Predicting what will happen if the Democrats win control in one or both houses of Congress next month is a burgeoning cottage industry. It is, however, both more interesting and probably more useful to consider what will happen if they don’t.

If Democrats win they will crow and bray and make nuisances of themselves with frivolous, ankle-biting investigations. They may even connive with the White House and some foolish Republican legislators to enact “comprehensive immigration reform.” If they do, the principal effect will be to turn our illegal immigration problem into a crisis, creating a major political opportunity for the next generation of GOP leaders. Aside from that, very little will change.

Democrats are too conflicted and too politically timid to force any significant change in the Bush administration’s foreign and defense policies. They frittered away their dominant position in American politics by procuring the Ford administration’s surrender in Vietnam. Ever since, they have been crippled by the widespread (and entirely accurate) perception that they are not to be trusted with our national security. They may belong, body and soul, to the lunatic left, but most of them are not about to step over the same cliff twice.

In any case, having stepped over that cliff in the 70’s, the Democrats are very unlikely to win either house of Congress in 2006. The American people may loathe the Republican Party every bit as much as the Washington Post thinks they do, but nothing in our history suggests that a majority of American voters is crazy enough to trust Democrats with significant power during a war.

The headlines of the moment are orchestrated to create the appearance that a Democrat restoration is at hand. After the news industry has prepared them for victory in the run up to three consecutive electoral defeats, the Democrats should be wary. Many, probably most, of them are not. They have made the mistake of believing their own propaganda yet again.

In the likely event that Democrats wake up on the Wednesday after the first Tuesday in November and find that the federal government is firmly in Republican hands for another two years how will they react? After licking their wounds by dabbling in deranged conspiracy theories about election fraud, they will fall to fighting among themselves like starving sled dogs. There will be casualties. Howard Dean, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid will all have trouble keeping their jobs in the wake of yet another failure.

In the ensuing succession struggles the deep divisions in the Democrat Party will be laid bare. Some Democrats will claim that the party must take the war more seriously and appear more moderate to win. Others will argue that the party must be true to its ideological roots on the far left so that it may win a majority by the power of passion and persuasion. Neither side of this debate will grasp the true nature of the Democrat dilemma.

The would-be moderates don’t understand that Democrats can’t win without the left. The ideological purists don’t understand that Democrats can’t win with it.

If the Democrats ceased to be the leftist party they would lose their all-important propaganda apparatus in the heirloom media. They would lose all their intellectual firepower (such as it is) in the universities and all the cachet of Hollywood. Their fundraising base would disappear. They would become a me-too party relegated to winning elections in most of the country only when the Republican candidate got caught in bed with either a live boy or a dead girl.

As essential as the left is to Democrats, it can’t muster anything approaching a nationwide majority. This is hardly surprising. The left is anti-American and most Americans aren’t.

The left is defined by it’s loyalty to a trans-national ideal. Nation states in general and the United States in particular are obstacles to the realization of that ideal. Whenever the interests of the United States and the ideological purposes of the left conflict, which is often, American leftists work against their own country.

Consider, for example, the grotesque foolishness of Kyoto and the left’s determined efforts to undermine our ongoing war for national survival. Even the dimmest voter can smell the contempt leftists have for ordinary people and for everything they hold dear. The more voters understand that Democrats are the political wing of the American left, the fewer votes they will cast for Democrats.

Professional Democrats have tried for years to have their cake and eat it too. They have tried to keep the loyalty of the left without getting identified with it. That worked during the ersatz peace of the Clinton years when they were still winning, at least sometimes.

The pressure of war and defeat has made it much more difficult for Democrats to have it both ways. They have tried desperately to straddle the divide between those who want to defend America from our deadly enemies and those who don’t. John Kerry made an ass out of himself trying to bridge that gap and then discovered that Americans don’t really want an ass in the White House.

Since Kerry went down in flames, canny Democrats have tried to say very little about the war but to say it as indignantly as possible. They have been in tune with the left’s anger without overtly adopting its politically poisonous defeatism. This tightrope act isn’t likely to work for them any better than Kerry’s contortions did.

After yet another defeat even the Democrats may finally grasp that they can’t have it both ways. They can follow Joe Lieberman’s path and stand for American interests at the price of parting ways with about half their voters. They can also follow Ned Lamont and stand up for the left at the price of losing the other half. Either choice would mean that the Democrat Party could no longer seriously contend for a share of power in national elections.

This isn’t the first time a major American political party has been closely divided over a defining issue. The Democrats’ dilemma in 2006 looks a lot like the Whigs’ dilemma in 1852. The Whigs depended on support from both slave holders and abolitionists. They tried to straddle the slavery issue but they couldn’t. Their party broke apart and disappeared.

The Democrats have much deeper roots than the Whigs, who lasted only 24 years. They are likely to linger in some form for quite some time. But one more unexpected defeat just might tear them apart and prompt a dramatic political realignment.

At some level, Democrats seem aware of this danger. They are fighting the 2006 campaign like the existential struggle which, for them, it may very well be. It smacks of desperation, to choose an example at random, when the party of pederasty attacks Republicans for failing to condemn a homosexual congressman in advance of any evidence that he did anything wrong.

The political game has never been a better spectator sport and the stakes have rarely been higher.

I wrote an essay on this subject last year. The only thing I would add to it now is that if the Democrats win any national elections after 2008, it will be because the Republicans wimped out and threw them a lifeline. Here it is:

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.

Because of population shifts toward the sunbelt, winning the southern vote is more important than ever, but are Democrats trying very hard to court us? No!!!! Most non-southern Dems still think of us as uneducated Rednecks preoccupied with "God, guns and gays," as Howard Dean put it, while Kerry limited his southern activities to picking John Edwards for a running mate (who subsequently failed to deliver his home state) and a few campaign stops in Florida.

"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!

Democrat vs. Republican women

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

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