The Informationist

I’m Not Alone

Ken Baer’s posting this morning was critical of the Democratic leadership. The first three comments were less than complimentary. I offered my support.

There were three comments posted in response to your eminently reasonable article when I started writing. All were overtly hostile, IMHO all were completely wrong, and none of them point the way towards winning elections. My reading of the past five years, though, is that they are more representative of where the Democratic Party is heading than anything that you might say—or I might believe.

The very day that Bill Clinton handed the baton to Al Gore at the 2000 convention, Gore began running away from the Clinton record (and much of his own history) to embrace angry populism. Since then, we have seen the Party’s reflexively anti-Israel wing grown, the mainstream of the Party’s tolerance for anti-Semitism expand, the abandonment of free trade principles by virtually all of our elected representatives, and an apparent decision by the Party leadership to elevate shrill rhetoric over actual planning. We just ran an entire Presidential campaign without a foreign policy vision. How did that work out?

I fear that if today’s Democratic Party were to embrace a foreign policy vision, it would not be one that I could endorse. That would put me—and all American voters—in a position to choose between two clearly articulated visions. As a believer in market mechanisms, I’d like to see an election go forward on such grounds. I remain relatively certain, however, that whichever side loses would blame it on a combination of the other side’s duplicity and their own poor marketing.

The best reason to stay a Democrat today is that the Republican leadership either belongs to or kowtows to its moral hegemonist wing. If unrepentant leftists become as influential among Democrats as unrepentant rightists are among Republicans, that reason will disappear.

Lots of comments followed. Few were supportive--though most of them heaped their venom on Ken, rather than upon me.

Posted by Bruce Abramson from on 06/18 at 11:27 PM in American Government, Politics, and Domestic Policies