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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.

There is some truth in there, but it was more the cultural revolution of the 1960s than race that drove such voters away from the Democrats. The later economic malaise also had a lot to do with the making of Reagan Democrats. It's certainly true that the races were more divided in the 1960s and 1970s than today, but a lot of the tension over busing had to do with the autocratic, top-down imposition of the thing. Attitudes might have been different had things been done differently. Divisions between the parties, though, weren't quite so clear on this issue: it was Nixon who brought in many of the quotas and affirmative action programs that he campaigned against.

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.

True, though it's not always easy to know who was right and who was left. We've taken our cue from the Cold War, and now that it's over and the struggles over communism don't dominate political debates, it's always not so easy to see who's who and what's what in terms of ideology. Prior to that the conflicts of the Progressive era or the New Deal provided frameworks for sorting things out ideologically. Where Theodore Roosevelt saw Hamilton as a far-sighted progressive, Franklin Roosevelt deplored Hamilton and preferred Jefferson. We're in a similar period of sorting things out now so questions about what Washington or Hamilton, Jefferson or Jackson, Lincoln or TR were ideologically aren't as easy to answer as they once were.

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.

True, the Democrats are very out of touch on social issues, but how different are states that they carried like Minnesota or Michigan from Iowa or Ohio, which the lost? The strange thing was their thinking that Kerry could actually win. 49% of the vote against a wartime President and for someone who was so obviously a regional candidate with little national appeal wasn't a terrible showing.

You may be right about the Democrats dying or turning into something very different, but this last election wasn't enough proof. It was unique in pitting a liberal from the most liberal part of the country with a conservative from one of the most conservative parts. Neither Bush I v. Dukakis or Reagan v. Mondale or Nixon v. Kennedy was anywhere near as clearcut a contest of regional loyalties. The big test will come when they nominate someone from outside the Northeast.

Yet there was also something typical about the election as well: from 1860 to 1932 the Democrats were locked into the South, and the Republicans controlled the rest of the country, so far as Presidential elections were concerned. Who won depended on swing states like New York and Illinois, Indiana and New Jersey. After forty years of Democratic domination (1932-1972) and a Republican era (1972-1992) we may have come full circle to a system characterized by Democrat control of one region (the two coasts) and Republican dominance in the rest of the country. In a way, it's a return to where we were in 1880 or 1920.