The longtime-Democrat blues: the Democrats are now the party of the bureaucrats and the underclass

National Review, July 20, 1992 by Michael Novak

The Democrats are now the party of the bureaucrats and the underclass and a few lonely souls who remember when they were the party of the people.

THE SADDEST THING about being a Democrat is the arrival of presidential election years. Ordinarily, it isn't such a bad feeling, being a Democrat, because the party is, after all, the oldest political party in the world; the largest party in America; and quite certainly the dominant party not only in most of the state legislatures, but also in the U.S. House and Senate. It is also (after all) the second most capitalist party in the world. Many of the most colorful political leaders in America during the last sixty years have belonged to it. Nearly all major journalists--at the networks, on the major dailies and newsweeklies--support it, with thinly disguised political passion. In faculty clubs and in classrooms, as well as at public university functions, the prevailing speech assumes that anyone with moral discretion is a Democrat. As Pauline Kael once wrote, disbelieving the outcome of the Nixon-McGovern election of 1972, "Nixon can't have won; no one I know voted for him."

So it is nice to be able to slip casually into a conversation the soft-voiced confession, "I am a Democrat... ," which wins one at least an initial exemption from being thought a complete Neanderthal. A significant proportion of American left-wingers of artistic, intellectual, or academic standing, it seems, have never had a conversation with an intelligent Republican, and think the latter term an oxymoron. (This explains the extremist speech that left-wingers frequently allow themselves; they have virtually never heard their views challenged. Anybody who is anybody in their circles agrees with them.) Being able to say one is a Democrat is like having the card that gets one into the first-class lounge at an international airport.

Inside the party considerable diversity is tolerated. "I don't belong to an organized political party," Will Rogers once said. "I'm a Democrat." There are a lot of Democrats it is easy for other Democrats to dislike intensely, except that they need each other's votes. Pas d'ennemies a gauche. "Left" means a passel of feuding sects. "Left" also means "more moral than thou."

ONE OF the benefits to being a registered Democrat, then, is access to moral superiority. The sadness, as I say, comes every four years. One then has to face the fact that the party is certain to nominate a candidate one cannot vote for. Even if he is a very nice candidate, a man one has for some time admired as a generally responsible and decent fellow (like Walter Mondale), by the time he is finished assuring all the loud-voiced parts of the Democratic "coalition" of everything that he will do for them, not only the price tag but also the pandering of the thing has become insupportable.

But that's not yet the deepest sadness. The deepest sadness is that the Candidate is going to have to come out "pro-choice," which actually means in favor of discarding human life. And to do this within the same political party that insists on protecting the spotted owl, the snail darter, the whale, and every other species in this bio-diverse universe. (Perhaps it would help if Democrats began thinking of the unborn as nonhuman; perhaps then they would want to save them.) In addition, the Candidate has got to pretend to love and admire the feminists, even the loudest, most man-hating, and most extreme among them. Indeed, beyond expressing sympathy for gays and lesbians (which is easy to understand) the Candidate will have to speak to lesbians and gays as if they were the most honorable, wealthiest, and best-organized oppressed people on earth. The special mixture of coercion and pretense involved in this particular public exercise is unusually cloying. Watching grown people say what they do not feel is acutely embarrassing.

Worse still are the left-wing movie stars and rock singers the Candidate is going to have to cavort with. Pretending that these folks are sensible must be the most difficult part of running for office.

But if you think that the Candidate's association with the glitterati is the most embarrassing thing about presidential election years, you are still wrong. The most embarrassing thing is that the Candidate is bound to have his photograph taken. If it's not Mike Dukakis with a helmet in a tank turret, it is Bill Clinton with dark glasses, a funny hat, a creak in his knees, and a long saxophone held coolly toward the floor. A nice cold stab in your heart tells you immediately that the Republican campaign is going to play this photograph over and over again on television, in their ads: "This is the man you want for President?" Over beside it the Republicans will run a picture of their man conversing intently with Gorbachev or Yeltsin: "Or this one?"

No, it's no fun being a Democrat in presidential election years. Proud as you can be of your party at any other time, in this long and painful year you can only inure yourself to one humiliation after another. No party in the world should have to put itself through this obstacle course every four years. No human being should have to be a Democratic presidential candidate, getting punched up here, elongated over there, pinched this way, grabbed that way, in order to emerge from it all misshapen, forlorn, and altogether pitiable. The hardest thing about being a Democrat is finding a presidential candidate one can actually vote for.