Comment: What Would a Good Democratic Argument Shop Look?

There’s no evidence that the Democrats have a real argument shop. The Republicans clearly do. They develop a line, they disseminate it among their party, and they flood the media with it. Individual Democrats think and talk on their own, but there appears to be neither an institutional facility for developing arguments, nor a strategy for disseminating the arguments.

One stock response to this observation is that Democrats are by nature individualists. You can’t coordinate them. You might as well try herding cats. That’s the stock response. Forget it. Anyone who thinks Democratic politicians are individualists is a romantic divorced from reality. Group-think is as prevalent among Democrats as among any group. More to the point, the party can’t do without a serious, well-staffed, well-run argument shop. So let’s just do it.

This is not to say that an argument shop implies the sort of borg-like party discipline that the Republicans suffer under. A Democratic argument shop should simply develop arguments and provide them as suggestions to individual office-holders and other talkers. If the arguments don’t seem persuasive and effective to the talkers, then the talkers shouldn’t go with them.

But enough of that. What should a Democratic argument shop look like? I’ll take this up in the next post.