Does the Democratic Party Lack a Coherent Message?

Listening to the Democratic candidates in the primary season has made me question whether the Democratic party has a coherent message. It seems they focus on a laundry list of problems that the government could help people with without any coherent ideology to tie it all together.

I wondered why they can't just take something like the tenets of neo-liberalism and only talk about the anxieties of the day in the context of that ideology. Now that's a coherent ideology, I thought.

Then I realized the reason is that neo-liberals are just a subset of Democrats just as neo-cons are a subset of Republicans. Republican neo-cons believe in energy independence, while the regressive wing of the GOP wants to make life just a little harder for gay people. So you could cast Republican ideology as a laundry list too. It does seem like they have a greater divide yet do a better job avoiding the circular firing squad.

I have to remember that political parties need to be a big tent. A few months ago a retired factory worker told me that neo-liberalism destroyed the world she grew up in, and she's sort-of right. I didn't know what to say. That's why they need a big tent, which sometimes feels like a laundry list.

If broad tents stop working and the political parties collapse under their own weight, maybe that's okay. The framers of the Constitution wanted to discourage political factions. The parties, though, appear to be here to stay, so we have to work within the imperfect system we have.