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Sunday, November 14, 2004
Along The Democrats’ Whine Trail
From this Robert Kaiser editorial in the Washington Post, we can see that the spate of denial among Democrats and their media boosters has not yet ended:
Democrats older than 55 or so think it’s easy to explain who they are. But their litany of heroes and accomplishments, from FDR and Social Security to Bill Clinton’s balanced budgets, consists of things that must look to younger voters like history, or ancient history. Next August, the Social Security program will celebrate its 70th birthday!
Sorry, it’s not that Democratic Party “heroes and accomplishments” are fossils; it’s that they’ve done immense harm to the country.
When Reagan became the first new Republican to win the White House in 1980, he ignored his predecessors. Dwight D. Eisenhower had left office 20 years before, and Nixon was still treated like a pariah, but this didn’t matter. Reagan was a new voice for a new America, an America that had become, in the 1970s, a country dominated not by the working class, but by the beneficiaries of the post-World War II boom, the great new middle class. Somehow Reagan felt relevant to a majority of voters who liked him and his straightforward views.
But this is to make a very tendentious, highly questionable use of the term “middle class.” The “middle class” has existed at almost all times in our history. Its position relative to the “upper” and “lower” classes has varied. At one time, the distinction between the “middle” and “lower” classes was how assured one was of having dinner; today it’s about whether one can afford a Lexus or a high-definition TV.
Traditional Democrats resist the suggestion that the country needs a “new” Democratic Party for a new age. Indeed, many traditionalists regard the New Democrats as closet conservatives who want to move the party to the center.
They might not be conservatives, but they do recognize a successful message when one shellacks them at the polls.
Democrats won’t—and shouldn’t—turn on their history in the same way, but it is instructive to note that the GOP of Reagan and afterward was constructed independently by people with no great regard for their party’s traditions and history. What they had was a determination to march it forcefully in a new direction. They did this by dint of patient and expensive effort.
Unmentioned here is that the Reagan Era activists believed in that new direction; it wasn’t merely a tactic for regaining power.
The new conservatives were tapping into a demographic shift that obliterated the America that gave rise to the Democratic Party. By early 1973, the postwar economic boom that transformed America was coming to an end, but not before it had created, for the first time, a middle-class majority. From FDR to LBJ, Democratic liberalism had been sustained by a working-class America that all but disappeared in the 1970s. The passion for tax-cutting that caught on in the second half of that decade (California’s Proposition 13, curtailing property taxes, ignited it in 1978) was the first political signal that times had changed. Reagan was elected president two years later, and the era of the new conservatism was underway.
Beginning, arguably, with Proposition 13, the new conservatism has evoked grass-roots enthusiasm that Democrats can only envy. Bush’s victory this month was made possible by the Republicans’ ability to identify, register and turn out more new or sporadic voters than the Democrats did.
Mr. Kaiser appears to believe that taxes were at some point a popular thing. Your Curmudgeon hates to destroy any man’s cherished illusions, but…
Ronald Reagan offered America a simple-sounding alternative approach to a new era. He promised to be strong on defense, low on taxes and tough on soft-headed liberals. Helped by his own genial personality, he created a winning combination that is still the essence of modern Republicanism.
Ronald Reagan articulated to the American people the essence of their own beliefs about what America stands for. He didn’t sell them an untried new package that won them over with glitz or through rhetorical power; he told them that he believed as they did.
Republicans have successfully ridiculed and demonized Democrats as the party of gay marriage, or the party of unilateral disarmament, or the party of dirty songs and violent movies, or the party of divorce, abortion, free birth control for teenagers and the banning of school prayer. They’ve succeeded because all these labels contain an iota of truth, and, much more important, because the Democrats have no coherent view of themselves that could displace them.
A party dominated by a bevy of quarrelsome special-interest groups and a pervasive, half-guilty conviction that freedom, property rights, and international assertiveness are somehow wrong can hardly concoct any sort of message for American public consumption, much less a “coherent view of themselves.”
“You always know where I stand,” Bush said throughout this campaign. The 51 percent who voted for the president in this election knew what he meant, and liked the sound of it. But no Democrat could credibly say anything like that today, because, both as a party and as individuals, the Democrats’ belief systems are muddled, and do not resonate with many millions of Americans.
