republicans do.

During their 12 years in power, on the other hand, congressional Republicans did not play well with others. They governed only from their political base, relying on the wealthy and the evangelicals for support. They equated compromise with weakness, and set out to suppress those who offered other ideas. Their legacy is a bitterly divided nation. That bitterness came home to roost on Nov. 7.

Congressional deadlock is certainly a real possibility for the incoming Congress — but because of Republican intransigence, not internal disagreements within the Democratic Party. Democratic diversity — of ideas and experiences — has been the party's great strength since 1932.

Will Rogers may have been right that Democrats didn't constitute a well-organized party. But then, this is a messy, bumptious, diverse nation, not a nation of people who march neatly in rank and file. Who better than the Democratic Party to represent that?

Steven Conn is an associate professor in the history department at Ohio State University.