The Political Costs of the McGovern Legacy -- Democrats Are the Obnoxious Party

Some fundamental and generally unexamined assumptions about the course of modern politics -- ones promulgated and sustained by the MSM and much of the academic establishment -- are at last beginning to be questioned. In the course of this questioning a liberal model of political development that has reigned supreme for half a century is beginning to crumble. It's about time!

Gregory Rodriguez, writing in the L.A. Times, reports on some aspects of this reassessment [here], but fails to realize the implications of the arguments he relates.

Assumption 1:

It is widely believed that in recent decades Republicans have mobilized a politically inert population of evangelical Christians by unscrupulous means, including attempts to break down the "wall of separation" between church and state and inciting anti-feminist and anti-gay bigotry.

But, as Geoffrey Layman shows in his important study, The Great Divide: Religious and Cultural Conflict in American Politics (Columbia, 2001) [purchase by clicking one of the banners at the top of this blog], it is the Democratic Party, not the Republicans, that has been on offense, strenuously working to exclude religion from the public square and to promote a secularist, feminist, and pro-gay agenda. Rodriguez writes:

[T]he Democratic delegation that nominated South Dakota Sen. George McGovern for president at the '72 convention represented a profound shift from what had been the cultural consensus in American politics. Whereas only 5% of Americans could be considered secular in 1972, fully 24% of first-time Democratic delegates that year were self-identified agnostics, atheists or people who rarely, if ever, set foot in a house of worship. This new activist base encouraged a growing number of Democratic politicians to tone down their appeal to religious voters and to seek a higher wall separating church and state. With little regard for the traditionalist sensitivities of religious people within or outside of the party, the Democrats also embraced progressive stances on feminism and homosexuality that the public had never openly debated.

The "long march through the institutions" was underway.

In adopting this agenda Democrats catered to the interests, not of the general electorate, but to a small, activist minority of cultural radicals and in doing so the Party has alienated itself from much of its traditional constituency. This fact was recently addressed in a memorable speech by Barak Obama [here]. This speech, in which Senator Obama urged Democrats to reconnect with religion, caused a great deal of consternation and confusion in Party ranks because it called into question many unexamined liberal assumptions [for a good example see here].

And what of the Republicans?

[T]he Republican delegation — and by extension the party platform — remained unchanged, and the GOP essentially became the party of tradition and religion by default. "The partisan differences that emerged in 1972," writes University of Maryland political scientist Geoffrey Layman, "were not caused by any sudden increase in the religious and cultural traditionalism of the Republican activists but by the pervasive secularism and cultural liberalism of the Democratic supporters of George McGovern."

In other words, it has been the Democrats not the Republicans, the secularists not the "Christianists," who are trying to push a radical agenda on the American public. The standard liberal narrative has it precisely wrong, and Obama's recent critique of that narrative is a welcome first step in bringing the Party back into contact with the real world.

Assumption 2:

It is widely believed by liberals that the alienation of large numbers of traditional Democratic voters, mostly in the South, was due almost exclusively to racist appeals on the part of Republicans during and after Nixon's successful presidential campaign in 1968. But this self-serving explanation, which brands Republicans as racist, however useful it is in keeping Blacks from straying from the Democrat fold, does not account for the fact that in 1968 Southern racists voted for Wallace, not Nixon, and completely ignores the impact of Democrat secularist activism on the general electorate.

As Rodriguez notes:

[T]he shift in the Democratic Party [dating from the McGovernite reforms of 1972] pushed many religious voters, including the traditionally Democratic bloc of Southern evangelicals, into the arms of the Republican Party. In the 1980s, a shrewd GOP leadership discovered that the newly politicized evangelical population could be the engine of a remarkable late-century political comeback. By 2004, pollsters found that voters considered the Republican Party "more friendly" toward religion than the Democratic Party.

The liberal narrative that has dominated mainstream discussions of late twentieth-century American political development has done a lot of damage to the Democratic Party. It has kept Party leaders from realizing the real reasons for the political realignment underlying the Republican ascendency. But that is slowly changing. Recently, in "A Fighting Faith," Peter Beinart criticized the foreign affairs agenda of the Democratic leadership, particularly their deference to the fringe of radical anti-war activists [here]. Now Senator Obama is opening a critique of their radical secularist domestic agenda. These are important dialogues. For far too long the Democratic Party has been held in thrall to McGovernite radicalism masquerading as mainstream liberalism. And as a result far too many people have been able to say, as did Ronald Reagan,

"I didn't leave the Democratic Party; it left me."

UPDATE:

Chuck Shumer gets it. Democrats are the obnoxious party and have been for a generation.

Jules Witcover reports on recent statements by Senator Chuck Shumer to the effect that "New Deal Democracy" is "over;" that catering to special interest groups is a losing strategy for the Party; that the old class-warfare rhetoric turns off voters; and that "the hard left has a moral eliteness that is obnoxious." Read it here.

It's not just the hard left. Shumer himself is a prime example of the obnoxiousness of mainstream Democrats. But at least he has a glimmer of what is wrong with the Party.