2005: The Splintering of the Democratic Party

A Publius Essay | 3 February 2005 | Publius

[Publius]

The year 2005 will mark the 72nd anniversary of the New Deal, the seminal event of the modern Democratic Party. Democratic policies and rhetoric all hail from that era of Big Government protecting the American people from Big Business. As long as the party held to its roots in economic equality, it prospered. When it marched boldly into the quicksand of social change, it alienated the Great Middle of American politics and lost its way.

Now the signs are all in place for another great Democratic debacle, but with one major difference. This time, the Democrats are headed for the ash heap of American political history.

New England is where American political parties go to die. In 1814 Alexander Hamilton, guiding light of the Federalist Party, had been dead for a decade. While Hamilton would have argued vehemently against a new war with Britain, preferring instead to resolve differences through diplomacy, he was astute enough to understand that certain arguments stop at the water’s edge. When the ragtag remnants of the Federalist Party, then holed up in New England, organized the Hartford Convention to discuss secession, Hamilton must have turned somersaults in his grave. Once Andrew Jackson routed a British invasion at New Orleans, the Federalist position smacked of treason, and the ragtag remnant was annihilated in the next election.

In the 1850's, with founder Henry Clay dead, the Whigs lost their way over slavery. While even the Great Compromiser might have found it impossible to square this particular political circle, the temporizing of the Whigs made them toothless in the face of people who were absolutely sure of what they believed. It took only a few electoral cycles for the Whigs to be replaced by the Republicans.

The Roots of the Democrats’ Dilemma

In 1964 Lyndon Johnson defeated Barry Goldwater in a popular and electoral vote blowout. One thing that can be disastrous for a political party is for it to get everything it wants. Following the election, the Democrats felt they had decisively won the argument, and Goldwater’s defeat cleared the way for the enactment of Johnson’s Great Society programs. Medicare and the war on poverty quickly became law, although poverty clearly won over time. The Democrats had achieved the goals set during the Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy years. What was left?

In the late Sixties the Democrats made the error of turning to social change – in that era it meant race – and promptly alienated a key group of voters later to be known as Reagan Democrats. Ethnic blue collar Democrats were liberal on economic issues and had agreed that the situation in the South was intolerable, but there was no such consensus on de facto segregation in the North. When the courts went beyond the law and ordered busing to promote racial balance, the future Reagan Democrats became angry. Thanks to the rising tide of Black Nationalism and the violence of urban insurrections, sympathy with the problems of black America began to wane.

In the Seventies the Democrats invested their energy in promoting social change via the courts, this time in the area of sexual liberation. At bottom, liberals were trying to change the social attitudes of Americans by judicial fiat – to infuse them with the proper revolutionary fervor – and they failed to see that the resistance of the Great Middle was but a desire to de-politicize the affairs of daily life. As a rule, social attitudes change at their own natural speed and do not require a political party to push them along. The Democrats forgot this and ceded the Great Middle to others.

As Reagan shifted the Great Middle to the right, the Democrats spent the Eighties in a state of shock and denial. Looking at the Democratic Party, Americans saw a collective of America’s misfits and malcontents, and the result was disastrous. The Democrats had jumped on the bandwagon of social change and had forgotten the economic issues that had made them the majority party. The institutional party had become totally disorganized and obsessed with process while the nominating electorate was dominated by left-wing ideologues. Upset and bewildered, the Reagan Democrats made a new home in the Republican Party.

After the Dukakis debacle in 1988, Mark Russell posed the question, "Why do we expect our generals to be serious men and our brain surgeons to be serious men, but we expect our presidents to be game show hosts?" In 1992 the Great Game Show Host slouched onto the scene. Bill Clinton emphasized economic issues and fudged the social foolishness that had gotten his party into so much trouble in the past. Clinton’s pitch was simple: “Guys, we can take a stand for our beliefs and go down in flames, or we can go back to basics and win.”

Once elected, however, Clinton discovered that in running for office from the center, he lacked the political capital to enact any genuine liberal programs. His first major expenditure of political capital was NAFTA, a Republican initiative. A few months into his presidency, Clinton realized with horror that he had become an “Eisenhower Democrat”. Having sold the party to the lobbyists of K Street to raise enough money to compete with the Republicans, Clinton had robbed his party of its soul. The left wing ideologues took note but kept silent lest they lose the perks and privileges of power. Their day would come, they thought.

