Over the winter, the Democrats are going to need to do some serious soul-searching about what they want their party to represent. Do they want to be the champions of empowerment, or the champions of handouts? Do they want to be the champions of liberty, or the champions of relativism? Do they want to liberal proselytizers, or provincial isolationists? Their descent into post-modernism has been disastrous for the party and disastrous for America. If the Democrats are to go forward, they must look to their past, and they must embrace what they see.

This past election was devastating to liberals, but it shouldn’t be considered exceptional in any way. Kerry was lucky the race was even as close as it was. Bush was probably the weakest incumbent in 100 years: he presided over the worst economy since Hoover, his Iraq War has produced some horrifying headlines, and he has managed to alienate virtually the entire world. But Kerry still lost, and he still lost decisively. Compounding the defeat, the GOP made gains in both the House and the Senate, increasing their majorities and strongly establishing the Democratic Party as the “opposition” party. The reasons for Kerry’s loss have less to do with Kerry than they do with the Democratic Party’s trajectory over the last 35 years, but we’ll get to that in a moment.

The bloodletting is already beginning within the Democratic Party as its members search for an identity to guide them through 2006 and 2008. Some are saying that the party needed to move further to the left to excite the base, and they point to the CNN exit poll statistic showing that two-thirds of Kerry voters were voting against Bush, not for Kerry. Some are saying that the party should have moved further to the right, and they point to the way San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s allowance of gay marriage in his city helped galvanize conservatives. Still others are saying that the Democratic Party must begin to speak the language of “values” and “morals.” Bush’s faith, they say, and his ability to identify with those of faith, drove flocks of evangelicals to the polls and gave him a majority. Unfortunately for the Democratic Party, all of these lines of argument are wrong.

Since the election, we’ve heard the pundits pouring their hearts out on TV- almost apologetically- for not being “in touch” with Middle America, and for not accurately reporting “values” as an issue. The reason, one would suspect, for this guilt trip is the statistic being bandied about showing that the “largest single block” of voters picked “moral values” as the “most important election issue.” As Andrew Coyne points out, that is a very misleading statistic.

For starters, the “largest single block” is only 22% of the electorate. Further, the category “moral values” is broad and all encompassing: it could include, among other things, issues of gay marriage, faith in society, abortion, stem cell research, school vouchers, etc. If you broke it down by category, it is unlikely that any one would register significantly over the other. Further, “Iraq” and “Terrorism” were grouped separately. I remember when I took an exit poll and was asked what the most important issue to me was, and I responded by asking if the Iraq War and Terrorism were grouped in a broad “War on Terror” category. I was told that was not the case. I chose the Iraq War for my answer, but only because I believe it is the central front in the War on Terror, and the latter cannot proceed without success in the former. Coyne points out that if the Iraq War and Terrorism were grouped under one heading- his choice is “national security”- then that category would have fetched 34% of people’s first choices. He also notes that “taxes” and the “economy” combined for 25% of the people’s first choices. Adding that up, you see that people, by a margin of almost 3 to 1, are more concerned with National Security and with the Economy than they are with “moral values.”

Now that Coyne has dismissed the “values” canard, we can move on to look at the election from a more traditional perspective: liberal, independent, conservative. Here the answers are more indicative of the Democrat’s problems. Coyne notes that 45% of Bush’s vote came from moderates and liberals. 45%. That is a lot- 23% of the total vote. When the Democrats lose their base and the center, what chance do they have?

The reason the Democrats should be fretting is because this is becoming a trend. They’ve lost 5 of the last 7 Presidential elections, and they’ve seen their historic hold on the Congress disappear completely. Why? The voters, we’ve already seen, have not changed. Sure, Bush may have been able to bring some evangelicals to the polls, but that’s just because Bush is seen as one of them. The Evangelical Protestant community in the United States is a fairly introverted one. If McCain had been the GOP nominee, the majority of their vote would probably have still gone to him, but a lot of them would have stayed home. The voters of America, as shown above, care more about security and the economy than about “morals”- some things just don’t change.

So if the voters haven’t changed that much, than that means the Democratic Party must have. And, indeed it has. During the 1930’s, 1940’s, 1950’s and 1960’s, the Democratic Party was unquestionably the majority party. It had the White House for 28 out of 36 years. Getting back to that is surely the goal for Democratic strategists, so they should pay more attention to the candidates the party offered for office in those years.

Look at the Democratic Presidents from that span- FDR, Truman, JFK, and LBJ. What common thread- other than party affiliation- connected them all? They were hawks and they were empowerers. FDR sent Americans to Europe to combat fascism, Truman dropped two atomic bombs to send a message to the Soviets, JFK hectored Nixon about the “missile gap,” and LBJ escalated a liberal hawk’s war, however misguided, in Indo-China. The stars of the party were politicians like Scoop Jackson, who spoke of foreign policy issues in clear, stark terms: there was right and wrong, and when the Democrats called someone an “evil dictator” they meant it, and people knew they meant it. On domestic issues, the Democrats owned the “empowerment” debate. Their policies from this era are often associated with the term “welfare state,” but it was always clear to voters that the Democrats were just trying to help people help themselves. They were using the power and reach of the Federal Government to empower people to run their own lives. And the people responded to these policies by electing Democrats year after year.

The Democratic Party of that era looks absolutely nothing like the party of today. In an age where there really are thousands of wicked men sitting outside our gates waiting for us to let our guard down so that they can do us great harm, what kind of message does it send to the American people that Denis Kucinich and Howard Dean are taken seriously as Democratic presidential candidates? And in an age where the majority of Americans are ready to say good-bye to a culture of affirmative action, what does it say to the American people when Al Sharpton isn’t booed off the stage by Democratic audiences as a race-baiting shake-down artist? The biggest criticism of the Democratic Party of the last decade- particularly under the leadership of people like Tom Daschle and Nancy Pelosi- is that it has traded principles for a strategy of pandering to as many different minority groups (in the mathematical sense) as possible, and just hopes that on election day enough of the group members turn out to make an electoral majority. So imagine the reaction when, the day after the election, people like Dick Gephardt start saying that the Democratic Party needs to start pandering to Evangelical Christians by speaking more openly of their faith! The lesson wasn’t exactly learned.

Over the winter, the Democrats are going to need to do some serious soul-searching about what they want their party to represent. Do they want to be the champions of empowerment, or the champions of handouts? Do they want to be the champions of liberty, or the champions of relativism? Do they want to liberal proselytizers, or provincial isolationists? Their descent into post-modernism has been disastrous for the party and disastrous for America. If the Democrats are to go forward, they must look to their past, and they must embrace what they see.