Why the Democrats Are Blue: Secular Liberalism
and the Decline of the People’s Party
By Mark Stricherz
(Encounter Books, 315 pages, $29.95)
Believe it or not, there was a time when it was possible to
survive and even thrive within the Democratic Party as a principled
opponent of abortion. In 1972, the same year the party acquired its
“acid, amnesty, and abortion” label, two pro-lifers made it onto
the Democrats’ national ticket.
Thomas Eagleton — the man Robert Novak credits with coining the
Democrats’ triple-A sobriquet — was George McGovern’s first choice
for a running mate. Eagleton was replaced on the ticket by fellow
abortion opponent Sargent Shriver. And although he had to upset
pro-life frontrunner Edmund Muskie to win the nomination, McGovern
himself was more ambivalent about abortion than his countercultural
supporters.
In chronicling the decline of the pro-life Democrat, however,
political journalist Mark Stricherz assigns a considerable amount
of the blame to McGovern and a commission bearing his name. His
book Why the Democrats Are Blue traces the
decline of the “people’s party” to the displacement of its socially
conservative base among blue-collar Catholics and (to a much lesser
extent) Southern Protestants by white-collar secular liberals.
When bills expanding access to birth control began wending their
way through state legislatures, they often passed with the votes of
Rockefeller Republicans over the objections of Catholic Democrats.
The GOP, the party of Phyllis Schlafly, endorsed the Equal Rights
Amendment in its platform years before the Democrats adopted such a
plank. Hubert Humphrey and Ed Muskie were initially more vocal in
their opposition to liberalizing abortion laws than Richard
Nixon.
Consider the long (by no means exhaustive) list of high-profile
Democratic politicians who began their careers as abortion
opponents only to embrace a pro-choice position as their political
fortunes advanced: Ted Kennedy, Jesse Jackson, Joe Biden, Al Gore,
Dick Gephardt, Richard Durbin, and Dennis Kucinich. Even Bill
Clinton once wrote, in a 1986 letter to Arkansas Right to Life,
that he was “opposed to abortion and government funding of
abortions.” Democratic opposition researchers and attack ad-makers
beware: Mitt Romney has had plenty of company in the abortion
flip-flopping business over the years.
ALL THESE DEMOCRATIC pols changed because their party did. On the
social and cultural questions of its time, the Democratic Party of
the 1960s and early '70s was a house divided. It was the party of
both the Southern defenders of Jim Crow and the civil rights
movement. It was also the political home of both moral
traditionalists and '60s radicals.
Although many Catholic Democratic leaders tried to keep the New
Deal party together, combining economic liberalism and support for
blacks’ civil rights with social conservatism, these divisions came
to a head at the 1968 convention in Chicago. The clashes between
the demonstrators in the streets and Mayor Richard Daley’s police
convinced much of the “Silent Majority” that the Democrats were on
the other side. And it convinced many of the young liberals who
worked within the Democratic power structure but sympathized with
the demonstrators that the party bosses and political machines
needed to be supplanted.
Enter the McGovern Commission. Ostensibly aimed at making the
Democratic Party more small-d democratic, it reduced the role of
party officials and bigwigs in the nomination process while
increasing the importance of caucuses and primaries in choosing
delegates to the national convention. But the commission also
mandated quotas to enhance the representation of women, minorities,
and the youth movement.
Stricherz contends that the net result was to bias the process
in favor of the party’s most liberal elements, shutting out
working-class social conservatives. And as the Democratic Party
tried to make itself look more like America, it began to have less
in common with the American electorate. The 1972 election, with
McGovern at the helm, was a debacle, with the disenfranchised
Catholics and Southerners contributing to Nixon’s 49-state
landslide.
Jimmy Carter briefly contained the damage. A Southerner and
born-again Christian who absorbed the lessons of McGovern’s loss,
he played the middle on social issues. Running against the moderate
Republican Gerald Ford in 1976, he opposed both a constitutional
amendment overturning Roe v. Wade (without being
especially supportive of Roe itself) and taxpayer funding
of abortion (he later signed the Hyde Amendment into law). That
year, he carried both social liberals and social conservatives by a
narrow margin, winning the presidency with pro-life and pro-choice
votes alike.
THE FRAGILE COMPROMISE came apart in 1980, when Ronald Reagan
invited social conservatives — many of them Reagan Democrats —
into the new Republican majority coalition. Stricherz recounts the
familiar stories and statistics about these voters helped the GOP
win the 1980, 1984, 1988, 2000, and 2004 elections, except for when
Bill Clinton reprised the Carter model in 1992 and 1996.
Like, in their own ways, Ramesh Ponnuru in The Party of
Death and David Carlin in Can a Catholic
Be a Democrat?, Stricherz makes a powerful case that
social liberalism has hurt the Democrats. He is much less
persuasive about what to do next. He can’t argue for returning to
the old undemocratic boss system and provides little evidence that
the recommendations he does make — more open, less blue-state
primaries and optimism about Hispanic social conservatism — will
turn the tide.
The book also comes at a bad time. The Democratic Party has
managed to win control of both houses of Congress while being only
marginally more open to cultural conservatives. The two most
frequently cited examples of this new openness are pro-life
Democrats Harry Reid, whose record has become much less pro-life as
he’s moved up in the leadership, and Bob Casey Jr., who voted to overturn the Mexico City policy against
taxpayer funding of pro-abortion groups.
Even without taking Stricherz’s advice, the Democrats may be
poised to increase their congressional majorities next year and are
favored in the presidential race. The Republicans seem to be
increasingly split between undermining their social-issues
advantage by nominating Rudy Giuliani or mimicking the Democrats’
old fusion of social conservatism and economic liberalism by
nominating Mike Huckabee.
Why the Democrats Are Blue is a welcome reminder of
social conservatism’s continued relevance and the Democratic
Party’s better angels. But sometimes, you can’t go home again.
