IT IS not surprising that Democrats often look back sentimentally on the Kennedy years as a kinder, gentler time in American history. For ever since Lyndon Johnson's landslide election in 1964, on the heels of Kennedy's assassination, the Democrats have won a majority of the popular vote in the presidential contest but once, in 1976, and that due to Watergate. Thomas and Mary Edsall, in their seminal book "Chain Reaction," argued that during the late 1960s, as a result of the upheavals of that era, a "culture war" sprang up in the nation which tore asunder the Democratic coalition. That realignment has persisted over 40 years, and rendered the Democrats what they are today: firmly a minority party. Last Tuesday's election only confirms the Edsalls' thesis: cultural issues have killed the Democrats.
With the Democratic Party more united than it had been in decades, with a competent candidate at the top of the ticket, the Democrats managed to not only to lose the Presidency but also to lose seats in the House and Senate, entrenching their minority status. Yet in the face of this overwhelming rejection, many liberal Democrats continue to insist that the electorate will eventually come around to the their social agenda, if only the issues can be framed in a different way. But this view is mere wishful thinking. Rather, the Democratic decline is part of a continuing historical process that cannot be ended until the Democrats end their association with liberal cultural issues and become a truly national party once again.
Indeed, the pattern remained the same for the Democrats in 2004, as cultural issues ignited the electorate, and rejected the leftist position. A new front in the culture war, gay marriage, was opened due to a outrageously activist decision of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Council who, relying on abstract moral argumentation, decreed gay marriage the law of the land in that state in the Goodridge decision. As UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh noted on his blog, that decision may very well have cost Kerry the election "by making people feel that traditional marriage rules are in jeopardy from courts," because many voters believed that "Kerry appointees would be more likely than Bush appointees to implement Goodridge on the federal level."
Gay marriage was soundly rejected by the voters on Election Day, with voters in 11 states resoundingly supporting state constitutional amendments defining marriage as between a man and a woman. Exit polls conducted by several news organizations show that moral values were cited as the top issue by voters, an astounding statistic at a time when we have troops in Iraq. Yet the fundamental split in our party system continues to be around cultural issues. The realignment begun in the 1960s persists and continues to keep the Democrats in the minority.
Democrats need to seriously take stock of the changes in the country that have occurred during the past 40 years. Back in the early to mid-1960s, when the Democrats were last a true majority party, being a social progressive was still a cutting-edge phenomenon. The Civil Rights Movement was in full force, the Great Society had not been enacted, cultural change was in the air and America seemed ripe for social change. Yet America rejected the Great Society and the cultural liberalism of the 1960s very decisively over the course of the next two decades, the Nixon and Reagan years. It is time for the Democrats, and liberals generally, to fundamentally alter their cultural agenda.
Take the gay marriage controversy: many earnest liberals have convinced themselves marriage laws as they have traditionally existed limiting unions to between a man and a woman constitutes a very fundamental violation of the civil rights of gays and lesbians. They loudly bemoan the marriage policy that has existed through history as "discrimination." Yet this view is based on exceedingly abstract argumentation that simply has no relevance to the lives of most Americans, who in their reactionary way view the traditional family as something worth preserving.
Perhaps the greatest quality which marked Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal Democrats was their pragmatism, their capacity for experimentation and willingness to tackle innovative public policy solutions for the benefit of the common man. The only way the Democrats will regain ascendancy is by eschewing abstract moral argumentation, declaring an armistice in the culture war, and recapturing that New Deal spirit.
Noah Peters colum appears Fridays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at npeters@cavalierdaily.com.
Read More
WILLIAMS: The future of Virginia is on the ballot this fall
By Ryan Williams | 10 hours agoHence, voters must make it their top priority to think critically and closely as they decide who their ballot will support this fall.
PARTING SHOT: On the art of walking and chewing gum
By Nathan Onibudo | 2 days agoStudent journalism, and maybe even life more generally, is about holding space for multiple conflicting truths.
PARTING SHOT: Confessions of a nepo baby
By Grace Thrush | 3 days agoWhile I can’t point to one specific “aha” moment where I finally started to dispel my self-consciousness and claim my pride for the paper, I got there gradually over the course of my term as managing editor.
