Calif. Hunter
Active member
Dem Problems
A great political party can't thrive on snob
appeal.
Monday, March 3, 2003 12:01 a.m. EST
PEGGY NOONAN
Recently Andrew Cuomo asked me to contribute to a book of essays
on the future of the Democratic Party. I thought I would send it
to Andrew through OpinionJournal.com. That way he will be able
to see your responses pro and con and perhaps include a few of
them in the book, too.
Dear Andrew, As a former Democrat I'm happy to talk to my old
party about its future. Some of my words may sting a little, but
I send them to you in hopes your party will see in them food for
thought, and for progress.
All political parties have problems--infighting, internal
dissent, philosophical disagreements. But the modern Democratic
Party has problems that are essentially different from that, and
could actually do it in.
The first is what seems to me a lack of a constructive spirit
within your party. Great parties exist in part to give us
markers for the future. They offer a rough map that will get us
to a better and higher destination. In the Democratic Party now,
and for some time, I have not perceived that they are trying to
get us to a good place. They seem interested only in thwarting
the trek of the current president and his party, who are, to the
Democrats, "the other." When the president is a Democrat you now
support him no matter what. You support him if he doesn't have a
map, and isn't interested in markers, and is only interested in
his own day-to-day survival.
I am not saying you are too partisan. Partisanship is fine. But
Republicans by and large don't suffer from blind loyalty or
blind antagonism. They would think it irresponsible to the
country. They will bolt on one of their own if he insists on a
route they think is seriously wrong (the first Bush on taxes).
They will kill his presidency if they conclude he is essentially
destructive (it was his Republican base in Congress that ended
Richard Nixon's career). Recently it was Republicans who did in
their own Senate majority leader because they would not accept a
certain kind of nonsense. If George W. Bush begins to seriously
compromise conservative political philosophy, or to behave in a
manner grossly offensive in a leader, they will turn on him too.
The Democratic Party will now stick with its guy forever, no
matter how harmful he is. Perhaps you call that loyalty, and
perhaps there's something to it, but a bigger part, I believe,
is that you have come to think that winning is everything--that
victory is the purpose of politics.
If the purpose is just winning, you can do anything to win. And
you can do anything to stay. You never give an inch. But people
who never give an inch sometimes wind up occupying tired and
barren terrain.
You have grown profoundly unserious. This is the result of the
win-at-any-cost mindset. A recent illustration: President Bush
broke through to the great middle of America and persuaded them
we must move in Iraq. He was able to do this not because the
presidency is the Big Microphone--President Clinton used to
complain that Rush Limbaugh had the big microphone--but because
he honestly believed, in his head and his heart, he was acting
to make our country and other countries safer. Maybe history
will show him right and maybe not, but people can tell his
passion springs from conviction. Democratic leaders, on the
other hand, have by and large approached Iraq not with deep
head-heart integration but with what appears to be mere
calculation. What will play? What will resonate? These questions
are both inevitable and a part of politics. But again, they are
not the purpose of politics. Lincoln himself said, "Public
opinion is everything," but he was speaking of public opinion as
a fact he had to consider as he tried to push the country in a
new direction. He did not think public opinion itself was a
direction. And he didn't think it was a policy.
The modern Democratic Party is unserious in other ways. In the
1950s and '60s the party included many obviously earnest and
thoughtful liberals who supported goals that were in line with
and expressions of serious beliefs. They believed that America
was an exceptional country. (See the speeches of Adlai Stevenson
among others.) Because it was exceptional it needed to remain
strong. (JFK: "We shall pay any price, bear any burden, suffer
any hardship . . . to secure the survival and success of
liberty.")
They also believed America had real flaws, actual sins, that
needed to be righted. They assumed this exceptional country
could right them. (That's what optimism is in politics; it's not
smiling a hearty smile in front of a podium and pointing with a
commanding air toward all your friends in the audience.) They
wanted racial integration for the good of justice and the good
of our country. They wanted more government assistance to the
poor for the same reason. They were anticommunist. They were
grownups. They were thinking.
Vietnam changed everything of course, and even though this is an
old story I'll touch on it. Your party's problem was not that it
opposed the war--that was one honorable position among many. The
mistake the Democrats made was to allow their antiwar movement
to become infused with bitterness and hostility, with a spirit
of destructiveness. By the end the animating spirit of the
movement looked something like this: We do not love this place;
we prefer leaders unsullied by the grubby demands of electoral
politics; we are drawn to the ideological purity of Ho, Fidel,
Mao. And by the way we're taking over: Oppose our vision and
we'll take care of you by revolutionary means.
