Democrats who don't dirty their hands with politics

Democracy requires more than one party or at least more than one faction. In Massachusetts, we've managed to do o.k. with schisms within the Democratic Party, even now that we have a Democratic governor for the first time in nearly two decades.

Much of the South has two conservative parties. It's hard to see how that's better for democracy.

In any case, I think Democrats are less dangerous in unified government than Republicans. The reason is that Democrats are more fractious and prone to dissent, even from each other. Jimmy Carter and Tip O'Neill butted heads, for example.

David Brooks's Republicans who "hate" Duhbya nonetheless keep their mouths shut in public. They follow the corporate model, where direction flows from the top and fealty is required for continued membership. (This looks like leadership, but it's often really just coercion.)

I'll worry about the Democrats becoming unbeatably dominant when they show the slightest understanding that they need to be in politics before they get to do governance. Right now, I don't see them coalescing around a pointed message that distinguishes them from the Bushists.

The very least they should be doing is forcing the Republicans to obstruct popular law every week. The Dems need to make their opponents pay a political price for thwarting the will of the people. To do this, they should have a consistent media narrative that they repeat over and over and over and over again until the media can remember it. But despite the last 25 years of Republican PR and propaganda techniques as an example, they can't seem to manage that.