Take Dionne's position on the great canard, "Was Al Gore Too Much of a Populist?" (which is always proposed by people who forget that Gore WON the 2000 election by more than a half a million votes). Dionne's take: "He attacked big oil companies, polluters, HMOs, and big insurance companies. Does anybody think he lost voters by doing this?.... On many issues, the 'mainstream' is populist." Thank you, E. J.!

Dionne falls into the camp of those who urge Democrats to redefine the issues to their advantage. It is what Berkeley Professor George Lakoff calls framing. Up until now, the Republicans have been brilliant at framing (and deceiving), and the Democrats have been abysmal failures at framing (while being generally successful at being relatively honest). Deeply interested in the writings of Orwell, Dionne quotes him as observing: "If thought corrupts language, language also corrupts thought." This could be the Republican propaganda motto. Perhaps it is.

Like Paul Krugman, E. J. Dionne is one of those rare breed of modern columnists who is a serious researcher and scholar first, and a journalist second. Whereas Krugman is a professor at Princeton, Dionne is a Senior Fellow at the prestigious Brookings Institution. Dionne did once have a stint in journalism, but we'll forgive him that. This is a guy with a doctorate in philosophy from Oxford.

The point is that Krugman and Dionne are based in offices outside of the newspaper world but write columns for The New York Times and Washington Post, respectively. Because of their distance from the daily "corporate culture" of the papers they write for, they are able to offer a fresh, progressive approach. With Dionne, you get more light than heat, because he is analytical and thoughtful by education and temperament, which is an advantage to a strategic thinker. In his compelling book, he urges Democrats to strategically combine light AND heat to "stand up and fight back." This is his roadmap.

Here is the BuzzFlash.com interview with E. J. Dionne.

E. J. Dionne, Jr.: Well, one of the central themes of the book is the idea the Democrats became afraid of their own principles, or weren't certain of what their principles were. As I say in the book, Democrats and liberals, to a significant degree, have spent so much time saying who they’re not that nobody knows who they are. I've always loved that Corinthians quote because the point is if you don’t know who and what you’re fighting for, you will be, I think, utterly ineffective in the world, and especially in the world of politics.

BuzzFlash: In Chapter 4, you have what you entitle, "Talking the Other Guy’s Talk." It’s subtitled "Why Democrats Are Afraid of Their Own Principles.” There’s a quote from George Orwell in here: "If thought corrupts language, language also corrupts thought." Can you explain why you included that?

E. J. Dionne, Jr.: First, I love Orwell, and I promised myself that if I ever taught, the first essay I would assign, no matter what I was teaching, was "Politics and the English Language." I use that at the beginning of that chapter because its theme is that in three areas in particular -- the use of market language; the way they talk about government; and this debate about softness versus toughness -- progressives and Democrats seem given to using a language that is often alien to what they're trying to argue. The market language is the most dominant. I have a quote in the book from Ann Lewis, who said, "We used to call for immunizing little children against disease. Now we call it an investment in human capital."

I'm trying to argue there that the market is fine in what it does, but the market cannot do everything, and if a market logic pervades politics, it especially puts progressives, and I would also argue what you might call a certain kind of compassionate conservative, in a very difficult place.

For example, if a brilliant market economist made the case that the buying and selling of human beings made the labor market more efficient, would we suddenly abandon our opposition to slavery? Of course not. If a market economist showed that it actually increases productivity to invest all kinds of government money in well-off kids, and to cut all investments in poor kids, would we stop trying to lift up poor kids in the education system? Of course not. In the book I refer to using the other side's language and logic as speaking in a foreign tongue.

I think the same problem has arisen when liberals and progressives talk about government. There's always an apologetic tone about using government. That wasn't the case in the New Deal era or in the Truman era. It's true, of course, that a government can be oppressive and inefficient, but government can also expand human and civil rights. I argue in the book that African Americans are among the most loyal progressives or liberals precisely because they understand better than anyone that a government acting forcefully can expand people’s rights. And for African Americans, it happened first with a strong federal government that ended slavery, and second, through the civil rights laws. Progressives need to be less afraid than they have sometimes been about speaking plainly about their principles, which are actually at odds with some of the dominant language in the culture right now.