Congressional Democrats, ideologically at odds with the president, felt they had the luxury of not marching in step with Clinton and didn't fear him the way they would have feared an experienced operator like Lyndon Johnson. Thus, his health insurance initiative crashed and burned, and Republicans went in for the kill. The post-Watergate reforms had the effect of locking the Congress of 1974 in place for twenty years, but Clinton's failure to produce the promised changes brought in a Republican Congress for the first time in forty years.

Internally, the two parties are very different. The Democrats function like a federation of state parties while the Republicans have always been a top-down organization. This gives the Democrats an edge when they don't control the Executive. Republicans, without the Executive, seem lost. They need a leader to snap them to attention and send them marching in step. Newt Gingrich took that role and made his troops the force of change in the Nineties, but in provoking a government shutdown Gingrich failed to understand the role of entitlements in the American psyche. People had come to expect certain things from their government, and they didn't want anything to get between them and their government checks.

Having lurched too far to the left with “Hillary Care”, Clinton positioned himself as close to the Great Middle as he could. Unwilling to show the ruthlessness required in politics, the Republicans nominated Bob Dole even when it was obvious months before the convention that he couldn't win. Frustrated by their inability to defeat the slickest president in modern times, the Republicans grasped at a straw held in the mouth of a White House intern.

In retrospect Rush Limbaugh was right. Neither Congress nor the American people would countenance the removal of a president for offenses related to illicit sex. To most Americans in the Nineties, Bill Clinton’s behavior was not outside the mainstream. By couching the 1998 election as a referendum on impeachment, Gingrich misread the situation.

Talk to ardent partisans about the 2000 election, and you’ll get two very different versions of reality.

A Republican will tell you that the networks called Florida early and suppressed Republican turnout not only in Florida, but nationwide. Some will accuse the networks of collusion with the DNC in attempting to steal the election for Al Gore. A partisan Florida Supreme Court attempted to keep the theft in motion, but the US Supreme Court honored the Constitution and stopped it in its tracks.

A Democrat will tell you that Al Gore won the national popular vote and the vote in Florida. Bush was selected illegally by a partisan US Supreme Court when his father called in some IOU’s. The election was stolen, plain and simple. Bush lost and took up residence in Al Gore’s big white house.

But the events of September 11, 2001 changed everything.

War, Disconnection and Marginalization

The Republicans were now in power in time of war. With Afghanistan out of the way and Iraq on the table, the Democrats found themselves in a quandary.

The Democratic Party had played a key role in the creation of the United Nations, and there was a strong belief that being a responsible player on the world stage meant not engaging in unilateral action, but working through the UN to gain the support of world opinion. This is the origin of the “global test”. Had not Jack Kennedy gone to the UN first during the Cuban Missile Crisis? With most of our traditional European allies opposing regime change in Iraq, Democrats were split on whether to authorize an invasion. The initial success of that invasion coupled with the guerilla war that followed furthered splits in the party. The perception of lukewarm support of the war effort on the part of Democrats led to losses in the election of 2002, and the party’s left-wing nominating electorate was on the warpath for peace.

At the center of this difficulty is a problem unique to liberals – a willingness to accept the adversary’s viewpoint if it puts their country in a bad light. Liberals call it “being objective”, but it is really a lack of faith in America and a lack of faith in traditional American ideals. While fine in peacetime, it is deadly in war.

• “If we pull out of the Middle East, the Muslims will leave us alone. We’re not a force for good there.”
• “If we stop using Middle Eastern oil and rely on homegrown renewable energy resources, we’ll stop global warming. We use a disproportionate amount of the world’s energy anyway.”
• “If we give up the sillier vestiges of rugged individualism and pack ourselves into the cities, we’ll have a better and more diverse society.”
• “If we put our sovereignty into the hands of the UN, we’ll be giving the rest of the world a good example. World government is inevitable. Let’s be first.”

At their core, these ideals are not American, but “UNeesian”, to invent a word. To UNeesians, patriotism is a vice. To UNeesians, America doesn’t have the right to lead because its hands are dirty, courtesy of slavery, Vietnam or some other flaw in its past. To UNeesians, America, like Israel, is a source of evil in the world.