That was the ultimate spirit of the movement, and it began to
take over your party. The old-bull liberals were swept away,
more radical Democrats arose, and they led your party to become
not a united and spirited force but a party of often warring
pressure groups. The pro-abortion lobby, the affirmative-action
lobby, other lobbies. You have had only one two-term Democratic
president in the 35 years since Vietnam. This is because in the
end you looked extreme, bought and paid for, and weak.
The Republican Party still manages to cohere around principles
that are essentially clear and essentially conservative. The
Democrats are not cohering. They are held together by a gritty
talent for political process--message discipline, for instance.
But what good is message discipline if there's no serious and
coherent message?
There is another problem. You have become the party of snobs.
You have become the party of Americans who think they're better
than other Americans. Let me quickly chart the life of a former
Democrat. When I was a teenager in the 1960s, the Democrats
seemed to me the party of the working class and middle
class--the party of immigrants, strivers and those who adhered
to an expansive reading of the American dream. I shared that
dream, and saw my home as the Democratic Party. I was swayed by
JFK and Bobby, by their implicit sense of honor about being
Americans, as if they thought to be an American was a great gift
and yet had a price: You had to help your country, you had to
have guts and an open mind, you had to care about people others
forgot.
I thought of Republicans as bland, unimaginative, vaguely
immoral people who drank things like gin and tonic where they
played things like golf. I remember reading in high school or
college and being moved by someone's wonderful old turn of the
century agitprop poem--"The golf links were so near the mills
that nearly every day / The laboring children could look out and
see the men at play." I assumed those men were Republicans.
My father had been a poor kid in Brooklyn who grew up on what
was then called relief. He'd talk about the rancid butter people
like him were given to eat. But he thought Franklin Roosevelt
was the only president who'd ever done anything to help the
workingman, and he had a resentment of those who were
comfortably middle class, or upper middle, or rich. I inherited
this. These were the biases I brought to the conversation when
talk turned to politics when I was a teenager and young woman.
But--again--the antiwar movement startled me. I knew America was
imperfect, but I also loved it. I had no illusion that other
countries were perfect, or superior. I couldn't imagine an
unelected dictator had more legitimacy than an American
president. I will never forget a moment when on local television
they showed one day an antiwar march meeting up with a bunch of
New York hardhats near City Hall. They fought, and the hardhats
tried to raise the American flag. I watched and realized I was
pulling for the hard hats.
I worked in Boston after college and saw affluent, well-educated
and deeply insensitive officials forcing busing on working-class
people who were understandably aghast at the idea that their
young children couldn't go to the school down the block but had
to be bused to a place far away where they knew nobody. I worked
in an all-news radio station, and many of my colleagues, the
writers and editors and producers, were young liberals gone
left, bright and engaged by life. They were almost all for
busing. Their enthusiasm for it--they hadn't yet had children
whose presence might have moderated their thoughts and
conclusions--left them patronizing the ill-educated and no doubt
racist poor-Irish-Catholics-who-have-nothing people of South
Boston, who opposed busing. Again I was startled. This was like
the antiwar movement. It was like Henry Cabot Lodge looking down
on the help! It would never have occurred to me to look down on
anyone. But boy, these liberals did. They were real snobs. And
it was class snobbery.
I was, as a young woman in the '70s, trying to commit myself
professionally for the first time. I wanted to do good work, and
really tried. But I saw in time that I was being clobbered by
taxes, and in time I had a subversive thought. Hmmm, liberals
who back busing are taxing me extra heavy so I can pay for
busing. Great.
Liberals were also acting as if street crime was an inevitable
result of societal injustice. I didn't doubt there was truth in
that, but I also knew street crime was the result of street
criminals, and they should be caught and thrown in jail. But how
can you find time to do that when you're busy reforming society
top to bottom like little Pol Pots? In fact, why do it at all
when the fact of exploding street crime seems to support your
theories about American inequality and injustice? Once one late
night on the T, the city transit system, I got off at a downtown
stop and noticed a woman who'd gotten off with me. She was about
60, she was furiously going through her purse, and she had the
kind of flopping _expression of someone who's just lost control
of her facial muscles. I asked what was wrong and she turned to
me and began to cry. She said she'd had her purse next to her on
the subway, she feared the kid next to her had opened it, she
was afraid, she got off, and all her money was gone. He'd taken
everything. She did not appear to be someone who could lose $40
or $60 lightly. I helped her report it and I think I gave her
money. But hers was truly the face of the oppressed: an old lady
alone who's lost control of her face. And who was oppressing
her? It wasn't the tough-on-crime crowd.
