The Problem With Democrats

[Update: My apologies for the garbled lettering and punctuation in the blockquotes below. I tried and couldn't fix them.]
The American Conservative magazine was launched a few years ago as a counterpoint to the neo-conservative takeover of the conservative movement and Republican Party. Very critical of President Bush on a number of issues, its editors split six ways in 2004.

The July 31 issue has two interesting articles on the Democratic Party. Will the incompetence of the President and mis-rule of Congress cost the Republicans in November? Probably. But will it last?

Steve Sailer's What's Wrong With the Democrats? points out:

AFL-CIO rank-and-filers long helped the Democrats excel at the blocking and tackling of organizing winning campaigns, but they’re getting old and losing a step at the ground game. Most of the Democrats’ other white constituencies—feminists, gays, movie stars, New Agers, hipsters, and intellectuals—are too self-absorbed to build effective organizations.

Worse, many elements within the Democratic Party can’t actually stand each other. The white “lifestyle” liberals welcome minorities as allies because they believe being on the same side as African-Americans against the white majority validates their feelings of self-worth. Yet to be frank—not that they would ever say it in so many words—they also regard blacks and Hispanics as scandalously reactionary on such crucial issues (to them) as gay marriage.

Meanwhile, the racial minorities are heavily Democratic both for newfangled identity reasons and for old-fashioned ethnic clout purposes that St. Tammany himself would have understood, but they are also more culturally conservative and view their white allies as smug, out-of-touch, and patronizing.

[...]

The Democrats can seldom appeal to one of their blocs without offending another, so the main message they can all agree upon is how much they hate George W. Bush. The problem with that strategy is that, yes, admittedly, the president is a national disgrace, but that also reflects badly on the nation that twice elected him, so a large fraction of patriotic Americans don’t want to hear it.

While Democrats esteem themselves as more socially prestigious than Republicans, their electoral prospects are undermined by the faint whiff of failure that many Democratic voters exude, the impression that they resent their country and compatriots because they haven’t quite fulfilled their own potential.

[...]

Surveys going back to 1972 have consistently found that more Republicans than Democrats consider themselves “very happy.” In a 2005 poll, the Pew Research Center discovered that 50 percent more Republicans than Democrats rate themselves “very happy” and that “if one controls for household income, Republicans still hold a significant edge.” Indeed, Pew reported that their multiple regression analysis of what makes people content showed “the most robust correlations of all those described in this report are health, income, church attendance, being married and, yes, being a Republican. Indeed, being a Republican is associated not only with happiness, it is also associated with every other trait in this cluster.”

While it may (or may not) be admirable of liberals to want to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,” it’s also hardly unreasonable for voters to assume that the party whose members, on the whole, better manage their own lives could better manage the government.

Meanwhile, Bill Kauffman reviews Jeff Taylor's Where Did the Party Go? William Jennings Bryan, Hubert Humphrey, and the Jeffersionian Legacy that "traces the decline—disappearance, really—of Jeffersonian populism within the democracy by contrasting the careers of William Jennings Bryan and Hubert Horatio Humphrey." On Bryan, who was the Democratic nominee for President in 1896, 1900, and 1908:

Restating the Jeffersonian motto “Equal rights for all; special privileges for none,” he denounced “ship-subsidy grabbers,” “trust magnates,” and “the privilege-hunting and favor-seeking class.” (Predictably, his campaigns were chronically underfunded.) It might seem odd that Taylor calls a candidate who advocated nationalization of the railroads a believer in “a laissez-faire economy,” but Bryan himself professed it: “The safety of our farmers and our laborers is not in special legislation, but in equal and just laws that bear alike on every man. The great masses of our people are interested, not in getting their hands into other people’s pockets, but in keeping the hands of other people out of their pockets.”

Bryan was also “a quasi pacifist and anti-imperialist” who made his 1900 campaign a referendum on imperialism and stood up against the jingoes in opposing U.S. entry into the First World War. He supported a national referendum upon a congressional declaration of war, one of the last full-throated shouts of the radical populists.

Contrast this with Humphrey:

As a good social democrat—today’s neocon elders were almost all Humphrey men—HHH hated pacifists, isolationists, and radical American dissenters and purged them with the fervor of Tailgunner Joe. And as a good liberal of the American Century, “Humphrey was an enthusiastic supporter of every U.S. war from 1938 to 1978.” For by 1950, liberalism meant tanks and conscription and a foreign policy designed by rootless products of elite prep schools, well-bred Mr. Joneses who had no idea what was happening to them when finally, in the 1960s, the fodder rose up against their fathers.

Humphrey, twisting the Jeffersonian slogan, desired “special privileges for all,” cracks Taylor. An “exponent of paternalistic statism,” he never met a welfare progam he didn’t vote for—no matter if the beneficary was Lockheed, Boeing, or a single mother. He stated confidently that “big corporations are a source of strength and economic vitality.” No hippie-dippy small-is-beautiful sap for the Triple H!

Which resembles the Democrats today? Sailer continues:

Carrying the story beyond Humphrey, Taylor pokes about in the Democratic carrion and finds nothing but little Huberts (without the original’s kinetic appeal) scurrying about: Gore, Kerry, Hillary Clinton. The values associated with the Democracy B.E. (Before Empire)— “decentralization, frugality, pacifism, and isolationism”—are about as potent a force as Anti-Masonry in contemporary Democratic politics. (He holds out hope for Wisconsin Sen. Russell Feingold, who cast gutsy votes against the Iraq War and the Patriot Act and seems to have a LaFollette gene. We shall see.)

As for Bryan’s legacy? Taylor nominates Sen. Robert Taft, California Gov. Jerry Brown, and maverick Wisconsin Sen. William Proxmire as “the most balanced, most fully realized Jeffersonian politicians of the post-New Deal era.” He rightly sees in the Brown, Perot, and Buchanan campaigns of 1992 the seeds of a new populism that is antiwar, anti-globalist, and anti-Wall Street, the avenging Jeffersonian ghost haunting the ruined castle along the Potomac.

Taylor, who has been active in the Green Party, seems to write off the Democrats when he says, “It may be that the only hope for a Jeffersonian reunification of the common people in the electoral arena is the creation of a broad-based, ideologically diverse populist party that encompasses everyone from the Green Party on the Left to the Constitution Party on the Right.” That dream always dissolves abruptly in the light of social issues, though coalition builders might try the federalist solution: let San Francisco be San Francisco, and let Utah be Utah. Mind your own damn place.

Anti-government (libertarian), anti-Big Business (populist), pro-federalism (paleo-conservative): is such a coalition possible? That might be our best and last hope.