In time of war, social issues take a backseat. One of the key UNeesian objections to the war in the Middle East is the belief that the money should be spent on something else. Spend it on government-run health insurance, government-run schools or government-run Amtrak, but don’t spend it on war. That’s immoral. Spend it on social change. But there comes a time when people become weary of social change and want stability, particularly freedom from attack by foreign religious fanatics.

Nothing bothers UNeesians more than a muscular United States working to mold the world into a place reflective of its traditional values. To UNeesians, these traditional American values are suspect. They remember Vietnam, but not World War II. And when they root for the enemy, as many of them did in the case of Iraq, they step over the line crossed by the ragtag remnants of the Federalist Party in 1814.

Trapped by Ideology

In 2004 the Democratic Party could have run against the Republicans from the right, a technique used successfully by Jack Kennedy. This would have meant taking the war against terrorism to a new level, to include racial profiling and securing our borders. Ordinary Americans not associated with Big Business would have jumped to join a party willing to militarize and seal the borders. This would have led to a stand in favor of economic nationalism, which would have brought many of Patrick Buchanan’s troops into the party.

But the Democrats instead argued that terrorism was a nuisance and that the US should apply a “global test” to military action, thus giving Europe and the UN a veto over America’s defense. From its “Democratic wing” came a hint that America got what it deserved on September 11. Economic nationalism, racial profiling and sealing the borders went against the grain of the party’s UNessian values. Further, without that vast army of illegal immigrants in the nation’s workforce, the declining birthrate would put the sacred programs of the welfare state in actuarial jeopardy.

Socially, the Democrats pushed for a continuation of the sexual revolution when people were tired of being confronted by sex every time they turned on the TV. After forty years of sexual liberation, people wanted a break from overt sex, particularly from the same sex variety. A key issue for Democrats in 2004 was the recognition of gay marriage – by fiat via the courts – which is not a priority for the vast majority of Americans who are not gay. This has led to the beginnings of an exodus from the party by Hispanics and blacks.

For an economic program, the party has not changed its stance in forty years, arguing for programs that even Lyndon Johnson could not push through Congress. When looking at an economic platform, the Democratic Party can suggest only more socialism. They succeeded in getting a new entitlement – prescription drugs for the elderly – and they still hope for some form of government-run health insurance, but the party has failed to answer the question, “Do you want the people who run Amtrak to take out your appendix?” When it comes to economic ideas, even the Mainstream Media admitted 25 years ago that it was the Republicans who had all the good ideas.

The Future of the Democrats

The New Deal coalition has been fraying ever since George Wallace cracked the Democratic Party in 1968 over race. Failure to defend the country and manage the economy has haunted the party at each election. Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton defeated Republican incumbents only because of a failing economy.

In 2004, the Democrats nominated a New Englander who was deep in his party’s mainstream but was out of step with the rest of the country. In “reporting for duty”, John Kerry hoped to elide his party’s ideological marginalization, but since his defeat the rest of the party has stridently spoken out, raising disturbing questions:

• Are Democrats Americans or UNeesians?
• Are they citizens of America or citizens of the world?
• Do they truly believe that Bush is Hitler and that this country is no better than Nazi Germany?
• Are they seriously considering emigrating to Canada? Or France?
• Whose side are they on, anyway?

Much of this conflict has played out in the race for the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee, soon to be Howard Dean, another New Englander. Clinton’s decision to sell his party out to the Grifters of K Street still rankles. But Dean’s belief in going directly to the people via the Internet would have credence only if the “Deaniacs” were more connected to the mainstream. Dean’s supporters on the Internet, however, are among the most radical people in the Democratic Party. This will only exacerbate the differences between the party’s factions.

Today’s Democratic Party is made up of K Street Grifters, government workers, the remnants of the union movement, UNeesians, political correctness fanatics, Greens, homosexuals, liberal women and blacks. As Michael Barone has pointed out, blacks are the glue that holds the party together. But as they join the Great Middle, make some money and move into a nicer neighborhood, black Americans start thinking like Republicans, even if they can’t say so publicly. Bill Cosby speaks for many middle class blacks who are tired of the antics of their poorer brethren in the cities.

This hodgepodge of factions is not geared to occupying the same political party.