BuzzFlash: The Republicans seem very good at using language. The term "compassionate conservative" is perhaps the most over-used example of positioning language that allegedly Karl Rove came up with. Do you rate them much more capable at using language, at least in terms of appealing to the public?

E. J. Dionne, Jr.: I think there was a period when Clinton was putting together the projects, both political and intellectual, that helped him get elected president, when he and the people around him, including both new Democrats and liberals, were actually quite skilled at using language. To some degree, I think the Bush project learned from the Clinton project. I think Bush understood going in that there were problems left over for conservatives that he had to solve if he was going to get elected. I did an interview with Bush in 1999, which I quote some in the book, where he talked about the importance of putting a compassionate face on conservatism. Of course, we knew just whose face he had in mind. The original formulation of compassionate conservatism was, I am told, first used by his father in the 60s. I don’t think he consciously took it from his father, but somebody once told me -- and I’ve wanted to track it down -- that his father actually used that term in a speech.  Dan Coats, the former Senator and Ambassador to Germany, was also one of the first people in this era to use it. And it's no accident that Dan Coats' speech writer was Mike Gerson, Bush's great speech writer. But what Bush did with compassionate conservatism was clever on so many different levels. He linked it not to a sense of social injustice or structural injustice, but rather to human failure that can be overcome through the compassion of others, essentially a conversion experience. And that’s where he got to the faith-based organizations.

Now in my experience, there are two kinds of compassionate conservatives. There are the real ones and there are the less real ones. Over the years, I have run into a number of conservatives who really do have troubled consciences about poverty, and they really did think that it was important for conservatives to come up with their own anti-poverty agenda. Many of them were religious; they are Christians and felt this obligation, and for them it was real. I think there’s another kind of compassionate conservative; they are mainly interested in dismantling the state, in reducing government programs. They see moving money over to the faith-based groups as a way, over time, of dismantling government.

This difference between these two kinds of conservatives is, in a sense, a contradiction within compassionate conservatism, because people who are in the first camp, the real ones, tend to understand -- even if they’re critical of the welfare state and traditional government programs -- that many of the government programs we have are actually necessary if you’re serious about lifting up the poor. The second group seems more interested simply in dismantling government. Then Bush rhetorically was in the first camp, and I know some of those compassionate conservatives really believe Bush believes this. Yet the budgets he proposed, the tax cuts he proposed, never fit in with anything that really looked like compassionate conservatism.

I think what you’ve seen until very recently is that he largely abandoned talk of compassionate conservatism and is now talking, if you will, a martial conservatism in the wake of 9/11. But as the campaign gets closer, compassionate conservatism is getting back into his speeches. I think that’s happening because there’s a problem for the president in the middle part of the electorate, among independents and moderate Republicans. So I think they realize they’ve got to pump up this talk again.

BuzzFlash: You're a scholar, a fellow at Brookings, a syndicated newspaper columnist read around the country. You’re a person who believes in ideas, the written word. We have to ask, because this is a topic we often deal with on BuzzFlash -- what is it about our technological age that image and branding, for at least a significant portion of the American population, override the articulate investigation of empirical data and experience that someone like yourself brings to bear?

E. J. Dionne, Jr.: Somebody once said that democracy is based on the hunch that most of the people are right most of the time, and I believe that. My friend Sam Popkin, who’s a professor at the University of California at San Diego, wrote a very interesting book some years ago called The Reasoning Voter. And it’s got the best blurb on it from James Carville, who said, "If you must read two books on politics this year, read The Reasoning Voter twice." Sam’s theory is that voters who are not necessarily utterly engaged in politics use information shortcuts to learn what they need to know before they vote. We’re talking here just for the moment just about voting. And the information shortcuts include the advertising, the snippets they might hear on the radio or catch on television. It might include something they glanced at on the web. And that on balance, voters tend to support the candidate who comes closest to their view of the world. I’m oversimplifying Sam's argument here, but I do think that’s true. And I think the data eventually have an effect.

If you look at this election, there was an enormous rallying around the president after 9/11. In a lot of ways, I think that was a perfectly rational response to a time of trouble. In a chapter of the book called "He’s Ours. He’s All We’ve Got," I recall a conversation I had shortly after 9/11 with a Democratic consultant.  Asked about his attitude toward Bush in the wake of the attack, he says: "I actually went into church and knelt down and prayed that he’d be successful. He's ours. He’s all we’ve got." Over time, the voters sort of pay attention to what’s happening. It's not necessarily that they pay attention to large piles of empirical data any more than all baseball fans pay attention to ERAs and slugging percentages. But they get a sense of what’s going on.

