Blue Democrats Lost Red America

[R.A. Hettinga]

<http://online.wsj.com/article_print/0,,SB109962033700165749,00.html>

The Wall Street Journal


 November 5, 2004

 WONDER LAND
 By DANIEL HENNINGER



Blue Democrats
 Lost Red America
 Back in 1965
November 5, 2004; Page A12

"And you tell me over, and over, and over again my friend
 Ah, you don't believe we're on the eve of destruction."
 --Vietnam War Protest Song, 1965

How did the 2004 election map of the United States come to look like a
color-field painting by Barnett Newman? In fact, if you adjust the map's
colors for votes by county (as at the Web sites for CNN and USA Today),
even the blue states turn mostly red. Pennsylvania is blue, but between
blue Philadelphia and Pittsburgh every county in the state is red.
California, except for the coastline, is almost entirely red.

This didn't happen last Tuesday. The color-coding of the 2004 election
began around 1965 in the politics of the Vietnam era. The Democratic Party
today is the product of a generational shift that began in those years.

The formative years of the northern wing of the Democratic Old Guard go
back to World War II. It included political figures like Tip O'Neill, Pat
Moynihan and Lane Kirkland. It was men such as these whose experiences,
both political and personal, informed and shaped the Democrats before the
mid-'60s.

Over time the party passed into the hands of a generation, now in their 50s
and early 60s, whose broad view of America and its politics was formed as
young men and women opposing the Vietnam War. That would include the
party's current leading lights -- John Kerry, Howard Dean, Nancy Pelosi.
And its most influential strategists, such as Bob Shrum, Mary Beth Cahill
and James Carville. The old industrial unions, whose members went over to
Ronald Reagan, gave way to the more dependable public-employee unions run
by John Sweeney and Gerald McEntee.

These Baby Boomers -- the generation of John Kerry, Al Gore and Bill and
Hillary Clinton -- transformed the world view of the Democrats, on
everything from foreign policy to cultural issues. This new ethos --
instinctively oppositional, aggressively secular -- sank its roots deep on
the East and West coasts, but it never really spread into the rest of the
country, then or now.

Early on, the military became a focus. Democrats belonging to the World War
II generation believed that one "served." There was a nonpartisan pact of
reverence for the services. After Vietnam, Democratic partisans worked
hard, and successfully, to eradicate ROTC from elite, coastal campuses and
to adopt an ethos that no longer revered the services, but held them
suspect of doing harm. Bill Clinton's relations with the military were
strained. John Kerry tried to use his service biography to erase the
Vietnam-era legacy of Democratic opposition to things military. It didn't
work.

Expressed emotion matters greatly for this generation. The most notable
phenomenon of the 2004 election was widespread liberal "hatred" of George
Bush. Many wondered what sleeping volcano brought this lava to the surface.
It came from the style of protest politics born in the 1960s. A famous
liberal political phrase then was "the personal is political." Letting
oneself become emotionally unhinged during a protest, as at Columbia,
Harvard and Berkeley, became a litmus of authenticity. It became the norm,
and it still is. But again, only for people who scream themselves blue.

Another phrase heard often in the campaign just ended was, "I'm
frightened." Admiration for childlike fears in politics received approval
in 1970 from Charles Reich's bestseller "The Greening of America," a paean
to youth and "a new and liberated individual." Reich's book, by the way,
also popularized the notion then that something called the "Corporate
State" was blotting out the Aquarian sunshine. This is the mindset that
just produced the Democrats' weird obsession with "Halliburton," as if
anyone would care beyond the people who were long ago baptized into the
blue faith.

But the politics of the Vietnam generation wasn't just about Vietnam. It
was about changing everything, most notably the culture. This generation
really opened up the culture. The old pre-Vietnam strictures on behavior
and comportment -- Tip O'Neill's old Boston Catholic world of Mass on
Sunday and at least a working if not functioning knowledge of the Baltimore
catechism -- got hammered down till the moral landscape became flat and
fast. Now you can drive anything at all into theaters, music or movies.
This post-Vietnam culture of non-restraint, now almost 40 years old,
produced Whoopi Goldberg's double-entendre jokes about George Bush's name
at Radio City Music Hall, the Massachusetts Supreme Court's sudden decision
on gay marriage, and hard-to-defend support for partial-birth abortion.

George Bush, age 58, was a reproach. He personifies everything they have
fought since they drove LBJ and Richard Nixon out of politics. And this
week they are trying to discover why most of the people who live between
the Hudson River and Hollywood Freeway don't agree with them. Expect
documentaries soon about Christian evangelicals on the Discovery Channel.

There is no hope that the Vietnam generation braintrust who just lost this
election will ever understand Red America. Until someone in the party
recognizes this, the tides of demography will inexorably erode the blue
islands that remain on the map.


-- 
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R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'