All of it came together bit by bit, and I started to become a
conservative, and in time a Republican. And for the very reasons
that my father was a Democrat.
Not a word of what I am saying is new. You've heard stories like
this before. But it is still fiercely pertinent to your
fortunes, because the journey I describe was common. It was the
journey millions and tens of millions of people were taking at
the same time, in the same era, for the same reasons. By the
'80s their numbers were massive. They were the ground troops of
the Reagan revolution. They left the Democratic Party. They left
you. Here's your problem: To this day they haven't come back.
And they're not teaching their kids to love you.
I see the modern Democratic Party as the party of snobs. I
wonder why your much-proclaimed compassion is distributed on
such a limited basis--to this pressure group, that minority
group, this special interest group.
Yes, all parties do this to some degree, but again, the
Republicans the past quarter century seemed to be building
coalitions that embraced the same general principles--freedom in
the world, security at home, smaller and less mighty government
wherever possible, more money left in the pockets of the people,
a respect for the things that were tried and true. They
recognize the fact of evil in the world, and they're unwilling
to excuse crime and criminals.
The Democrats seemed motivated not by general principles and
beliefs but only the need to win, which left you protecting your
market share by bribing groups you'd once been able to champion.
You've become confused as to your purpose, your reason for
being. Yes, Republicans have pressure groups too, and the party
pays great attention to them. But the GOP's pressure groups are
in line with the sympathies of the party as a whole. When the
National Rifle Association agitates for its issues, it's
agitating within a party that supports the right to keep and
bear arms.
"Confronting Liberals with the facts of reality is very much akin to
clubbing baby seals. It gets boring after a while, but because Liberals are
so stupid it is easy work." Steven M. Barry
A great political party can't thrive on snob
appeal.
Monday, March 3, 2003 12:01 a.m. EST
PEGGY NOONAN
Recently Andrew Cuomo asked me to contribute to a book of essays
on the future of the Democratic Party. I thought I would send it
to Andrew through OpinionJournal.com. That way he will be able
to see your responses pro and con and perhaps include a few of
them in the book, too.
Dear Andrew, As a former Democrat I'm happy to talk to my old
party about its future. Some of my words may sting a little, but
I send them to you in hopes your party will see in them food for
thought, and for progress.
All political parties have problems--infighting, internal
dissent, philosophical disagreements. But the modern Democratic
Party has problems that are essentially different from that, and
could actually do it in.
The first is what seems to me a lack of a constructive spirit
within your party. Great parties exist in part to give us
markers for the future. They offer a rough map that will get us
to a better and higher destination. In the Democratic Party now,
and for some time, I have not perceived that they are trying to
get us to a good place. They seem interested only in thwarting
the trek of the current president and his party, who are, to the
Democrats, "the other." When the president is a Democrat you now
support him no matter what. You support him if he doesn't have a
map, and isn't interested in markers, and is only interested in
his own day-to-day survival.
I am not saying you are too partisan. Partisanship is fine. But
Republicans by and large don't suffer from blind loyalty or
blind antagonism. They would think it irresponsible to the
country. They will bolt on one of their own if he insists on a
route they think is seriously wrong (the first Bush on taxes).
They will kill his presidency if they conclude he is essentially
destructive (it was his Republican base in Congress that ended
Richard Nixon's career). Recently it was Republicans who did in
their own Senate majority leader because they would not accept a
certain kind of nonsense. If George W. Bush begins to seriously
compromise conservative political philosophy, or to behave in a
manner grossly offensive in a leader, they will turn on him too.
The Democratic Party will now stick with its guy forever, no
matter how harmful he is. Perhaps you call that loyalty, and
perhaps there's something to it, but a bigger part, I believe,
is that you have come to think that winning is everything--that
victory is the purpose of politics.