I think what you've seen with the president in the last six months is that voters have looked at the economy and said, yeah, there’s some recovery, but it hasn’t affected me very much. And they look at Iraq and say: I'm not sure what we ought to do, but whatever we should do, they’re not doing it. There's a mess over there, and they’re asking why. So what you’re seeing in this great middle of the electorate --- moderate voters, independents, moderate Republicans --- the data is not in the form of lots of numbers; it's in the form of experience and seeing what's going on. Lincoln was right: you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. I have faith that democracy ends up working.

If I could make one more point on this -- the late Christopher Lasch argued that the beauty of authentic argument in a democracy is that people are willing to put their own views at risk. By that definition, a lot of the argument we're seeing these days is not authentic. But if you do engage in that process, you end up, through argument, receiving a lot of information. I think that’s part of what's happening on the web right now, on more partisan web sites. Lasch concludes that democracy may not be the most efficient form of government, but it ought to be the most educational form of government. If you look at our history, we haven’t done badly as a people in coming to the right judgment. Sometimes it takes us awhile to get there, but I think that's true of many of us in our own lives.

BuzzFlash: On page 181, there is a paragraph that seems to be sort of the Rosetta Stone about one of the basic conundrums of American politics. I'll read the one sentence that seems to be central to what you discuss in your book about the contradiction within the American people. “In general” -- and I’m quoting from you -- "Americans agree with conservatives on the need to limit government, but they tend to like the government programs that liberals have enacted." We would add that Americans tend to dislike programs that don’t benefit them, but embrace and support programs that do benefit them. You go on to say that one of the failures of the Democrats is to embrace that second part about what government does well for people, and to try to use market language and other language, but that are kind of afraid of saying that government does some things well. Beyond how the Democrats have mishandled that, isn't that an essential contradiction in the American people?

E. J. Dionne, Jr.: Senator Fritz Hollings once said a wonderful thing, and I couldn't quote it in this book because I quoted it in an earlier book -- and I’m going to paraphrase -- he talked about running into a man who fought in World War II, went to college on the G. I. Bill, bought a house with F.H.A. loan, drove back and forth to work on the interstate highways. He got an S.B.A. loan for his business. His students got some federal student loans. His parents were happily retired on Social Security and Medicare. And he said he was voting for Ronald Reagan to get the government off his back.

Of course, there are contradictions in our approach to this. And again, I think it is human nature that we tend to be for the things that help us, and not necessarily for the things that help somebody else. Reinhold Neibuhr, one of my heroes, a great theologian, once said that original sin is the only empirically verifiable doctrine of the Christian church. So, yes, we are capable of acting that way. But I think it gets worse than it has to when progressives just stop making the case altogether that collective action, community action, government action, is not only necessary, but can actually be a social good. I think part of it does depend on making the case to everybody, as Hollings implicitly did in that speech, that lots of people benefit from collective action.

Secondly, I think there has to be less fear of saying we ought to do things because they’re the right thing to do. That kind of language is now associated with conservatives on matters of personal morality. Indeed, I think sometimes -- and I talk about this in the book -- that when you use the word "morality" these days, everybody's expecting you to talk about sex, and they're never expecting you to talk about justice or compassion. Progressives need to be more explicit that government action can work -- reform what doesn’t work and celebrate what does work. There are certain things we ought to do simply because they're the right things to do, and that includes helping the homeless and helping the poor. No one who works should be poor. That was an old Clinton line. I think that does appeal to a basic sense of social morality that people have.

Having said all that, do I think that selfishness is part of the human condition? Of course it is. It's part of all of us. But I think people always have an instinctive sense that there’s something wrong with it. I think progressives should be less afraid of speaking in explicit moral terms and say, "We don’t want to live in a society that is indifferent to people who are suffering." I think there’s an audience for that. There are a lot of conservative christians -- with a small "c," as opposed to organized Christian Conservatives -- whose views on social and economic matters are moderate to liberal. They respond to that appeal because it’s very much a part of who they are.