• The Grifters of K Street want to get the money that pours from the government faucet directed to specific industries and companies they get paid for representing.
• Government workers want more government – at a time when Americans no longer want to pay for the government they’re getting.
• The remnants of the union movement want economic growth, but are split on whether immigrants are potential union members or people who would take away union jobs. They can’t seem to penetrate the new industries that have arisen over the past forty years.
• UNeesians want to turn America over to the UN when the country is edging toward pulling that corrupt institution down. They hate this country at a time when people have rediscovered patriotism. They want to emigrate if they can’t get everything on their wish list.
• PC fanatics want to protect America from discussing solutions to problems they thought were settled in the Sixties when certain classes were protected.
• Greens want no further economic growth, desiring to return to a hunter/gatherer lifestyle – whoops, no hunting allowed! They also want to regulate the environment and push businesses worldwide into bankruptcy.
• Homosexuals want their lifestyle decisions ratified by law and don’t care how it’s done or whether the American people agree with them or not. A liberal activist judge is sufficient.
• Liberal women want a social safety net that doubles as a husband, noting all too well the instability of the institution of marriage.
• Blacks who have resisted assimilation, choosing instead to remain in the urban underclass, want welfare and reparations for slavery.

These factions have only one thing in common – an insatiable appetite for more government, an appetite not shared by the majority of the American people.

Endgame

On occasion in American history, concepts like Left and Right become blurred, parties run out of steam and ideas, and a wing of one party wraps around a wing of the other party. Sometimes one party will even splinter. Then the two parties re-form when a new issue arises. The Nineties, like the 1850’s, represents a time when one party ran out of steam and ideas, and everybody noticed it.

The Democratic Party is now restricted to America’s cities and to the suburbs of certain states. It is almost absent from America’s heartland. Its values are out of step with the Great Middle. It has forgotten its economic roots and become lost in the swamps of social change once again, vehement in its insistence on forcing that change down the throats of a reluctant nation.

The center cannot hold.

The Democratic Party will splinter like the Whigs. Soon there will be at least three parties on the left: the Green Party, the Labor Party and the Reparations Party. The Grifters of K Street will merely change their spots, as many of them have done since the 2002 election, and switch allegiance to the Republicans now that they control the federal faucet. Americans once represented reasonably well by the old Democratic Party, like Zell Miller, will reluctantly pull up stakes and find a new political home.

It will be another twenty years before a new set of issues emerges that permits a true second party to coalesce. The Republicans may well be running the store for decades.

[Solar Wind]

Great essay. Obviously the result of much observation, thought and pleasantly, some good writing.

You are right, the center of the Democratic party cannot hold. It is amazing to see the slow self-destruction of this once national party.

I appreciate all your work that you put into this essay. Do you publish a column or write for any other forum or paper?

Regards, Mr Sol.

[Constantine XIII]

“Do you want the people who run Amtrak to take out your appendix?”

LOL, that's a winner!

[Publius]

I've never done this professionally, but I've written a lot of Publius Essays over the past 8 years. The better ones are available in the "Links" area of my FReeper home page.

[hinckley buzzard]

I think the split in the Democratic Party in the 60's happened over Vietnam

Remember the "hard hat" demonstration, I think in NYC, and "The Great Silent Majority?" They were about the war.

I would agree that on balance, Vietnam energized the split more thoroughly than race, although the Wallace democrats used the general backlash, fuelled by resentment of the urban riots which occurred intermittently throughout the sixties, including 1968.

[colorado tanker]

Wallace returned to the Democratic Party and later reconciled with Alabama's black citizens. The Senate Democrats who filibustered the 1964 Civil Rights Act stayed in the Dem party. You didn't see large numbers of southern Dems begin to switch parties until the 70's when the Dims split over Vietnam, becoming isolationist and appeasement, and took a radical pro-abortion stance.

Remember, a higher percentage of Senate and congressional Republicans voted for the 1964 Act than Dems and the Nixon administration was known for zealous enforcement. The Republican Party wasn't a very attractive alternative for Dems who might want to leave the party over desegregation.

[Popman]

bump

[cmsgop]

You Know, You Da Man Right ?

[Publius]

Glad you enjoyed it. I hope I called it right.

[Publius]

The latest wrinkle -- Hillary's private voter database with Harold Ickes in charge -- indicates that Hillary has found a way to finesse her Howard Dean problem.