If the purpose is just winning, you can do anything to win. And
you can do anything to stay. You never give an inch. But people
who never give an inch sometimes wind up occupying tired and
barren terrain.
You have grown profoundly unserious. This is the result of the
win-at-any-cost mindset. A recent illustration: President Bush
broke through to the great middle of America and persuaded them
we must move in Iraq. He was able to do this not because the
presidency is the Big Microphone--President Clinton used to
complain that Rush Limbaugh had the big microphone--but because
he honestly believed, in his head and his heart, he was acting
to make our country and other countries safer. Maybe history
will show him right and maybe not, but people can tell his
passion springs from conviction. Democratic leaders, on the
other hand, have by and large approached Iraq not with deep
head-heart integration but with what appears to be mere
calculation. What will play? What will resonate? These questions
are both inevitable and a part of politics. But again, they are
not the purpose of politics. Lincoln himself said, "Public
opinion is everything," but he was speaking of public opinion as
a fact he had to consider as he tried to push the country in a
new direction. He did not think public opinion itself was a
direction. And he didn't think it was a policy.
The modern Democratic Party is unserious in other ways. In the
1950s and '60s the party included many obviously earnest and
thoughtful liberals who supported goals that were in line with
and expressions of serious beliefs. They believed that America
was an exceptional country. (See the speeches of Adlai Stevenson
among others.) Because it was exceptional it needed to remain
strong. (JFK: "We shall pay any price, bear any burden, suffer
any hardship . . . to secure the survival and success of
liberty.")
They also believed America had real flaws, actual sins, that
needed to be righted. They assumed this exceptional country
could right them. (That's what optimism is in politics; it's not
smiling a hearty smile in front of a podium and pointing with a
commanding air toward all your friends in the audience.) They
wanted racial integration for the good of justice and the good
of our country. They wanted more government assistance to the
poor for the same reason. They were anticommunist. They were
grownups. They were thinking.
Vietnam changed everything of course, and even though this is an
old story I'll touch on it. Your party's problem was not that it
opposed the war--that was one honorable position among many. The
mistake the Democrats made was to allow their antiwar movement
to become infused with bitterness and hostility, with a spirit
of destructiveness. By the end the animating spirit of the
movement looked something like this: We do not love this place;
we prefer leaders unsullied by the grubby demands of electoral
politics; we are drawn to the ideological purity of Ho, Fidel,
Mao. And by the way we're taking over: Oppose our vision and
we'll take care of you by revolutionary means.
That was the ultimate spirit of the movement, and it began to
take over your party. The old-bull liberals were swept away,
more radical Democrats arose, and they led your party to become
not a united and spirited force but a party of often warring
pressure groups. The pro-abortion lobby, the affirmative-action
lobby, other lobbies. You have had only one two-term Democratic
president in the 35 years since Vietnam. This is because in the
end you looked extreme, bought and paid for, and weak.
The Republican Party still manages to cohere around principles
that are essentially clear and essentially conservative. The
Democrats are not cohering. They are held together by a gritty
talent for political process--message discipline, for instance.
But what good is message discipline if there's no serious and
coherent message?
There is another problem. You have become the party of snobs.
You have become the party of Americans who think they're better
than other Americans. Let me quickly chart the life of a former
Democrat. When I was a teenager in the 1960s, the Democrats
seemed to me the party of the working class and middle
class--the party of immigrants, strivers and those who adhered
to an expansive reading of the American dream. I shared that
dream, and saw my home as the Democratic Party. I was swayed by
JFK and Bobby, by their implicit sense of honor about being
Americans, as if they thought to be an American was a great gift
and yet had a price: You had to help your country, you had to
have guts and an open mind, you had to care about people others
forgot.
I thought of Republicans as bland, unimaginative, vaguely
immoral people who drank things like gin and tonic where they
played things like golf. I remember reading in high school or
college and being moved by someone's wonderful old turn of the
century agitprop poem--"The golf links were so near the mills
that nearly every day / The laboring children could look out and
see the men at play." I assumed those men were Republicans.
My father had been a poor kid in Brooklyn who grew up on what
was then called relief. He'd talk about the rancid butter people
like him were given to eat. But he thought Franklin Roosevelt
was the only president who'd ever done anything to help the
workingman, and he had a resentment of those who were
comfortably middle class, or upper middle, or rich. I inherited
this. These were the biases I brought to the conversation when
talk turned to politics when I was a teenager and young woman.