BuzzFlash: On page 181, you also said that the Democrats have become intellectually and politically flabby in embracing the positive aspects of government, where government represents caring for the community as a whole, caring for our seniors, caring for our youngest, caring for our medically needy. You describe the propensity among Americans to embrace this part of government as operational liberals. Now this whole word "liberal" -- and you discuss this a little bit in here -- is a controversial word, a red-flag word. It means all sorts of different things to different people. But you point out a few paragraphs later that liberals have never been anti-capitalist. In fact, most people argue that Roosevelt saved the United States perhaps from a leftist revolution, if not communism, at least something different than what we have.

E. J. Dionne, Jr.: Or perhaps fascism.

BuzzFlash: Or fascism. But he actually was a savior of capitalism. What do you make of the word liberal? How should the Democrats deal with that word? Should they run away from it? Should they redefine it?

E. J. Dionne, Jr.: You just reminded me of one of my favorite New Yorker cartoons, where two very wealthy men are in their club in overstuffed chairs, and one says to the other, "I don’t understand it. Every time these socialist Democrats get elected, I make a pile."

There is a sense that it's taken liberalism to save capitalism. Liberalism, progressivism, or, for that matter, in Europe, social democracy, have saved capitalism. One of the fun things I got to do in the last year was to write a piece for the American Legion magazine.  Their editors called and asked me to write an essay defending liberalism for their audience. I began with this great speech that John F. Kennedy gave when he accepted the Liberal party nomination -- when New York State had its Liberal party. And he began by saying that, if by liberal you mean soft on defense, being for wasteful spending, and all the other negative things people associate with liberalism, then I’m not a liberal. But if by liberal you mean -- and then he listed support for Social Security, help for the elderly, more assistance to the schools, and listed all the parts of liberalism people like -- then, he said, I am proud to be a liberal.

I've gone back and forth on the word itself. I think everybody figures: why should you hang yourself up on a word? Lately, partly, I suppose, because the title of this book, Stand Up Fight Back, reflects my mood, I'm starting to use the word in describing myself more because I'm wondering if allowing that word to be demonized was, in fact, part of a larger surrender of principle and of the rhetorical high ground. The truth is the history of the word is complicated. In Europe, and for a long time in our country, liberal referred essentially to free-market conservatives or libertarians, really. The social movements that are the forebears of modern liberalism were called progressive at the turn of the century, or for that matter, with Eugene Debbs, they were called socialists. But they were broadly called progressives. FDR is the person who adopted the word liberal and thought it was a positive word. He used it in place of progressive. Of course, now you have the situation where a lot of liberals are replacing the word liberal with progressive. I've seen polling on this. The word progressive definitely polls better than liberalism.

But I think that by completely abandoning the L-word and failing to defend it, we abandon an entire tradition, and we make it easier to demonize the tradition from which we come. So these days, my inclination is to try to retrieve and defend the word, mostly as an effort to defend a broader tradition.

BuzzFlash: Toward the end of your book are two lists, and it seems what you’re urging is for Democrats to redefine the debate. It's something at BuzzFlash we’ve hammered on -- the Democrats have, for a large part, played a defensive political game, at least for the last three or four years. Clinton certainly was into defining terms until he was blind sided by the impeachment proceedings, but even Clinton spent some time on his defensive. In fact, the first few months of his administration were defined as being on the fence about gays in the military.

E. J. Dionne, Jr.: I write that Democrats are like the stereotypical old couple who relive fights from 25 years earlier just to feel young again. I read that to my wife and she said: "That’s a good line. You’re not talking about us, are you?" And I replied, "No, we haven’t been married long enough." So part of this list is to say -- why are we having arguments with each other that are 20 years old or more? Enough already. For example, big government vs. small government. Well, if you are in favor of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, education spending, environmental, worker and civil rights protections, and consumer protection, you're already for a fairly big government. Why engage the issue that way at all? The right way to frame the question is to ask: Whose side is the government on, and yes, can you do these things in an efficient way? Or, take the question of whether progressives, Democrats, are pro-business or anti-business. As you just said, the American center left has never been anti-business. It's wanted to regulate business. It's sometimes wanted to regulate capitalism in order to save it.

