"Oh, please, the Democrats are in nowhere near as bad a shape as the Republicans were throughout the 1970s."
The columnist's concerns are unduly apocryphal, to be sure.
And your assertion is true...on one level. Certainly, there are more Democrat seats in Congress and more self-styled Democrats among voters today than there were Republicans in the seventies.
But, on another level, the Democrats are in desperate shape compared to the Republicans in the seventies. The Republicans, at least, had a coherent philosophy to build on and ideas that were worthy of support.
Today's Democrats have no such guiding philosophy and are totally devoid of ideas. Unless you want to call pro-abortion, pro-gay, pro-racism, pro-gun control, anti-Bushism, anti-conservatism and anti-Americanism "ideas". As such, the party is a shell that could collapse upon itself as rapidly and as completely as Communism did in the late eighties.
Come to think of it, Democrats and Communism is a pretty apt analogy...