But--again--the antiwar movement startled me. I knew America was
imperfect, but I also loved it. I had no illusion that other
countries were perfect, or superior. I couldn't imagine an
unelected dictator had more legitimacy than an American
president. I will never forget a moment when on local television
they showed one day an antiwar march meeting up with a bunch of
New York hardhats near City Hall. They fought, and the hardhats
tried to raise the American flag. I watched and realized I was
pulling for the hard hats.
I worked in Boston after college and saw affluent, well-educated
and deeply insensitive officials forcing busing on working-class
people who were understandably aghast at the idea that their
young children couldn't go to the school down the block but had
to be bused to a place far away where they knew nobody. I worked
in an all-news radio station, and many of my colleagues, the
writers and editors and producers, were young liberals gone
left, bright and engaged by life. They were almost all for
busing. Their enthusiasm for it--they hadn't yet had children
whose presence might have moderated their thoughts and
conclusions--left them patronizing the ill-educated and no doubt
racist poor-Irish-Catholics-who-have-nothing people of South
Boston, who opposed busing. Again I was startled. This was like
the antiwar movement. It was like Henry Cabot Lodge looking down
on the help! It would never have occurred to me to look down on
anyone. But boy, these liberals did. They were real snobs. And
it was class snobbery.
I was, as a young woman in the '70s, trying to commit myself
professionally for the first time. I wanted to do good work, and
really tried. But I saw in time that I was being clobbered by
taxes, and in time I had a subversive thought. Hmmm, liberals
who back busing are taxing me extra heavy so I can pay for
busing. Great.
Liberals were also acting as if street crime was an inevitable
result of societal injustice. I didn't doubt there was truth in
that, but I also knew street crime was the result of street
criminals, and they should be caught and thrown in jail. But how
can you find time to do that when you're busy reforming society
top to bottom like little Pol Pots? In fact, why do it at all
when the fact of exploding street crime seems to support your
theories about American inequality and injustice? Once one late
night on the T, the city transit system, I got off at a downtown
stop and noticed a woman who'd gotten off with me. She was about
60, she was furiously going through her purse, and she had the
kind of flopping _expression of someone who's just lost control
of her facial muscles. I asked what was wrong and she turned to
me and began to cry. She said she'd had her purse next to her on
the subway, she feared the kid next to her had opened it, she
was afraid, she got off, and all her money was gone. He'd taken
everything. She did not appear to be someone who could lose $40
or $60 lightly. I helped her report it and I think I gave her
money. But hers was truly the face of the oppressed: an old lady
alone who's lost control of her face. And who was oppressing
her? It wasn't the tough-on-crime crowd.
All of it came together bit by bit, and I started to become a
conservative, and in time a Republican. And for the very reasons
that my father was a Democrat.
Not a word of what I am saying is new. You've heard stories like
this before. But it is still fiercely pertinent to your
fortunes, because the journey I describe was common. It was the
journey millions and tens of millions of people were taking at
the same time, in the same era, for the same reasons. By the
'80s their numbers were massive. They were the ground troops of
the Reagan revolution. They left the Democratic Party. They left
you. Here's your problem: To this day they haven't come back.
And they're not teaching their kids to love you.
I see the modern Democratic Party as the party of snobs. I
wonder why your much-proclaimed compassion is distributed on
such a limited basis--to this pressure group, that minority
group, this special interest group.
Yes, all parties do this to some degree, but again, the
Republicans the past quarter century seemed to be building
coalitions that embraced the same general principles--freedom in
the world, security at home, smaller and less mighty government
wherever possible, more money left in the pockets of the people,
a respect for the things that were tried and true. They
recognize the fact of evil in the world, and they're unwilling
to excuse crime and criminals.
The Democrats seemed motivated not by general principles and
beliefs but only the need to win, which left you protecting your
market share by bribing groups you'd once been able to champion.
You've become confused as to your purpose, your reason for
being. Yes, Republicans have pressure groups too, and the party
pays great attention to them. But the GOP's pressure groups are
in line with the sympathies of the party as a whole. When the
National Rifle Association agitates for its issues, it's
agitating within a party that supports the right to keep and
bear arms.
"Confronting Liberals with the facts of reality is very much akin to
clubbing baby seals. It gets boring after a while, but because Liberals are
so stupid it is easy work." Steven M. Barry
