{"id":86,"date":"2003-11-04T11:23:59","date_gmt":"2003-11-04T16:23:59","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=86"},"modified":"2003-11-04T11:23:59","modified_gmt":"2003-11-04T16:23:59","slug":"the-whig-maneuver","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=86","title":{"rendered":"The Whig Maneuver"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>VodkaPundit asks: Is the Democratic Party becoming increasingly<br \/>\nlikely to pull a Whig Maneuver and disappear into history? If so, what<br \/>\nreplaces it?<\/p>\n<p>The Democrats certainly seem to be trying pretty hard to<br \/>\nself-destruct.  But this is not a new story; it&#8217;s been going on ever<br \/>\nsince the New Left captured the party apparat in the early 1970s.  My<br \/>\nfirst experience of political activism was standing athwart that<br \/>\nparticular tide of history, yelling &#8220;stop!&#8221;, as a campaign worker for<br \/>\ncentrist Democrat Scoop Jackson in 1975.  I think I already<br \/>\nhalf-understood that he was doomed.  What I didn&#8217;t foresee was the<br \/>\ncompleteness with which the Democrats would abandon their southern and<br \/>\nrural wings to become a party run exclusively by Brie-nibbling urban<br \/>\nelites.  Call it the NPRization of the party.<\/p>\n<p>Recently they&#8217;ve abandoned the private-sector labor unions as well.<br \/>\nJust before 2000, a key Democratic strategist noted that party&#8217;s<br \/>\ndemographic power base consisted solely of blacks and the<br \/>\npublic-employee unions.  Bill Clinton, charming sociopath and perfect<br \/>\nacme of the American political creature that he was, had managed to<br \/>\npaper over that problem for a while.  But it keeps getting worse.  The<br \/>\nliberal-Democrat lock on the national media is crumbling under<br \/>\npressure from talk radio, Fox News, and the bloggers.  They&#8217;re losing<br \/>\ntheir ability to control the terms of political debate.<\/p>\n<p>Finally, there is the notorious fractiousness of the smaller<br \/>\nDemocratic interest groups.  While the black establishment has largely<br \/>\nsettled into the role of party wheelhorse and the trial lawyers play<br \/>\nfinancial sugar daddy without demanding much except a complete block on<br \/>\ntort reform, feminists and gays and the hard left continue to cause<br \/>\nthe party problems out of all proportion to their voting strength.  The<br \/>\nstructural problem is that the small factions are disproprtionately<br \/>\nstrong in the Democrats&#8217; grass-roots organization; they therefore<br \/>\nexert a big influence on party primaries and tend to pull the<br \/>\ncandidate list and the platform to the left.<\/p>\n<p>Ever since the early 1990s, there&#8217;s been a tug-of-war going on<br \/>\nwithin the urban elites that now run the party; the Democratic<br \/>\nLeadership Council versus the inheritors of the New Left.  What&#8217;s<br \/>\nhappening now with the Dean campaign demonstrates that the DLC has<br \/>\nlost its grip.  The left is winning. The trend that has taken the<br \/>\nDemocrats from solid majority status in my childhood to the point<br \/>\nwhere it needs a Bill Clinton to win elections, if it continues, might<br \/>\nvery well result in it disappearing into history.<\/p>\n<p>The DLC&#8217;s most recent effort to reverse this tend &mdash; to stop<br \/>\ntalking about gun control &mdash; only highlights the depth of the<br \/>\nproblem.  They know, because their own analysts and Bill Clinton have<br \/>\ntold them, that gun owners are the swing vote that cost them the 1994<br \/>\nand 2000 elections.  And yet, the left, for whom hatred of civilian<br \/>\nfirearms is a religious absolute, has such a lock on the party machine<br \/>\nthat the DLC can only talk about spin, not about a substantive change<br \/>\nin platform.<\/p>\n<p>I expect the Democrats to lose heavily in today&#8217;s elections.<br \/>\nLike VodkaPundit, I expect the loss to change not a damn thing. The<br \/>\nDLC will continue to wring its hands, and the New Lefties, comforted<br \/>\nby convenient rationalizations in the major media, will continue to<br \/>\nmarch the Democratic Party towards a cliff&#8217;s edge.<\/p>\n<p>Suppose they do succeed in self-destructing.  What then?<\/p>\n<p>No crystal ball is required to answer that question, just a look at<br \/>\nthe minor-party voting statistics.  If the Democrats crumble, the big<br \/>\nwinners have to be the Greens and the Libertarians.  The New Lefties<br \/>\nwho run most levels of the modern Democratic apparat would run to the<br \/>\nGreens en masse; in fact, whatever organization emerges would probably<br \/>\nview itself (with some justification) as the Democratic Party&#8217;s<br \/>\nsuccessor. They&#8217;d probably take the public-employee unions with them.<\/p>\n<p>The interesting question is whether the black establishment would<br \/>\nfollow.  Blacks, as a voting group, are more conservative on social<br \/>\nissues than Democrats as a whole &#8212; heavily opposed to gay marriage,<br \/>\nfor example, and more in favor of school vouchers.  The strain between<br \/>\ngeneral opinion among blacks and the strident leftism of many of their<br \/>\npublic figures has been growing.  If the party of Lyndon Johnson were<br \/>\nto disintegrate, it would become acute.  I think the most likely<br \/>\nscenario is that the Al Sharptons. Cynthia McKinneys and Carol<br \/>\nMoseley-Brauns would run to the Greens, lose their popular base,<br \/>\nand the black vote would fragment.  Blacks would become a normal<br \/>\nethnic group, not tied to any one party.<\/p>\n<p>The second-order effects on the Republicans would be just as<br \/>\ninteresting.  The youth demographic Andrew Sullivan and others call<br \/>\n&#8220;South Park Republicans&#8221; would bolt the GOP in a second if the<br \/>\nLibertarians looked like a credible alternative. So, albeit more<br \/>\nslowly and partially, would more traditional (and older)<br \/>\nsmall-government\/classical-liberal\/free-trade types.  The big<br \/>\nquestion, given current pressures, is whether the Libs would remain<br \/>\nisolationist or reluctantly slide into the pro-war camp and start<br \/>\nbehaving a bit more like a European party of the center or<br \/>\ncenter-right.<\/p>\n<p>In either scenario, the effect on the Republicans would be to<br \/>\nresove <em>their<\/em> split-personality problem in favor of cultural<br \/>\nconservatives and the hard right.  They&#8217;d become a lot more like a<br \/>\nTory party.  The really entertaining part comes when you look at how<br \/>\nthis change would tie in with regional demographics &#8212; in this future,<br \/>\nthe Republicans would become the party of the old South!<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/enetation.co.uk\/comments.php?user=esr&amp;commentid=106796293950819788\">Blogspot<br \/>\ncomments<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>VodkaPundit asks: Is the Democratic Party becoming increasingly likely to pull a Whig Maneuver and disappear into history? If so, what replaces it? The Democrats certainly seem to be trying pretty hard to self-destruct. But this is not a new story; it&#8217;s been going on ever since the New Left captured the party apparat in&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=86\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">The Whig Maneuver<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-86","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=86"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=86"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=86"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=86"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}