I Finally Get Off the Fence!

Michael Barone, writing in the WSJ on the subject of Senator Lieberman, identifies four areas in which he stands in opposition to major elements of the Democratic party.

As an observant Orthodox Jew, he has consistently portrayed himself as a man of religious faith, while one-quarter of John Kerry voters in 2004 described their religion as "other" or "none." He has been a critic of vulgarity and obscenity in television programs and movies, while the Democrats enjoy massive financial and psychic support from Hollywood. He has supported school-choice measures, while one of his party's major organized constituencies is the teachers' unions. And he has been an American exceptionalist--a believer in the idea that this is a special and specially good country--while his party's base is increasingly made up of people with attitudes that are, in professor Samuel Huntington's term, transnational. In their view, our country is no better than any other, and in many ways it's a whole lot worse.

All of these are issues on which I agree with Lieberman against his critics, but the last item -- the idea of American exceptionalism -- is the one that, in this time of crisis, most interests me and Barone.

Through most of the 20th century, American exceptionalism has been the creed of both of our major parties. Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy, for all their sophisticated knowledge of foreign cultures, were exceptionalists just as much as Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. Among voters, transnational attitudes were espoused by only a very few, in the odd corners of university faculty clubs, investment-banking firm dining rooms and the councils of shop floor socialist intellectuals.

Now it's different. In 2004, pollster Scott Rasmussen asked two questions relating to American exceptionalism: Is this country generally fair and decent? Would the world be better off if more countries were more like America? About two-thirds of voters answered yes to both questions. About 80% of George W. Bush voters answered yes. John Kerry voters were split down the middle, with yeses outnumbering noes by small margins.

That is an astounding result and it emphasizes the immense gulf that separates most Americans from the activists on the Democratic Party's left wing.

And he devastatingly notes a characteristic of this new transnational left -- a surprising number of its major figures are people who have made, inherited, or married big money. They are people insulated from the exigencies of life that confront the rest of us. He writes:

The working class Democrats of the mid-20th century voted their interests, and knew that one of their interests was protecting the nation in which they were proud to live. The professional class Democrats of today vote their ideology and, living a life in which they are insulated from adversity, feel free to imagine that America cannot be threatened by implacable enemies. They can vote to validate their lifestyle choices and their transnational attitudes.

Indeed. The sickness of transnationalism has long infected academia -- one of the most protected precincts of our culture, and deliberately designed as such. I must admit that much of what I find most repulsive in today's Democratic Left is pretty much what repulsed me about the academic Left with which I shared an uncomfortable institutional relationship for several decades. It very much disturbs me, as it does Barone, that these ideas have escaped from their hothouse environments and are now infecting one of the nation's major political parties and Lieberman's purge is the reason that I can no longer maintain my previous ambivalence toward the parties and their fates.

The upcoming election is a crucial one and in it I will be, for the first time in memory, voting the party, not the man. I fear the consequences should the Democrats return to power. I will be voting Republican.