Yesterday I commented on the conservative extremism expressed by Robert Stacy McCain. In his blog he regularly repeats the usual distortions of Democratic beliefs spread by the extreme right. Checking back to his post I see that he has added an update with a contest to Describe the Democratic Party in 20 Words or Less. I’m sure he won’t choose this as a winner, but here is a far more accurate definition than any he has considered:
People with a wide variety of beliefs who oppose the authoritarianism and incompetence of recent Republican rule.
What people like McCain fail to recognize is that many of us now voting Democratic for lack of any other reasonable choice are former independents and there are even many former Republicans who oppose the extremist and authoritarian views now being promoted by the Republican party. The party now includes moderates and rational conservatives as well as liberals, with the Republicans driving out everyone other than the extreme social conservatives.
If they wish for the Republicans to again be a viable national political party they need to drop their ridiculous bashing of Democrats and realize that Democrats now represent the majority of the country, including many former Republicans. Rather then engaging in their attacks they need to closely examine their own failed ideas to see why they are driving away most of the country, and consider what is needed to get former Republican voters to reconsider the party.
Of course if they desire to be a small party of the south and Mormon belt which presents a consistent platform of theocracy and opposition to individual liberty they can ignore this as they are well on their way to accomplishing their goal.
Just to say it for the purpose of saying it, the Democratic Party has not ever been a ‘liberal’ party, at least in a unified and national sense. There has been a strong ‘liberal/progressive’ wing of the party since Woodrow Wilson, this is true. From the time of Franklin Roosevelt to the failure of the McGovern candidacy liberal ‘New Deal Democrats’ dominated the national party, though often only at the cost of divisive party conflicts. Beginning with Jimmy Carter’s first presidential candidacy, the Democratic Party moved back toward its more conservative Southern roots and ‘New Democrats’ began to hold the balance of power in the party. After the Republican congressional victory in 1994, they were joined by ‘Blue Dog’ Democrats who are frequently indistinguishable from Republicans.
In addition to the number of independents and former Republicans who are Democrats because of the polarizing of the Republican Party as politically reactionary and socially traditionalist to a disturbing extreme, many liberals would not be Democrats if there were a viable alternative. The now mostly defunct Natural Law Party and the Green Party were or are composed primarily of disgruntled liberal Democrats , alienated by the Clinton Era and repelled by the right wing horror show the Republican Party has allowed itself to become.
Even now, with liberal Democrats on the ascent again (at least in Congress and at the voter-on-the-street level within the party) the party is far from ‘liberal’. As the Republicans have embraced the worst part of their own base, so Democrats have repeatedly rejected their own base.
I commented in another thread that many of these reactionary voices appear to believe themselves the mainstream of American thought and the rather centrist, disappointingly (from my perspective) moderate mainstream of American thought to be some horrifying insult to the founding fathers.