Blame the message
Carlin, David R. Jr.
OF SEVERAL MINDS BLAME THE MESSAGE IT COMES FROM ELITISTS David R. Carlin, Jr. ill Clinton, it appears, is on his way to becoming the Democratic nominee for president, and all around the...
...The old have a strong sense of community...
...In short, the traditional Democratic constituencies sense that control of the national Democratic party is in the hands of people whose values are alien to the values of those traditional groups...
...Well, word of this scholarly revolution has apparently not reached Democratic party pundits...
...The politicians supplied the votes, the intellectuals the ideas...
...The social-cultural gap between the two was sufficiently great that there was no danger of anyone confusing one with the other...
...It is an article of faith in the Democratic religion that presidential election defeats are to be explained entirely in terms of candidates and campaign strategies, never in terms of the message delivered by candidate or party...
...But somewhere along the way an intermediate stratum developed and came to have great influence in the party...
...the new class is largely made up of rootless cosmopolitans...
...That is to say, they were politicians who had been to college (often very good colleges) and beyond...
...When it came to ideas, they didn't defer to the intellectuals, for they considered themselves to be relatively competent in the realms of abstract ideas and far more competent than the professional intellectuals in the realm of applied ideas...
...Time was when the Republicans were the "stupid party" (to use the phrase that John Stuart Mill applied to the British Conservative party of his day) and the Democrats the party of intelligence...
...A kind of Gresham's Law of the intellectual life came into play: bad ideas drove out good...
...Good liberal Democrats, who, while often not churchgoing people themselves, are sufficiently concerned about religion to deplore biblical fundamentalism when practiced by Southern Baptists, practice social science fundamentalism when it comes to analyzing presidential election results...
...The truth is, of course, that this new stratum, despite its good opinion of itself, was not especially competent in the field of ideas...
...The old tend to moral absolutism, the new to moral relativism...
...Commonweal 8 May 1992: 9 In the good old days the Democrats used to be characterized by a strange but effective marriage between the politicians and the intellectuals: Jim Farley and Rexford Tugwell, or Mayor Daley and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr...
...It is nearly two centuries now since the invention of modern historiography and social science, when historians abandoned the old "kings and battles" mode of writing history and began instead to examine the broader and deeper forces that shape the social world...
...The members of this new political class were part-politician and part-intellectual...
...he had us convinced that he possessed a magic formula for leading us into a land of milk and honey without the bother of traveling through the desert...
...They had pretentions to intellectual culture...
...There is yet another reason this new political class fails to offer anything but the most superficial analysis of the reasons for Democratic presidential defeats: a more profound analysis might point the finger of blame at this class itself...
...Why is this...
...And when it came to politics, they certainly did not defer to politicians of the traditional type, whom they considered to be their social inferiors...
...ill Clinton, it appears, is on his way to becoming the Democratic nominee for president, and all around the nation the Democratic party is wondering out loud once again if it has chosen the wrong candidate...
...Little wonder the Democrats cannot elect a president...
...But that day has long since passed...
...Why do apparently intelligent people fall into such stupidity at precisely this point...
...Republican intellectuals, once an endangered species, now abound, while the Democrats at the national level have come to be dominated by a social stratum that has a hard time distinguishing between catch-phrases and ideas...
...To be sure, there are other reasons for this drift: a certain amount of racism in the South, a considerable amount of upward mobility among Catholics...
...Third-rate minds drove out firstrate minds, and slogans of bumper-sticker quality came to replace serious analysis...
...the new is highly individualistic...
...One of the reasons traditional Democratic constituencies— white Southerners and Catholic ethnics outside the South—have drifted away from the Democrats in recent decades is the sense these groups have that the national Democratic party has fallen into the hands of a culturally alien group...
...For you see, that's the preferred Democratic way of explaining why they have been able to win the White House only once since 1968 (out of six elections): "We ran the wrong candidate...
...But there is no denying that the new political class is different in such a way as to give offense...
...The orthodox creed runs something like this: Nixon was tricky and his nasty cleverness fooled the people, especially in 1972, when he won every state but Massachusetts...
...And of course, George Bush a man who, like Gertrude Stein's Oakland, has no "there" there—also fooled the people, causing them to believe that Bush-Quayle was the only team that could save America from a Dukakis-Horton administration rife with prison furloughs and nonsalutes to the flag...
...The old groups are working class and lower-middle class...
...One reason is that there has been a general decline in intellectualism in the Democratic party...
...This Democratic explanation is generous enough to give a kind of backhanded credit to the winning Republican candidates...
...And little wonder the new political class shies away from an examination of the real causes of this inability...
...The simplistic mentality which reduces the abortion question to "a woman's right to choose" is the same mentalily that reduces the analysis of presidential defeats to "we ran the wrong candidate...
...The politicians didn't pretend to be intellectuals, and the intellectuals didn't pretend to be politicians...
...The old are usually locals rooted in a place...
...The old groups are churchgoing, the new thoroughly secularized...
...the new is uppermiddle...
...Ronald Reagan, a harmless old geezer endlessly manipulated by his wife and other handlers, also fooled the people (after first of all fooling himself...
...q 10: 8 May 1992 Commonweal...
...Thus Dukakis was wrong in 1988, Mondale was wrong in 1984, Carter was wrong in 1980 (though he was somehow right in 1976, but that was a fluke), McGovern was wrong in 1972, and Humphrey was wrong in 1968...
Vol. 119 • May 1992 • No. 9
