Right Down the Middle?
The Democratic Party has long cast itself as the party of the little guy fighting against the party of big business, privilege, and wealth. So why has it been unable to capitalize on these anxieties and connect its version of progressivism with American life? The roots of disenchantment lie in the 1960s and 1970s when Democrats began to focus less on economics than on liberal social programs to promote the interests of blacks, women, gays, and other groups. This pushed a lot of traditional Democrats into the Republican column--blue-collar workers, construction workers, homemakers, military veterans, cops, evangelicals, rural residents, and ethnics. They saw the efforts of the New Left to weaken oppressive authority as corroding all authority. Woodstock and Hollywood came to epitomize what was seen as a narcissistic assault on conventional values played out daily in the coarsening of our culture in gangsta rap, cable ranters, and pornographic websites, accompanied by the delegitimization of the sanctity of marriage, drug abuse, and recasting wrongdoers as victims of society instead of the reverse. There was a sense that the Democrats had become dominated by elitist, highly educated, progressive classes who believed they knew better than average folks.
The Republicans are not stupid. They tagged the liberals as "latte-drinking, Volvo-driving, school-busing, fetus-killing, tree-hugging, gun-fearing, morally relativist and secularly humanist so-called liberal elitists," as commentator Jason Epstein described it, soft on communism, soft on crime, opposed to capital punishment, and soft on the new war on terrorism. At the same time, they tried to shed the country club-boardroom image and portray themselves as the party of the hardworking, plain-speaking people who like country music and NASCAR, attend church regularly (as 120 million Americans do), and live in those parts of the country that fill the ranks of the military, defend the flag and patriotism, and are tough on national security issues. George Bush was an effective politician in exploiting the cultural alienation of the Democratic Party from its working- and middle-class roots, while a windsurfing John Kerry was the ideal candidate to aggravate it. Bush won culturally driven voters by over 70 percent and became the first president since FDR to preside over a steady gain in his party's seats, despite the fact that many social indicators that fomented the cultural divide had begun to improve, among them crime, abortion, teenage birth, illegitimacy, divorce rates, and teenage drinking.
Apart from an epiphany in the Democratic Party, what could threaten the Republicans' ascendancy? Quite simply, overreach. As the Democrats discovered before them, Americans do not long attach themselves to ideology or extremes. The Republican Party moved to the right under pressure from its southern base and by a congressional membership fearful of an attack from the right during a primary, so much so that it now risks alienating mainstream America across a range of issues. Over 60 percent oppose the privatization of Social Security; roughly 70 percent of moderates disagree with the president's opposition to the financing of stem-cell research; 82 percent objected to Republican intrusion in the sad case of Terri Schiavo; and there is uneasiness about the creeping abandonment of federal rules governing safety at home and in the workplace and the erosion of environmental controls.
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