The New Democratic Party

What will it be like?

That's really a rhetorical question. I think it follows, though, from this e-mail I sent yesterday afternoon. It was a reply to a message from Margaret, one of The Blog's more Faithful Correspondents; I got to thinking about it this morning, so I thought I would blog what I wrote to her in response to her query about Sen. Snake in Tom Daschle's Monday "prebuttal" of the SOTU:

Haven't seen it. But it strikes me as peculiarly stupid to respond to an address that hasn't been made yet. But Daschle has been growing increasingly, and obviously, more and more stupid as he finds that more and more of the Democrat-tried-and-true means don't work very good now. The Republicans have the intellectual basis and the mood of the country behind them; no Democrats now in power know how to cope with that.

The Democratic chiefs are shooting themselves in the foot, repeatedly and with determination. They haven't figured it out yet. But a lot of folks have. (When you had "Rev." Jesse Jackson and "Rev." Al Sharpton speaking at a "peace" march organized by Communists and Iraqi officials, you know they're on the way out. Even if they don't know it.)

The Democratic Party has been becoming more and more alienated from mainstream America — which is very much to be distinguised from mainstream media — since the Republican Revolution in the 1994 election. (I am convinced that this is due, partly, to the end run around MM by talk radio and the Internet.) This will not only continue, it will accelerate because the Democratic candidates have to pander appeal to their "base" — which seems nowadays to be anti-life, anti-family, anti-American, left-wing extremists.

Hey, how'dya like that — I slipped into Democratese for a moment. ;)

Seriously, a political party cannot continue long that way. Will it shrink drastically over the next decade, while the Republicans and Libertarians grow? Or will it split into squabbling factions? Will it, or its successors, become powerful only at the local/state/regional levels?

We must not let ourselves be deceived because our national political system has been effectively dominated by two parties for more than a century. (Lincoln won in 1860 partly because the vote was split among four major-party candidates.) I know of no divine or natural law that says it must be so — and especially not WRT those two parties being "Democratic" and "Republican".

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Wed. 01/29/03 11:49:42 AM
Categorized as Most Notable & Political.