The fortunes of political parties bob up and down. The Republican Party seemed all but dead after the elections of 1936, 1964 and 1974. In 1946, 1952, 1980, 1994 and 2002, it seemed on the way to permanent majority status. Today it is “dead” again. An interesting indicator is that David Frum, a first rate political commentator, has just written his second book bemoaning GOP decrepitude and proffering prescriptions for its ailments. The first one, titled Dead Right, appearing in early 1994, argued that the party’s future was hopeless unless it broke decisively from its reliance on conservative dogma. That analysis turned out to be dead wrong – which doesn’t mean, of course, that Mr. Frum is unprophetic this time around. There’s no Newt Gingrich in sight – not even New Gingrich is New Gingrich any more – and the Republican ship has picked up lots of barnacles over the past decade.
The plight of Ronald Reagan’s epigonoi is a topic for another time. Here I want to examine the presumptive high rider, the contemporary Democratic Party, and to call attention to what are, I think, overlooked aspects of its ideological and sociological profile.
The Democrats’ electoral base has three pillars: unionized and government workers, blacks and Hispanics. Those are the groups from which the party receives the bulk of its votes. Others, such as feminists, college professors and (to a rapidly diminishing extent) Jews, may be similarly lopsided in their voting patterns, but they are not very big.
Strikingly different is the party’s intellectual leadership, which is overwhelmingly upper class, affluent well-educated, and contemptuous of hoi polloi who “cling to guns and religion”. In manners, morals and ideals, a great gulf is fixed between this intelligentsia and the average Democrat (including the average black or Hispanic Democrat). At times it must be bridged on an ad hoc basis, as when the party occulted its advocacy of gun control laws. Elsewhere, bridges can’t be built at all: Radical feminism, same-sex marriage and affirmative action are nearly as unpopular with the Democratic as with the Republican base, but they are too precious to the Democratic intelligentsia to be abandoned or compromised. The work-around has been to maneuver them into the judicial system, out of sight of the ballot box. Vide the California Supreme Court’s decision today overturning a ban on same-sex marriage that voters had approved overwhelmingly. Gun control nearly followed the same course, except that the courts balked at expansive theories of gun makers’ and sellers’ liability for everything done with their products.
The one major area in which left-wing ideological preferences overlap with the interests and desires of the Democratic base is personal economic security. Liberals believe that the government can guarantee good jobs at good wages to everyone and provide an effective shield against financial misfortune. Voters with relatively low incomes and little capital to fall back on in an emergency would like to believe that, too. There lies the appeal of the progressive agenda of government management of the national economy.
Beyond purely materialistic concerns, though, the Left does not want to venture. Their voters are the segment of the population most harmed by crime, low educational standards, family instability and other social maladies. Yet politicians supremely confident that the government that can mesh all the gears of a $12 trillion economy are not much concerned about keeping downtowns safe at night or seeing that children are raised by intact families. In Barack Obama’s world famous speech on race, he uttered not a word about black-on-black crime, the scourges of illegitimacy and abortion, or the role of radicals (mostly white) in rendering both problems next to insoluble.
The radical domination over the Democratic platform shows up yet more blatantly in foreign policy. The Soros-Kossack wing – numerous, rich and voluble – stigmatizes the United States as the most dangerous and malign country on the planet, or perhaps the second worst after Israel. To accommodate them, the party has settled on a position of practical isolation from the rest of the world. It differs from classic isolationism in one respect: Instead of scorning foreign elites, the Democrats endow them with a veto over American actions abroad. The upshot is the same as an official policy of inaction, since these European bellwethers never want to go anywhere. Talk is their first, last and only resort.
Aggravating diplomatic and military passivity is the Democrats’ newfound hostility toward the free flow of goods and services across national boundaries. Peculiar as it seems, they imagine that the friends we gain by taking a soft line toward Islamofascism won’t be lost by our sinking the economies of the rest of the world through a resurgence of protectionism.
Prima facie, a political party whose leaders are actively hostile to its rank-and-file on a broad range of issues looks like a loser. What accounts for its recent success? One obvious explanation is that the Republican Party has simply become weaker. A corollary of an entrenched two-party system is that red’s loss must be blue’s gain. Another explanation, complementary to the first, is that the elite media have become clamorously and one-sidedly partisan to an extent never before seen in our country’s history. That development is very likely a consequence of the erosion of their information oligopoly. Partisanship can be a business strategy. Whatever the reason, the MSM remains the principal news source for much of the public, including the historical blue collar Democratic base. Thus people who are accustomed to voting Democratic hear little but shrill indictments of Republicans and lavish praise of Democrats. Why should they change their behavior? And why should those who have deviated to the GOP on past occasions do so again? Ordinary Americans can see the force of conservative arguments, as Ronald Reagan proved, but not if those arguments never reach them.
Perhaps those explanations are sufficient, but we should also consider what aspects of the Democrats’ program have a positive appeal. We have already identified one: The promise of security against economic hardship is highly attractive, so long as one can convince oneself that it is fulfillable and won’t turn the state into an all-powerful master.
Also attractive is the security that comes from shrinking the boundaries of the world. America’s rise to superpower status once was exhilarating, but the world proved to be complicated, dangerous and hard to deal with. How relaxing it would be to take no action without advance approval of the spokesmen for world opinion. How reassuring to face no competition from workers overseas. Life would again be peaceable and quiet, at least until we found ourselves alone in a world that rejected old-fashioned notions like personal freedom, private enterprise and consent of the governed.
When histories of our era are written, the modern Democratic Party will be a fascinating topic. It is a rare and paradoxical entity: a “party of the people” led by aristocrats and largely indifferent to popular concerns, a radical party whose primary attraction is the promise of peace, quiet and stagnation. Ultimately, I surmise, it will be seen as an experiment in persuading a majority to reverse the democratic ideal and freely return control of both state and society to a self-perpetuating, albeit non-hereditary and meritocratic, upper crust. Can government by mandarins become a reality in the modern West? If so, can it succeed? Those questions will be the stuff of a thousand learned tomes.
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