From the WSJ Opinion Archives
WONDER LAND
Democrats Need to Rejoin America
The cultural contradictions of American liberalism.
Writing in The Wall Street Journal yesterday, Al From, the head of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, offered an antidote to the party's election failure: "Democrats need to get the big things right. That means national security and the economy." It won't happen.
Years ago, a famous liberal intellectual named Daniel Bell wrote a book called "The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism." This column's brief essay might be called "The Cultural Contradictions of the Democratic Party."
It's likely true that if the Democrats got the two Big Things right--national security and the economy--they'd be back in the game. But there is virtually no evidence in print that the Democrats want to stare into the mirror of the morning after and confront the mortifying effects of the political lives they've lived the past 33 years--since 1969, that glorious year of Woodstock and the Vietnam Moratorium. At those two famous liberating events, the Democrats permanently lost touch with the two Big Things.
In the week since the election, what we've mostly heard is that the reason the Democrats lost broadly to Republicans is that they failed to make explicit their policy disagreements with George W. Bush on Social Security, taxes and Iraq. Success in politics often turns on such policy detail, but surely politics is about more than that. It is also about culture--the ideas and beliefs that one assumes are held in common by most members of a society. If you get too far on the wrong side of this majority culture, you might, if nothing else, start losing elections.
The first cultural contradiction of the Democrats is their alienation from the real economy. Democrats participate in the economy as lawyers, investment bankers, doctors, teachers and the like. Somehow, it's supposed to be more than mere workaday money-grubbing. But there is one career that would never enter the mind of most Democrats: Spend it working for Procter & Gamble. They'd go homeless before toiling as a middle manager at Procter & Gamble, which is "out there" somewhere. But this is what most Americans do, at thousands upon thousands of such companies spread from Pennsylvania to the border of California. No matter; in the Democratic Zeitgeist, it's all simply "corporate America," an alien blob of marketing types who have something to do with creating Wal-Mart, and other strange stuff.
These Americans don't live in the average Democratic mind as anything real; they're pod people, who cause "sprawl." In the election they just lost, Democrats demonized for months, then ran against "the Enrons and the WorldComs"--as if resentment of corporate logos would drive voters to the polls. At least in the old days the progressives railed against the Robber Barons, men with names. But with the decline of industrial unions, cultural Democrats have lost any affinity whatsoever for this swath of American society, which they've reduced to an economic abstraction.
It's the most natural thing in the world for a candidate like Al Gore, or hundreds like him, to rant about "big energy companies, big drug companies and corporate polluters." But showing themselves so viscerally hostile to the real economy has had an effect. Younger people coming out of college who might once have considered themselves natural Democrats now often claim to be "libertarians." Essentially this means they don't see the private sector as their mortal political enemy.
The second Democratic cultural contradiction is national security, but more than that, it seems to be security of any sort. Put it this way: If one of the three or four most important, constantly stated goals of your political culture is gun control, how are you going to make anyone believe that when the moment comes, you'll take up arms to fight al Qaeda or Saddam?
The Democratic Party has an esteemed and honorable legacy on national defense. But the Jackson-Nunn Senate philosophy of Democratic engagement in the formation of defense policy has vanished from the party's writing and thought. What happened? It's hard not to conclude that this loss corresponded with the dying out of the Greatest Generation, displaced by the Woodstock-cum-Moratorium opposition to America's overseas "adventures." Many Democrats who were young in those years and served in Vietnam have become marginalized inside their own party.
The elimination of universal military service no doubt played a role. The Pentagon opposes it now, but the loss of communal participation in the mechanics of national defense freed many Democrats to indulge and promote antimilitarist fantasies without fear they'd personally pay a price for them.
This, too, had a political effect over time. Tom Daschle, many of his colleagues, and his party's donors have so reflexively and for so long pushed against anything suggesting the culture of military violence and aggression (one bomber displaces so many needed child-care facilities) that when a real threat landed in America, they stumbled onto the wrong side of the Iraq resolution, and lost an election.
But the party's cultural contradiction on security has become even more self-destructive. In its most extreme manifestation, contemporary liberals have become so instinctively peaceable and gentle that they can't defend even themselves. When in the 1970s and '80s New York City and Los Angeles were beset with violent crime, liberals declined to act, having talked themselves into believing that this would be racist, even as residents in the poorest neighborhoods and schools were assaulted or killed. This is neurotic. Both cities now have Republican mayors.
Overall in the last election, Republicans got about 52% of the vote and Democrats 48%. Where's the upside for Democrats? It is difficult to see how they compete for the necessary margin of voting victory if they refuse to become full citizens of 21st-century America as it is, not as they endlessly--and condescendingly--imagine it. That means not mocking at their dinner parties the kind of people who work for Procter & Gamble. And it means being willing to support what it takes to defend the nation, themselves included. If living in this kind of political culture is unacceptable to them, their chances of winning will continue to shrink.
Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.
