THINKING THINGS OVER
Angry Democrats: Lost Birthright
Why they hate Bush as much as Republicans once hated FDR.
BY ROBERT L. BARTLEY
Monday, September 22, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT
To protect democracy, three judges of the far-left Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals have just canceled elections in California. The last horselaugh, I'd hope, for the Democratic charge that Republicans are subverting democracy. As we saw in this space last week, the charge was already a pretty silly explanation of the patent anger surging through the Democratic primaries.
The anger must have deeper, perhaps subconscious roots. So let me put the Democratic base on the couch and offer my own speculation. The party's most ardent adherents are angry because they feel they've lost their birthright.
That is to say, base Democrats think of themselves as the best people: the most intelligent and informed, the most public spirited, the most morally pure. This self-image has become more than a little shopworn over the years, and now George Bush's conservative Republicans threaten to strip it away. Inevitably such Democrats are angry.
Consider the purely political side: The Democratic Party held the House of Representatives for 40 years and the Senate and White House for most of an era reaching back to World War II. Today the Democrats' last toehold on political power is the ability to muster 40 votes to sustain a filibuster in the Senate--a not-so-democratic tactic it is using in unprecedented ways to sustain the judicial imperialism on display with the Democratic appointees on the Ninth Circuit.
The party's future bids further decline, despite the narrowness of the 2000 presidential election, and despite the Republican president's momentarily fading poll numbers. In the 2004 elections, the Senate races include 19 seats now held by Democrats and 15 held by Republicans. All but maybe two of the Republicans seem safe, while three Democratic incumbents have already announced their resignations. Of the 19 Democratic seats at stake, 10 are in "red" states carried by President Bush in 2000.
The midterm 2002 elections have been largely overlooked, further, but were a historical Republican success. Almost always an incumbent president's party suffers congressional losses in its first midterm elections, but the Republicans regained Senate control and added to their House majority. The nationwide House vote was 51% Republican and 46% Democratic. In state legislatures, Republicans gained 141 seats, winning a nationwide majority for the first time since 1952.
Looking at these results, Michael Barone speculates in the new edition of the Almanac of American Politics, "It may be that history will record the years 1995-2001, when there was parity between the two parties and when Clinton was re-elected and Al Gore came so close to being elected, as a Clinton detour within a longer period of Republican majority, something like the Eisenhower detour in majority-Democratic America." This is no sure thing, as Mr. Barone quickly notes. National security was a big Republican plus in 2002, and conceivably it could become a liability in 2004. But still, the specter of a generation in the wilderness haunts the Democratic primaries.
Beyond mere politics, the fading birthright becomes a matter of self-identity. It's possible, we've witnessed, to assert moral superiority while defending the Clinton perjury, sexual escapades, vanishing billing records and last-minute pardons. But politicians, pundits and intellectuals with this record shouldn't expect much moral deference from the rest of us. Indeed, inner doubts about their own moral position is one obvious path to anger.
Even without the Clinton problems, the Democratic Party has descended into a collection of interest groups not bound together by any ideals. So we see scions of inherited wealth berating the "rich," meaning those successful at earning their own money. We see supposed champions of civil rights standing in the schoolhouse door to prevent vouchers that might give a break to black children in the District of Columbia.
We see a highly qualified potential judge filibustered into withdrawal precisely because he's Hispanic, and therefore a threat in ethnic politics. We see that once a martyred president urged us to "share any burden," his brother now belittles the war that toppled Saddam Hussein throwing around reckless and irresponsible charges of "bribing" foreign leaders--his own personal past, by the way, having produced remarkably little reticence.
Yes, above all the war; the self-identity of the Democratic base is still wrapped up in Vietnam. In fact Vietnam started as a liberal, Democratic war, so turning against it had to be justified by assertions of a higher morality, especially among those with student deferments from the draft. The notion that military force was immoral, even that American power was immoral, was deeply imbedded in the psyche of Democratic activists everywhere.
Now comes George Bush asserting that American power will be used pre-emptively to avert terrorist attacks on America, to establish American values as universal values. This so profoundly challenges the activists' self-image that they can only lash out in anger. Not many of them actively hope the U.S. fails in Iraq, of course, but they are in a constant state of denial that it might succeed.
What's more, this challenge is brought to them by a born-again MBA from Midland, Texas. This is a further challenge to their image of the best people, secular Ivy-league intellectuals. And to twist the knife, President Bush actually comes from an aristocratic family and went to prep school, Yale and Harvard. He has rejected these values for those of Texas.
Current Democratic anger will likely in the fullness of time prove to be the rantings of an establishment in the process of being displaced. Come to think of it, they sound like nothing so much as the onetime ire of staid Republicans at Franklin D. Roosevelt as "a traitor to his class."
Mr. Bartley is editor emeritus of The Wall Street Journal. His column appears Mondays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.
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