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

National Review, July 20, 1992 by Michael Novak

Having strayed from the ordinary people of America, the Democrats came to like interest groups best of all. Why? Because interest groups hold meetings, they have organizations, they have highly trained professional staffs, they have money, and they are geared up to make their political weight felt in as many congressional districts as necessary. The party of government and the party of interest groups were made for one another.

The rub comes in trying to raise taxes to pay for all this. It is not that the Democrats mind raising taxes; we made an art of it in a period of inflationary expectations, when inflation itself delivered effortless increases in tax revenues. Democrats don't mind raising taxes, especially on "the rich"--defined as whatever percentage of taxpayers (about 1 or 2) earn incomes above a congressional salary (about $125,000). Here surfaces another reason why the Democrats have lost their old and fervent love for "the people." The latter don't like paying taxes. They suspect, alas, that "The Rich R Us." And they are right.

Bill Clinton, of course, has recently added another wrinkle to the Democratic presidential election ritual. This consists in going before selected special-interest groups to deliver an insult or two. His intention is to show these interest groups that (unlike Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, and Michael Dukakis) he can "stand up" to them. Simultaneously, the press gets the word out to all the special-interest groups, on whose votes the Democratic Party thoroughly depends, that this is smart politics: the Candidate is only pretending to attack them, so that he can get elected to fulfill their agenda.

Return Ticket

I LONG FOR the day when the Democrats give up being the party of government and return to being the people's party. This is where Ross Perot has stolen their lunch. For some twenty years, the Democrats simultaneously described government as duplicitous, under the control of mad generals, the militaryindustrial complex, and the CIA (in the tone so perfectly imitated in JFK), and called themselves "the party of government" without any sense of irony (not to mention of self-contradiction). The textbook name for this particular tactic is political suicide.

I wrote in 1972 that I would like to see the Democrats become again the party of families and neighborhoods, rather than of Hollywood and faculty clubs, and I still wish they would. I wish that they were still (much more than they now are) the party of Jews and Catholics and Southern whites, and able to come out of Philadelphia, Cleveland, Detroit, Gary, Chicago, and Omaha with large majorities among both blacks and white ethnics (as Bobby Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey used to do, before Jesse Jackson).

Instead, it is the Republicans who have understood the class profile of the American electorate. The top 20 per cent of Americans, defined roughly by annual income (above $55,000), years of schooling (college), and status (professional, managerial, salaried), is about equally divided. Half, the old elite, holds that the greatness of the United States springs from a stronger and more dynamic private sector. The other half, the New Class, holds that the country achieves its greatness by strengthening the public sector--to show that it is "caring," "compassionate," etc.