I was on this conservative business show some years ago, and a caller was saying various anti-government things. And I said, "Look, if you didn’t have a Securities and Exchange Commission, and Federal Deposit Insurance, you would probably be a lot poorer than you are now. You certainly couldn't invest and save with any confidence." So these pro-business or anti-business arguments are useless. One of the things I argue in the book, quoting David Dreyer, who used to work in the Clinton administration, to the effect that the real issue is not pro- or anti-business, or even worker vs. owner. It's now insider vs. outsider. The outsider can be an investor or the outsider can be an employee. So that's a useless argument. One more I talk about is populist vs. mainstream. Al Gore took a lot of grief because he went after HMOs and big insurance companies, and big oil companies and polluters. Does anybody think he lost votes in going after those groups? On many issues, the mainstream is populist. We repeat old debates we’re used to, but they're empty debates, and they are also politically useless.

BuzzFlash: Why do you think the Democrats are afraid then, and caught in this old mindset? A Zogby poll I read indicates the American population in general tends to be incredibly suspicious of motivations of corporations, and yet it's viewed as sort of a dangerous thing to say we have to protect ourselves from corporate greed.

E. J. Dionne, Jr.: Well, I think Eliot Spitzer, the attorney general of New York, has given a lot of people lessons on how to be pro-capitalist and tough on business at the same time, and be very populist. I think we've gone through stages in our history and moments when government has been held in higher esteem than business, and other periods when business was held in higher esteem than government. I think in the Gilded Age, business was held in higher esteem. In the progressive era, and especially during the New Deal, government was held in higher esteem. I think the majority of Americans felt that the New Deal helped save them from economic ruin or at least protected them to some degree in a period of downturn. The combination of the New Deal and the success of Roosevelt and Truman in waging World War II left us with government in very high esteem until the latter half of the 1960s.

I think because of a collection of events, beginning with Vietnam and moving to Watergate, and then going to Iran Contra later on, you had a period beginning somewhere around '72-'73 when government fell in popular esteem and business rose. So I think Democrats understood that they were operating in a climate in which business' reputation was much higher than government's. But I think they overreacted to that.

BuzzFlash: At a minimum, people expect corporations to behave responsibly. You expect an individual citizen not to break the law, not to cheat people, not to mislead their stockholders, not to embezzle, not to put all their money in offshore accounts, legal or illegal. And yet the Democrats, on a whole, still seem a bit timid about advocating aggressively for appropriate corporate citizenship.

E. J. Dionne, Jr.: I think that one of the reasons John Edwards captured a lot of people's imagination was his formulation about two Americas. It was very interesting how he described them. He didn't describe it as the rich and the poor. He described it as the very, very privileged and powerful and the rest of us. Always better to have 98 percent on your side instead of 55 percent on your side. But I think that formulation really came straight out of this period we have been through -- the combination of an economic downturn that hit very hard at people in the middle and the bottom, and this period of corporate corruption. So I think there is a change. One of the things about this book, even though I talk in the title about Democratic wimps, is that in the end it is a hopeful book because I do see a lot of things going on out there that create a real opportunity for people who are on the progressive or liberal side of politics.

I think people are starting to learn some of these lessons that I talk about in the book, and I think you're seeing it institutionally as well. You're seeing it with the presence of all the progressive web sites. which I argue are, for this moment, the progressive answer to conservative and right-wing talk radio back in the '90s. You're seeing much more aggressiveness in the intellectual world -- John Podesta's think tank, the Center for American Progress. There's a lot going on out there, and I think intellectually people on our side of the fence are tired of getting rolled. I think that's why the Dean campaign took off.

BuzzFlash: We call ourselves a pro-democracy news site and keep bringing up the issue of one person, one vote. From time to time, we get e-mails from people who object, who say: You're wrong. This is not a democracy; this is a republic. Are we a republic or are we a democracy? Or does it matter?

E. J. Dionne, Jr.: At the risk of sounding like Bill Clinton, we are a democratic republic. It's no accident that the Jeffersonians were called democratic Republicans. And I think both sides of this argument have a point. People who talk about a republic -- yes, sometimes they come out of a tradition which did not want to extend rights broadly -- but for the most part, what they're saying is we Americans believe in limited Constitutional government. That's a phrase conservatives use a lot. But it's also very much what liberals are about. It's why the American Civil Liberties Union exists. The progressives also believe in active but limited government. There are certain things we don’t want the government to have the power to do, but the difference between just a straight Republican and a democratic Republican is that we, on the democratic Republican side, believe that people do rule. We believe in a fundamental equality of every citizen. And we think that the government can act in ways that expand rather than contract rights. We are both of those things.

