Circling the Drain: The Death of the Democratic Party
After reading the news stories of 2003, 2004 and early 2005, I have come to the conclusion that the Democratic Party is committing suicide before our eyes. They are like a star being sucked into a black hole, cutting loose with a final scream of energy before momentum carries it beyond the event horizon. If their current irrational behavior continues, I predict they'll go the way of the Whigs, and be eliminated as a national party by the end of this decade.Since 1994 the Democrats have lost control of Congress, their majority among the voters, and most recently their minds. Now it seems that if you give their leaders two solutions to a problem, they will consistently pick the wrong one.
For example, they can't win on a national scale without the South. I have checked election records all the way back to 1800, and in every election the Democrats won, they carried at least four southern states. Bill Clinton got the minimium of four states from the Confederacy in both 1992 and 1996, while four recent Democratic candidates (McGovern, Mondale, Gore and Kerry) didn't win any southern states at all.
Moreover, I have noticed that of the seventeen Democratic presidents we have had, eleven of them were Southerners. Those eleven were Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, James K. Polk, Andrew Johnson, Woodrow Wilson (don't be fooled by his career in New Jersey, he was born in Virginia and raised in Georgia), Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. For the six Yankee Democrats, special circumstances can explain why each of them got elected. Martin Van Buren ran on his connections with the very popular Jackson; note that this only worked for him once. Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan were compromise candidates, nominated because they didn't take a strong stand either for or against slavery. Thus, they got the votes of both Northerners and Southerners who thought preserving the Union was the most important issue. Grover Cleveland faced the dirtiest Republican campaign of the nineteenth century, the first time he won. The second time he won, he was up against an extremely uncharismatic opponent (one book I read described Benjamin Harrison as "looking like a medieval gnome and having the handshake of a wilted petunia") and had some help from a strong third party, the Populists. Franklin Roosevelt had much in common with the previous Democratic candidate, Alfred E. Smith, who lost by a landslide in 1928, but desperation caused by the Great Depression made all the difference in his victory. John F. Kennedy barely pulled it off through several minor factors that worked in his favor:
- He was a real war hero, whose wounds, decorations and military record could not be questioned.
- His wife was one of the classiest first ladies to ever grace Washington. (Can anyone imagine Teresa Heinz Kerry in that role?)
- He wrote an inspiring book (Profiles In Courage) before running for the presidency. I don't remember anyone getting excited over Algore's Earth in the Balance.
- He had a charm and vigor that even Republicans could admire.
- He wasn't as liberal as the New England politicians that came after him. In fact, if JFK was alive today, I believe he would have become a Republican by now.
"The more Maureen (Dowd) gets on 'Meet the Press' and writes those columns, the redder these states get. I mean, they don't want some high brow hussy from New York City explaining to them that they're idiots and telling them that they're stupid." -- Georgia Senator Zell Miller, commenting on the arrogance of New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd
Now the Dems seem intent on alienating the rest of their coalition, except maybe for the arts-n-croissants crowd. Do they really think blacks and Hispanics will continue voting for them, after the way they treated Condoleeza Rice and Alberto Gonzalez? Only six Democratic senators voted for Gonzalez, one of them being my state's Bill Nelson, thank God. And their stand on gay marriage is a big turnoff to blacks, Hispanics, blue-collar workers and the elderly, all of which traditionally voted Democratic in the past.
The Democrats also seem to be like the Bourbons of eighteenth-century France, forgetting what they should remember, and remembering what they should forget. They did not learn, for example, that Americans don't like politicians who refuse to work, which prompted South Dakota voters to get rid of Tom Daschle, after he became the Senate's "weapon of crass obstruction." Instead, they picked Harry Reid as the new Senate Minority Leader, who promised (and delivered) all the obstructionism of Daschle, twice the hatred, and half the intelligence. Reid's favorite tactic is name calling; so far he has called President Bush a "loser," Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas an "embarrassment," and said that UN Ambassador John Bolton is "abominable, mean, unreasonable and bizarre." It won't surprise me if he calls the next person he doesn't like a "poo-poo head."
Finally, the Democratic Party appears to be bankrupt of new ideas. In the 2004 elections the Democrats did not have a viable alternative to the Republican platform. Nobody knew what John Kerry stood for; I don't think even Kerry knows what he stands for, except to oppose whatever George W. Bush is for. They seemed to think that incoherent rage and personal attacks on the Republicans would carry the day (see Harry Reid above), and when it didn't, they declared electoral fraud or called the voters stupid. That was the longest and most intense election campaign of my lifetime, and throughout it, I never met a real Kerry supporter. All the people I met who had a political opinion were either Bush supporters or Bush haters; I didn't consider "Bush haters" to be Kerry supporters because if the Democrats had nominated a baboon to run against Bush, most of them would have voted for the monkey anyway.
In previous essays I have given two little-mentioned reasons why the Democrats are no longer the majority party: they have aborted a big chunk of their next generation, and instead of offering their own ideas, Democrats simply say "No" to Republican ideas. It must be depressing to belong to such a party. To that I'll add a third reason for the decline; even our women look better than theirs these days!
Apparently liberalism now means the opposite of what it used to mean. Liberals used to be populists; now they're elitists. Whereas they used to favor human rights and the spread of democracy, now they don't care; note their lack of enthusiasm for the recent elections in Afghanistan and Iraq, and how Jimmy Carter went from being the human rights president to the former president who never met a dictator he didn't like. The Democratic Party used to portray itself as "the party of love"; now, except on the gay-marriage issue, it's the party of hate. Most telling of all, liberals used to embrace change for its own sake, but now they're often afraid to try any new policy, calling it a "risky scheme."
Along those lines, it is appropriate that the media now refers to the states that vote Republican as "red." Red is the color of revolution, and the vision of a global people's revolution has passed to those who call themselves conservatives. In response the Left has become reactionary, a victim of the Hegellian/Marxist dialectic that once encouraged them to think that history was on their side.
I never cared much for conspiracy theories, but I'm starting to wonder if Karl Rove is controlling the strategy of the Democrats, as well as the Republicans. If Dem leaders like Dean and Reid didn't exist, Rove would have to invent them.
"Whom the gods destroy they first make mad."--Euripides