There is nothing like listening to progressive radio in the
aftermath of a significant defeat for its pet causes to get a cheap
education in civics. I write this while marveling at how the
mid-day host on “Air America” assured like-minded callers that he
didn’t know whether voting machines had been rigged to ensure
Republican victory.
To his credit, Ed Schultz also admitted that devious programming
might not account for Republican gains in the House and the Senate.
In his estimation, Democrats lost because too many people have been
snookered by doubletalk about “God, Guns, and Gays.”
Bush won on fear, Schultz said. True enough, in its way: fear of
a Kerry presidency apparently gave the president even more votes
than Reagan ever won.
But how would Schultz and his listeners explain John Howard’s
victory in Australia, I wonder? Surely the evil genius of Karl Rove
does not extend to Oz, or to Afghanistan, which just certified Bush
ally Hamid Kharzai as its first elected president.
Sadly, neither Schultz nor his callers seemed prepared to
concede that perception rather than deception might explain
electoral defeat for the Kedwards ticket.
Believe it or not, some Left-leaning bloggers are consoling
themselves by invoking the ghost of Barry Goldwater. They want to
follow his example of turning short-term defeat into long-term
victory.
But the Goldwater example only works for progressives if you
think political philosophies are interchangeable. Whoever puts the
Democratic Party back together will have to do it with different
raw material than Barry Goldwater had on hand.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Kerry
together again. That’s because Democrat stars like Barack Obama,
Howard Dean, and Hillary Clinton have little more than money and
charisma going for them. The Democratic base isn’t what it once
was. Jesse Jackson talks more to himself than to anyone else these
days. Louisiana just sent an Indian-American to Congress for the
GOP. And as James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal is
forever pointing out in squibs about the “Roe Effect” (as first
discussed by Larry Eastland in The American
Spectator), abortion kills a disproportionate share of
would-be Democrats.
Meanwhile, although “compassionate conservatism” spends too much
taxpayer money, its implicit recognition of human dignity appeals
to more people than calls for bigger government. Couple that with
the explicit affirmation of human dignity in the RNC platform, and
you’ve got a chance to run the table, as George W. Bush very nearly
did, except for the defeat of Pete Coors in Colorado and the
passage of the rotten embryonic stem cell research bond in
California.
When progressives declare that “it takes a village,”
traditionalists invoke the (Catholic) principle of subsidiarity to
focus down further than that and say “it takes a family.” Smart
non-traditionalists accept the progressive formula, but rightly
suspect that a federal bureaucracy can’t really be called a
village.
Both of these objections must be taken seriously before
Democrats can win the presidency again, and neither objection can
be met by people who inflate judicial egos and dismiss their
opponents as simpletons. In political reconstruction project as in
other things, word choice plays an important role as the leading
indicator of fidelity to, or variance from, reality.
Rule number one: The American electorate is not a mob, not a
herd, and not a rabble: it’s a pack.