In terms of states' rights, I talk about this some in the book, and I've written a lot about this in the column. There is so much inconsistency, especially, I think, on the conservative side of the fence, but maybe that reflects my bias. There is so much inconsistency in the invocation of rights. Congressman Barney Frank has talked about this a lot. Wherever states are moving aggressively to regulate business, conservatives come along and try to use the federal government to preempt the state regulations and write weaker national regulations. So that even on states' rights, conservatives are often not consistent with their own principles. God bless them, there are some who are. But for the most part, when it comes to states challenging businesses, they want the feds to take over. Eliot Spitzer had this fight with Republicans in Congress and won it, when the Republicans were trying to limit his capacity to act in New York and give all the authority to the SEC. Clearly they were trying to block the progressive things he was doing.

BuzzFlash: To quote from your ending: "A progressive patriotism would insist that a free republic will not prosper if too many of its citizens are deprived of opportunities, of health care, of education, of hope. It would seek to make the United States a beacon not only of freedom but also of justice. A progressive patriotism would allow us to cast aside the politics of revenge. It would declare that we are all in this together. That’s an old-fashioned idea that would offer a bold alternative to a status quo that is dividing and failing our country." Are we one community? Or are we a community that embraces diverse communities? And in some ways, is that part of the debate between liberals and right-wing people?

E. J. Dionne, Jr.: Actually I think you ended with a very hard question, because I think there is a profound debate among liberals themselves on this question of diversity and the definition of community, because liberals, I think, try to have it both ways. They're probably right to try to have it both ways, which is to say we have a national community in which all of us are created equal and should be treated equally, and we have a national community in that we respond together as a nation to certain challenges, whether they be challenges from abroad -- terrorism, at the moment -- or whether they be challenges to our fairness as a society in the workings of the economy. In the New Deal era, we really did respond as a nation.

On the other hand, liberals have always been committed to openness to the various communities that people create on their own. For myself, I think that progressives have been better at defending particularism than at defending the idea of a larger, more inclusive, national or universalistic project. I quote Todd Gitlin’s book, The Twilight of Common Dreams. I think the danger for progressives is when we become less than the sum of our parts -- when we emphasize all our differences, whether they be differences of gender or ethnicity or race, and underplay what we have in common. I think the struggle between the universal and particular will always be with us. It will never be fully resolved. In this book, talking about progressive patriotism, I think we find ourselves in a moment when we do have to think of a set of universal principles and some national goals that are consistent with respect for the rights of individuals and communities. I think this is a moment when we should be serious about the idea of patriotism. And I think the paradox for some is that progressive ideas have advanced farther at times when the country was in a genuinely patriotic mood. There was more social progress made because of the spirit of national unity created in the Second World War than in most other periods in our history. No, I’m not recommending war. But I think patriotism itself does not have to veer into nationalism or chauvinism, and I think patriotism is something that liberals and progressives should not only feel comfortable with but embrace.

BuzzFlash: When we feel part of one community, of a national community, we tend to make more progress on social issues.

E. J. Dionne, Jr.: Right. We're more willing to share each other's burdens at moments like that. We're more willing to lift up others. It was very hard to maintain racial segregation after so many African Americans gave their lives and fought for the country in World War II. I think World War II and the equality of sacrifice in that war was the death blow to segregation. That's just one example. I’m a big advocate of what you might call G. I. Bill politics. I like G. I. Bill politics because it's about two things simultaneously. It says that each of us does have a responsibility to the community, whether to serve in the military in time of war, or also to serve in the Peace Corps or AmeriCorps. There are a lot of forms of service people can give to the country. At the same time, the G. I. Bill was also about promoting upward mobility. There are millions of Americans who would not have had a chance to buy a home or go to college but for the benefits of the G. I. Bill. I think this kind of reciprocal politics that marries rights and responsibilities is a politics that is very much out of the progressive tradition, and I think it'’s very much out of the American tradition.

BuzzFlash: E. J. Dionne, thanks so much, and thanks for this wonderful book, Stand Up and Fight Back. Good luck with it.

E. J. Dionne, Jr.: Well, thank you so much for doing this. This was fun.