VICTOR'S REMORSE
I bought a copy of the American Prospect at a newsstand the other day so as to read it while waiting for a haircut. In this article Robert Kuttner claims that "the right seeks total dominion," "the target is not Democrats, but democracy itself," blah blah blah, but somehow it all made me feel really sorry for the Democrats. Michael Kinsley's description of Democrats being pragmatic in Slate magazine made me pity Democrats even more.

What I realized is that the Democrats can't really win this election. I don't mean that they can't take the White House. I don't think they will, but let's go with Andrew Sullivan and assume that they just might be able to do that. So what? They won't take Congress, so whatever noble campaign promises the candidate makes will be stopped in their tracks. They'll inherit Bush's big budget deficit. Maybe with a Democratic Congress they could raise taxes sharply, or push the deficit even higher, to fund "liberal programs." As it is, they just might raise taxes, and that will only give the Republicans in Congress ammunition to shoot down new spending programs with. Liberals have been losing ground for a long time. Republicans held the White House from 1980-92. The Democrats won it in 1992, but only because Perot split the conservative vote, and Clinton won in 1996 by closing the book on sixty years of welfare. Meanwhile he had lost Congress. Clinton's record drove many Democrats to vote Nader in 2000. Democrats regained Congress briefly in 2001 by Jeffords' defection, then lost it resoundingly in 2002. It's been a long downhill slide, which a Democratic presidential win in 2004 would do little to reverse.

What's more, even if a Democrat wins, it won't be the one Democrats really believed in-- Dean. The Onion (www.theonion.com) had a hilarious main story a couple of days ago, called "Democrats Somehow Lose Primaries," which, as far as I can tell, they have pulled from the web. I can't find it on their website, only a couple of bloggers who quoted some of it. A sample:

In a surprising last-minute upset, all seven Democratic presidential hopefuls somehow lost the Democratic primaries Tuesday.

. . . “Given our standing going into Tuesday, we were surprised not to take at least one state,” Kerry campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill said. “But, in all honesty, we were a hell of a lot more baffled that none of the other Democratic candidates won, either.”

Aggregate results from the five states, with all districts reporting, show Kerry leading the other candidates, but at a distant second.

. . . Several pundits have already called the Democratic primary loss the worst defeat in the party’s history. Appearing on CNN, political analyst Larry Sabato said the results indicate a “combination of voter caution—with voters hesitant to cast votes when no one candidate stands out—and complete and utter mathematic improbability.”

I laughed hysterically, but what hit me today is that the article is actually true. The Democrats did somehow lose the primaries. Howard Dean was "the Democratic wing of the Democratic party," like he said. An articulate, self-convicted New Englander, who opposed the Bush tax cut, opposed the Iraq war, sanctioned civil unions. He energized the Democrats, and the primaries began to sound like an echo chamber, with all the Democrats feeling the need to oppose the Iraq war, be angry, bash Bush for being in thrall to the special interests. When Dean fell, the Democrats lost their own primary.

Why John Kerry? Because a long time ago he was a soldier. Kerry's rise on the basis of "electability" is a good illustration of how Democrats look down on Republicans. It's the attitude captured in the old joke (from the post-9/11 days) that "90% of the country supports President Bush, the other 10% supports better public education." Democrats do not understand that political conservatism rests on thought and ideas, smarter and subtler indeed than that of liberals. The rich support the Republicans, naturally, but they're by definition a minority, so why, why, why, do tens of millions of nonrich also prefer the Republicans too? Maybe they just like military brass. Maybe they would vote for an "alpha male." So the Democrats pick Kerry, and right-wing pundits, condescending to the Democrats' condescension, will have to dash through a dismissive tribute-- "Kerry's service in Vietnam was honorable, but..."-- before tearing into Kerry's contradictory positions, his Massachusetts liberal record, his phony populism, his repellent personality and ultra-elitism. Meanwhile, Democrats will have to hold their noses and pretend to like the guy, in hopes that they can send him to the White House to get in a popularity contest with the Republican Congress. My heart goes out to them.

Maybe, just maybe, there's an outside chance that Edwards can still get the nomination; best case scenario, he wins the primaries and the White House, armed with his youth and idealism, to face a Republican Congress and a yawning deficit. He might even get my vote. What would he do? He would plead for the poor, and we would all applaud his earnestness, while the country kept running along the tracks that more powerful presidents like Reagan, Clinton and Bush had laid.

We conservatives like to complain about the liberal media bias. When a movie has political good guys and bad guys, the good guys are always the left. Television shows like "Law and Order: Special Victims' Unit" and "West Wing" help the liberals to go on living in their fantasy world, where they are the enlightened ones. Popular music stars, too, are almost always on the left. The left has a stranglehold on many college campuses. Schoolteachers, too, are disproportionately Democrats and liberals. Conservatives think this is unfair, and it is, but the cloud has a silver lining: it makes us smarter. You can't grow up and get educated as a conservative in our society without knowing how to deal with a hostile climate of opinion, without knowing what it's like to lay low while you hear authority figures express contempt for your views. It's a school of hard knocks where argument is concerned: you learn to bide your time, to look for your opponent's weaknesses, to use his own assumptions and principles against him. Conservatives understand liberals. We have the comforting knowledge that we have refuted them in books they've never read. We're not afraid to be ruled by liberals, we're used to it. We have been scorned until we are immune to their scorn. That's why it's easier for us, in a way.

But liberals don't understand conservatives. They are so used to hobnobbing with their own, so used to assuming that they have a monopoly on good will and intelligence, that they can't figure out where Republicans are coming from, or where, now that power has shifted into Republican hands, we're taking the country. They think we're going "backwards," reverting to barbarism. Liberals are the real victims of the liberal media and campus bias, because it has deprived them of the chance to understand what has emerged as America's reigning political philosophy.

Smart conservatives know by now that they can beat liberals in arguments, that conservative thought is to liberal thought as the the Copernican system is to the Ptolemaic. It is easy, therefore, to think that liberals don't really deserve any pity; they're getting what they deserve for holding faulty positions. But this is uncharitable. Party affiliation is not, in practice, entirely voluntary; it depends in part on social groups, upbringing, and so on; it can be as irrational as rooting for a sports team. And a lot of Democrats are frustrated with their party, too, as they see its ideological coherence unraveling. Besides, we need the Democrats. They're America's second party, the opposition, responsible for keeping the ruling party honest. I really do wish them well. Despite my admiration for Bush, I half hope that the Democrats do manage to put Edwards in the White House, just to make them feel better. And if the Democrats do (as I suspect will happen) get crushed in 2004, I would like to participate in the intellectual reconstruction of the party into a viable opposition. I think I have a few ideas. Permission to speak?