From the pages of The New Republic: (try this link; otherwise try to get your hands on last week's issue)
"Democrats may win back the House or the Senate this year, but, even if they do, the majority that Karl Rove helped to construct remains formidable. Whatever happens this November, no one should be fooled: The Democrats are still in deep trouble...
It was the central achievement of [Republican strategists] Wallace, Black, and Atwater to link all these themes--elitism, religion, race, sexuality--together with a range of economic and social issues in order to assemble an overarching message. Indeed, because they so successfully conflated the various characteristics of liberalism into a single image over time, GOP strategists are now able to use any one issue--affirmative action, gay marriage, flag burning--to effectively raise them all. From this perspective, taxes are used to finance welfare programs that encourage family dissolution. Blacks and immigrants are deeply affected by such government policies, but, in the Republican view, no family is immune. Lax law enforcement, no-fault divorce, sex education, and pornography together foster fragile families and out-of-wedlock pregnancy, which, in turn, drive crime, drug abuse, and urban and suburban chaos. In the eyes of the cultural right, the sexual revolution, the women's rights revolution, and the blurring of gender roles--as well as abortion and the so-called gay agenda--all merge to usurp the status of those who were traditionally dominant, to upend authority, including paternal authority, and to corrode the lives of children and orderly, decent communities. All of this is abetted by an activist judicial system that promotes secularism and enables the emergence of an increasingly deregulated sphere for immoral private action. To liberals, all of this may sound like a laughable caricature of their political philosophy. But, to conservatives, it has long been a reliable formula for victory--and it still is..."
Match that, Mainstream media.
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"The problem of an eidos in history, hence, arises only when a Christian transcendental fulfillment becomes immanentized. Such an immanentist hypostasis of the eschaton, however, is a theoretical fallacy."-Eric Voegelin
George Will Advice
"I grew up in Champaign, Illinois, midway between Chicago and St. Louis. At an age too tender for life-shaping decisions, I made one. While all my friends were becoming Cardinals fans, I became a Cub fan. My friends, happily rooting for Stan Musial, Red Schoendienst and other great Redbirds, grew up cheerfully convinced that the world is a benign place, so of course, they became liberals. Rooting for the Cubs in the late 1940s and early 1950s, I became gloomy, pessimistic, morose, dyspeptic and conservative. It helped out of course that the Cubs last won the World Series in 1908, which is two years before Mark Twain and Tolstoy died. But that means, class of 1998, that the Cubs are in the 89th year of their rebuilding effort, and remember, any team can have a bad moment. So fellow members of the Class of 1998, my last piece of advice is - Mamas don't let your babies grow up to be Cub fans."
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where a tone of careless informality prevails; posts oscillate between the uselessly brief and the uselessly logorrheic; complexity and complication are eschewed; the humor is cringe-making, with irony present only in its conspicuous absence; arguments are solipsistic; writers traffic more in pronouncement than persuasion; PLUS little more than recounting what have become one side's talking points is accomplished
2 comments:
It's a nice summary. But, despite the conventional wisdom, the evidence is mixed as to how effective this strategy has been. For one decent overview, see _What Culture War?_ by Morris Fiorina. . .
From TNR
Correspondence
Post date 10.19.06 | Issue date 10.30.06
Thomas B. Edsall is onto something when he writes that "the Democratic Party has become the political arm of the subdominant, while the GOP is home to the dominant groups in American life" ("Party Hardy," September 25). This, however, is not new; it's the basic story of U.S. politics since the Civil War. Until the Depression, the Democrats were (roughly) the party of the South in coalition with the urban North, while the Republicans were (also roughly) the natural governing party of "the nation" as a whole. Franklin Roosevelt and his followers brilliantly capitalized on the Depression--which occurred at the apex of the urban moment in American politics--to build a party of dependent interest and constituency groups. (His administration didn't do much to solve the slump, but it did put the middle-class urban intelligentsia front and center as the administrators of American public life, to the gratitude of historians, journalists, artists, and others of the class ever since.) The Democratic Party's coalition began to break up after World War II. With the exception of Lyndon Johnson in 1964 (in the emotional aftermath of the Kennedy assassination), no Democratic candidate for president has received the 51 percent of the popular vote that George W. Bush garnered in 2004 since Roosevelt did it in 1944--not Harry Truman, not John Kennedy, not Jimmy Carter, not Bill Clinton. (Not even Al Gore.) Democratic Congressional majorities persisted in the decades after World War II, thanks in part to gerrymandering (the party got 59 percent of the seats in the House as late as 1992 on only about 50 percent of the popular vote) and the willingness of Southern Democratic politicians to stay in the party of the Confederacy until their retirement. The great run the Democrats had, from the 1930s until 1994, depended heavily on the artifice of padded congressional majorities and the complicity of the old segregationist South, hard as it might be for today's blue-state liberals to accept. Significantly, the economy was strengthening in 1994, when the realignment that the Democrats had long been able to skillfully avoid finally occurred. The Democrats are now basically back to being the party they were before the Depression: a coalition of disparate "minority" groups without much in common except their "outsider" status in the context of middle-class American life. They will win elections when the Republicans foul up or get lazy, but the slow climb back to power by the GOP in the absence of one mighty, aberrant event like the stock market crash or the Great Depression seems to illustrate that the Republicans represent "core American values" more authentically (if not more eloquently) than do the Democrats....
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