Orrin Judd at Brothers Judd blog has an excellent analysis of the problems in the Democratic party.
For all the gleeful cries from the left of "Pass the popcorn!" at the in-fighting among Republicans, it is the Democrats who are imploding specifically because they are only a party of factions, not ideas.
The brilliance of Bill Clinton--and it is a terrible mistake for Republicans not to recognize said--was that he made the Democrats a party of ideology again. While the disastrous 70s and the Thatcher/Volcker/Reagan recovery put paid to the Second Way and drove a stake through the heart of the old statist/socialist ideology, his Third Way/New Democrat platform unified Democrats around the idea of beating Republicans at their own game by using free market (First Way) means to achieve Second Way ends--a fairly high level of government-mandated and/or guaranteed social security. This was, of course, not original with him but borrowed from Augusto Pinochet, New Zealand, Margaret Thatcher, Anthony Giddens, Newt Gingrich, etc., and it was subsequently co-opted by leaders across party lines throughout the Anglosphere: Tony Blair, John Howard, George W. Bush, Stephen Harper, Kevin Rudd, etc.. Unfortunately for all concerned however, it was promptly dropped by the Democrats as his term ended, to the point where even his own vice president ran against it.
And so the Party reverted to being just a coalition of special interests with entirely parochial political ends pitted in a continuing contest against one another because those ends are so often in conflict. It is always difficult to unify such amalgams of different interests, both because it's unlikely the majority--even when your party has some power--will do much for the discrete minorities and because the resentments against the other party that you whip up to keep each tribe in line inevitably end up getting turned against the other tribes in your own party.
It's easy enough to keep blacks hating on Republicans, who have frequently been at least insensitive on racial matters and Latinos angry about the GOP's racist immigration ravings and seculars, queers, Jews, pro-abortionists, etc. riled up about a party dominated by conservative Christianity, and so on and so forth. But, unless you offer them something else besides, you run the risk that the blacks will recognize that open immigration is handing political power in the cities to Hispanics, that Latinos will realize that they are the Christians and "breeders" who the atheists and Malthusians despise, that the majority religious blacks and Latinos will realize that the social program of the Party is antithetical to their own faith, etc.. The fewer ideas your party is discussing and running on -- the less what? there is to the party -- the more time people have to spend thinking about who the party is. And the truth is, the various cohorts don't have much in common and don't necessarily like each other much.
Which brings us to 2008, wherein the Democrats offer two candidates who are most noticeably tribal and idea-free. The choice of a black man or a feminist woman, occurring as it does in a policy vacuum, essentially reduces the race to a contest to see who gets to be at the top of the totem pole and whose priorities get shoved towards the bottom. Under these circumstances it was always unlikely that the Democrats were going to be the party that elected a person of color or a woman. It's far easier for the GOP, where faith and the Founding present a universal set of ideas that cut across racial, ethnic, and gender lines. But, by abandoning Clintonism, the Democrats have probably made it impossible for themselves, particularly if Republicans nominate someone like John McCain, who is not despised within their own party. He offers a viable alternative for those alienated by their eventual nominee.
One of the important points overlooked by the rabid anybody-but-McCain folks is Romney's unelectability. Simply put, McCain will draw in the centrists and independents needed for victory and Romney will not. I know that comes as a real shock to Hugh Hewitt, who argues that conservatives won't vote for McCain (they will) or Glenn Beck who argues that John McCain, Hillary Clinton, and Barak Obama are interchangeable (surely he isn't this stupid?).
But the truth is (cover your eyes, Rush), this is a post-Reagan era and Republicans need a post-Reagan plan. That's not to say modern conservatism isn't grounded in Ronald Reagan's ideology. What it means is that when a certain segment of the electorate only remembers Bushes and Clintons, yammering about the greatness of Ronald Reagan doesn't draw them in. You have to accept that times have changed and so has the expectations of the electorate.
As Edward Glaeser says in this article,
Ideally, a new Republican party would keep the best parts of the Reagan revolution — a torch for freedom that limits government at home and presses for freedom abroad — but would also embrace new constituencies left cold by Tom DeLay. The environment has become too important to leave up to the environmentalists. It is time for the Republicans to return to Theodore Roosevelt and lead in this area. The party must once again make the case that its economic policies offer the brightest future for middle income Americans. The most important tasks of the next president lie in foreign affairs. Since that is not my area of expertise, I don't know whether Mr. McCain or Mr. Giuliani or Mr. Romney would be the best president. I think that Mr. McCain would do the most to transform the G.O.P. into a party that would appeal to a broader spectrum of Americans. A recent Wall Street Journal poll suggests that while Mr. McCain would beat Senator Clinton, either Mr. Giuliani or Mr. Romney would lose by more than 15 percentage points. Mr. McCain offers the most radical break with the recent Republican past, which explains both why he is disliked by those who look backwards and why he is most likely to create a more robust G.O.P.
I agree.
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