Posted on 02/26/2005 7:10:44 PM PST by Merciful_Friend
The outcome of last November’s election was a long time in the making. It is clear, in the easy wisdom of hindsight, that the Democratic Party’s descent into its present minority status began more than thirty-five years ago. Starting with Richard Nixon’s narrow capture of the White House in 1968, Republicans have won seven of ten presidential elections. (They had lost seven of the previous nine.) More significantly in terms of party standing, their marginal pickups in the House and Senate that year presaged their eventual emergence by the 1990s as the majority party in Congress. For those of us who grew up in a political America in which Democrats dominated Congress as a matter of course, it is stunning to note that Democrats are today numerically weaker in the House than they have been since the days of Harry Truman and in the Senate since before the Great Depression.
(Excerpt) Read more at firstthings.com ...
Mr. Neuchterlein makes some interesting points at both the macro and micro levels, and effectively demolishes Mr. Frank's thesis.
If I had to make one criticism, it would be that the author is too gentle. He refers to the Democrats as being a center-left party in a center-right country; but I see little in Democratic candidates or platforms which can be considered "center"-anything. At another part of his article, he maintains that the country has never had a viable socialist party. I wish that was true, but for my money, the majority of Democrats at the national level, from LBJ's Great Society to the current time, have been just that.
Great article, though. I hope it receives wide exposure.
One thing neither Frank nor the author of the rebuttal seem to remember is that Kansas comes by its hard-core right-wing credentials very honestly: Kansas is the one place where the hard left ever had control of the state legislature. The Progressive Party held a majority for one session in I believe 1893, and instituted required courses on Marxist political economy at the Kansas State College of Agriculture and the Mechanical Arts (what is now Kansas State University).
The Republican majority elected the next round of elections had to show up armed to see to it that the 'Progressives' would leave.
However the state voted back when 'liberal' wasn't a code word for socialist and the Democrat party still had a vigorous right wing with folks like Scoop Jackson, we've been right-wing out here ever since.
bump
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