Steve Sailer of the magazine "The American Conservative" recently
'reviewed' the Democratic Party and its present dilemma in American politics. The magazine, which
split six ways in 2004 in the Presidential race, is an interesting look at the conservatives unhappy with the current Bush Administration, but not willing to defect to the Democratic Party . . . yet? As a leading voice of conservatives opposed to the Iraq War, what stops the writers of this magazine from making the jump to the Democratic Party?
Steve Sailer is in fact routing for the Democratic Party and wants it to step up its criticisms of the Bush Administration. As a conservative opponent of the Bush Administration, he is unhappy with the Democratic Party not opposing Bush enough. He points out that with the sinking approval ratings of Bush and the Republican Congress, the Democrat should be doing better in the polls and should be on the attack more. They are on the cusp of a revolution, but they aren't acting like it.
His brings in an observation that politics in America has shifted from being "interest-group politics" to "identity-group politics." This would not be a surprise to readers of Chris Bowers at MyDD, who has made observations on the strong correlation between socio-cultural identification (such as race, religion, gender, and sexuality) and one's partisan affiliations. As Sailer notes:
For 40 years, progressives have toiled tirelessly to replace interest-group politics with identity-group politics. But taking pride in one's race is unseemly to the white majority, so partisan passions have become a sort of identity politics by other means for white people. Baby Boomers who once defined themselves by arguing over the Beatles vs. the Stones or George Lucas vs. Stanley Kubrick now express their self-conceptions by bickering over the Republicans vs. the Democrats.
The moment's issues are less important than they often seem. In 2000, George W. Bush ran on a "humble" foreign policy and in 2004 on an arrogant one, yet the distribution of his votes by state and by demographic group barely flickered from one election to the next.
[Emphasis added]
The problem facing the Democratic Party is their inability to crack the white vote. While demographics are shifting toward the Democratic Party, there is a time-delay in politics. Non-Hispanic whites make up 68% of the total population and just 57% of those under age five, but they cast 79% of the votes in 2004. While America may become a country with a non-white majority in the 2030s, whites may still manage to cast the majority of the votes as late as the 2050s. All this comes down to the big group that Sailer sees as the linchpin of the Republican Party and the major block to a Democratic majority: married whites. The result:
This relegates the Democrats to trying to lash together unwieldy coalitions of minorities united mainly in their alienation from majority attitudes. This is possible, but it's harder than the GOP's task of mobilizing a fairly cohesive body of supporters. The Democrats resemble the ramshackle multi-tribe army of the Persian Empire and the Republicans the cohesive Greek phalanxes of Alexander.
Sailer reduces the Democratic coalition to three groups: minorities, lifestyle liberals (seculars, environmentalists, anti-war protestors, non-Christians) and blue-collar workers, particularly union members. Yes, there is some over lap, but on the whole the three groups form an uneasy alliance in the Democratic Party, united more by their opposition to the Republican Party than their mutual love of one another. While lifestyle liberals are on the rise with the decline of Christianity, and minorities are on the rise from high-birth rates and immigration, the third group is being squeezed out of existence--both from demographics and from globalization.
The Democrats could certainly wait for demographics to do the job for them. When America not only becomes a country with a non-white and non-Christian majority but also votes that way, the Democrats could certainly win by default--assuming the Republicans don't change with the times. But are you willing to wait until 2040 or 2050 for that to happen?
Or do we work now on appealing to the white, Christian majority in this country?
To do so, we might want to turn to the thoughts of another American Conservative writer, Bill Kauffman, who recently wrote "Look Homeward America: In Search of Reactionary Radicals and Front-Porch Anarchists." Kauffman's political philosophy may be hard to sum up, but my best attempt would be to say that he's anti-government, anti-big business, and pro-localism. He calls himself an American patriot and "the love child of Henry Thoreau and Dorothy Day." He recently reviewed political scientist Jeff Taylor's new book "Where Did the Party Go? William Jennings Bryan, Hubert Humphrey, and the Jeffersionian Legacy" and it has strong implications for the discussion of the Democratic Party and the white, Christian majority in this country.
Taylor makes clear from the start that he is a true populist that admires William Jennings Bryan and not Hubert Humphrey. He finds the Democratic Party of today lacking in the Jeffersonian spirit that it once had. As Kauffman observes, Taylor believes that there are too many Huberts and not enough Williams.
Carrying the story beyond Humphrey, Taylor pokes about in the Democratic carrion and finds nothing but little Huberts (without the original's kinetic appeal) scurrying about: Gore, Kerry, Hillary Clinton. The values associated with the Democracy B.E. (Before Empire)-- "decentralization, frugality, pacifism, and isolationism"--are about as potent a force as Anti-Masonry in contemporary Democratic politics. (He holds out hope for Wisconsin Sen. Russell Feingold, who cast gutsy votes against the Iraq War and the Patriot Act and seems to have a LaFollette gene. We shall see.)
As for Bryan's legacy? Taylor nominates Sen. Robert Taft, California Gov. Jerry Brown, and maverick Wisconsin Sen. William Proxmire as "the most balanced, most fully realized Jeffersonian politicians of the post-New Deal era." He rightly sees in the Brown, Perot, and Buchanan campaigns of 1992 the seeds of a new populism that is antiwar, anti-globalist, and anti-Wall Street, the avenging Jeffersonian ghost haunting the ruined castle along the Potomac.
Do we see, perhaps, the rough outline of a possible pathway for the Democratic Party? Anti-war, anti-Big Business and anti-Wall Street, but also willing to stand up against the pro-corporate version of globalization being pushed by today's wealthy elite. Perhaps even a party that is critical of the dominating tendencies of government? The hang up of this dream of an ideologically diverse populist party has always been social issues. But does it have to be? Perot ran in 1992 without suffering, apparently, from being pro-choice and in most ways a social liberal. Could the Democratic Party do the same?