Dean’s accession to the party chair pushed the Democrats too far to the left. Soros was underwriting him, Move On and the entire party.

But for a Democrat to win, he (or she) would have to peel off a significant chunk of Republicans and independents, and occupying the Sensible Center is the only way to do it. Otherwise, it’s McGovern time all over again. Hillary has spent her first term setting herself up as a pragmatist and centrist, no doubt receiving a lot of coaching from her husband who was a master of triangulation.

With Dean pushing the party to the Hard Left, it becomes necessary to replace him, preferably with Harold Ickes, but that would open up a fight that would split the party. Hillary doesn’t need to be the heavy in an internal war to purge the Hard Left. They, after all, are the base. What Hillary needs is to control the purse strings. If she has that, then it doesn’t matter who chairs the party.

The coup is her seduction of Soros. If he’s underwriting Hillary’s effort, that means he has abandoned Move On and Dean, its avatar. It means that Hillary’s shadow party will harvest the unions for money while Dean will harvest the Hard Left. But Ickes will have the power while Dean becomes merely a figurehead.

In politics, always follow the money.

[Alia]

In politics, always follow the money

Bingo. And in re Soros: Double Dittos. Soros has used countries to manuever his own moneyed interests in past. I saw his dealings with MoveOn to be no different -- to manuever the Dem Party. Secret deals and handshakes.

[Alia]

I always did see Soro's move to support Move-on as only a blackmail economic tantrum in a tea-cup. Seems to me Hillary has agreed to whatever economic deals Soros wants in order to promote his financial agenda. I know it's something to do with "communications" especially in the mid-east. He was buying up stock in such companies last year like crazy.

[Publius]

There is another part of the Soros agenda. He believes that America's post-9/11 patriotism is a destructive nationalism that is tearing the international order apart.

Read The Bubble of American Supremacy, which Soros wrote for the Atlantic. He would like to bring this country back into harmony with the UN and the EU.

[Alia]

One is required to be a subscriber to read the full article. However, the opening paragraphs provide the platform upon which I can only imagine Soro's opinings. And the platform runs like this: "Yes, yes, 9-11 was a historical event, but just a twiddling thing, really".

Soro's has been dabbling and manipulating in the European Markets for overlong. Some countries cannot abide the man.

The lefties (Soros included) wish for a "unified", all things equal" world wherein only the moneyed puppet masters behind the world governments run the show. This is Soro's world goal, IMHE.

I get the impression that possibly the only human Soros ever idolized was Henry the VIII.

[Publius]

The full article by Soros was published on FR by Yours Truly.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1081391/posts

[Alia]

"Yours Truly" is so thoughtful. :)

[Paperdoll]

<Let's not loose sight of the fact that Iraq was a mess and the absence of WMDs led to many people feeling lied to.<

Oooo! What do you call Savin and Mustard Gas?

[tet68]

Nicely done.
t.

[hellinahandcart]

.

[dirtboy]

It will be another twenty years before a new set of issues emerges that permits a true second party to coalesce.

I disagree here.

The one thing I think you left out of the Dem pedigree was its labor roots. But the Dems morphed into a lifestyle party, leaving the labor wing marginalized.

If the blue-dog labor Dems find common ground with the anti-illegal-immigration conservatives, that could be the nucleus of the new party. And the corporatists pubbies and DLC Dems would be inclined to form the other party. Leaving the lifestyle types as an angry minority.

[colorado tanker]

Nicely done.

Barone is right about blacks being the "glue" of the party in terms of the voter base that keeps them competitive. But I think abortion cannot be overlooked. The pro-abortion bunch is genuinely afraid of pro-life people and reflexively votes Democratic. Abortion is the great fault-line in American politics, second only to the Boomers' romanticization of their 1960's opposition to Vietnam. My daughters find it quite amusing to spot the anti-Iraq demonstrators waiving signs at intersections - they all have grey hair!

Both issues could evaporate faster than people think, if the Iraq war is basically turned over to the Iraqi's in the next year and if Roe is overturned. Abortion could disappear as a major issue if Roe is overturned, the issue is returned to the legislatures, and the country discovers, contrary to NARAL, that women aren't being thrown in jail and abortion remains legal in most of the blue states.