Finally, a glimmer of insight! “Belief systems”—note the plural—is exactly correct. There can be no integrated Democratic message because there is no integrated Democratic Party; it’s merely a collection of power-seekers and rented allies. “What you are speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson.
There are certainly openings Democrats could exploit. Yes, America is a conservative society. It always has been. But it is a particular and mostly good-hearted brand of conservatism. We believe in God, revere family, love hometowns, see ourselves as gentle and benevolent folk who care for one another, and for foreigners in need too. Even the newest immigrants appreciate the most fundamental conservative attributes of American life, beginning with the reliable rule of law.
If Mr. Kaiser believes that he’s describing typical Democratic Party loyalists, he’s badly deluded. Indeed, he’s enumerated the precise reasons why the Democrats are becoming a shrunken minority party. He should spend some time reading Democratic Underground, to say nothing of Kos, Atrios, and Oliver Willis. He should reflect on the large numbers of Democratic bellwethers (and their followers) who have openly sworn that they’ll leave the country because the GOP has retained control of Washington. Those are today’s typical Democrats, not Mr. Kaiser’s Norman Rockwell figurines.
But we are also, polls make clear, a tolerant and moderate people. Democrats could become the party of tolerance, meaning tolerance for everyone: Bible readers, gay couples and Bible-reading gay couples alike. There is a strain of intolerance in today’s conservative Republicanism, and that’s an opportunity for the Democrats as they try to bring new people into their tent.
More self-delusion, with a dollop of slander for flavoring. To become such a party would require the Democrats to jettison the most important special interests keeping the current party afloat: the Northeastern liberal-feminist elite, the entertainment moguls, the moral and cultural relativists, the transnational progressivists, and the purveyors of unearned guilt for racial and ethnic advantage.
Americans also believe in economic fairness. Most Americans say the Bush administration’s policies principally help the wealthy. Most Americans aren’t wealthy. This is a potential political opening, but only if the Democrats can offer a plausible path to a fairer society. Just bashing Republicans won’t do it.
Pure nonsense. All but about 20% of Americans are wealthy. More, they’re aware of how wealthy they could be if only they could curb Washington’s appetite for power and revenue. It’s the very wealthy—the John Kerrys and John Edwardses, the George Soroses and Stephen Bings—who side most consistently with the Democrats. Why else would the Democratic Party refuse, year after year, to disclose the details of their fundraising and the average size of donations to them?
And a neoconservative foreign policy is hardly a popular platform—couldn’t Democrats come up with a believable approach to national security that actually makes sense?
The worst self-delusion of all. It would have been closer to true before Black Tuesday, but still less true than not. A policy of aggressive engagement in those lands that have given rise to international terrorism, coupled with a cold-shouldered withdrawal from those nations whose governments have attempted to obstruct us, is the most popular international posture since World War II. President Bush’s absolute refusal to bend on it, despite its difficulties and costs, was the true key to his re-election; it persuaded voters that he was sincere, in contrast to his endlessly waffling opponent. The unwillingness to modify one’s views for popularity’s sake stands near the heart of what most of us mean by “moral values.”
What won’t work is some evocation of the past. Yesterday is not America’s thing; tomorrow is. Republicans have found a voice for the 21st century—not one that swept the nation, just 51 percent of it. Can the Democrats find a way to match it? Or will they just keep on whistling?
If we could have excluded the Old Media’s undisguised support of John Kerry and Democratic campaigns of vote fraud from the election results, how much larger would that 51% have been?
Wake up, Mr. Kaiser. The country knows itself better than you do.
For a party to wrest America’s affections away from Republican-style conservatism, it would have to be even more American than the GOP. That is, it would have to be more committed to individual liberty, free markets, low taxes, light regulations, legal stability, judicial restraint, and a Teddy Roosevelt-style attitude toward international affairs. Though the Democratic Party did fit that role in the past—in the days of Andrew Jackson and Grover Cleveland—it cannot do so today. The odds are poor that it ever will again.
