"POLITICS 101"
My friend who said that "Republicans are the party of the rich" is "Politics 101" was right in one sense at least: if Democrats could write a Politics 101 curriculum, that's the first thing they would like to teach you. This is a problem the left has faced throughout its entire history. Leftists are mostly intellectuals, opposed to the establishment, but with egalitarian ideas that they think the masses ought to support. The masses, the proletariat, become the shadow constituency of the left, from which they derive their legitimacy. Leftists have a strong need to believe that poor people are on their side, as my Democrat-leaning friends did. And they are not always completely wrong: sometimes the majority do find the odd status quo institution unjust, or want a bit of redistribution. Most of the time, though, real proletariats are much more rooted in tradition than those that proletariats imagine. In England, the Tories were able to become a mass popular party under Disraeli; in Russia in the 1860s, idealistic populists who "went to the people" were treated with suspicion by the peasantry; later in Russia, Lenin had given up on the hopelessly corruptible proletariat and consciously established the new elitism of his "revolutionary vanguard;" in France, the Revolution gave way to a pro-Catholic reaction, and so on. In 2004, the Democrats persist in imagining that they have a vast shadow constituency of people who don't vote but are presumed to have Democratic preferences. Howard Dean's campaign relied on peddling this idea. Permit me to be skeptical. I think higher voter turnout would be just as likely to tip the scales in favor of Bush.