Why the Democrats are Blue: Secular Liberalism and the Decline of the People's Party (Hardcover)

~ (Author)
Key Phrases: postwar bosses, activist system, abortion plank, Democratic Party, New Politics, New York (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Why the Democrats are Blue argues that secular, educated elites, using a commission created at the 1968 convention in Chicago and later chaired by Senator George McGovern, took the Democratic Party away from working class and religious Democrats. This quiet revolution helps explain why six of the last nine Democratic presidential candidates have lost.

From the Inside Flap

Sadly, it's all true. Mark Stricherz has written a fascinating history of how the Democrats got themselves into this mess, and how they could still get out of it.

-Melinda Henneberger, author of If They Only Listened To Us: What Women Voters Want Politicians to Hear

The Democratic Party is the oldest political party in the world, but it has changed its character and approach sharply three times--in 1896, in the 1930s and in the late 1960s. Mark Stricherz in Why the Democrats Are Blue tells the story of how this third change came about--and how a small group of secular activists and insiders shaped the character of one of our great political parties in ways that persist to this day."

-Michael Barone Resident Scholar, American Enterprise Institute Senior Writer, U.S. News & World Report Co-author, The Almanac of American Politics

In my travels across the country since the days of Jack Kennedy, I have seen the political transformation of Reagan Democrat areas such as Macomb County, Scranton, and South Boston. I knew that these Catholics and blue-collar workers did not leave the Democratic Party; the Democratic Party abandoned them. In fact, as Mark Stricherz shows, wealthy, liberal activists hijacked the national party, leaving millions of Catholics and working-class voters with no home in either party. An important and original book, Why the Democrats are Blue tells the story of a political revolution that the media never told us about.

-Ray Flynn, former President of the U.S. Conference of Mayors and Ambassador to the Vatican

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 315 pages
• Publisher: Encounter Books (October 25, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 159403205X
• ISBN-13: 978-1594032059
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #864,345 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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34 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Democratic Party has Been Captured by the Leftist "Elites", November 20, 2007

By	David Thomson "Second Rate Eric Hoffer Imitator" (Houston, TX USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Mark Stricherz convincingly argues that the leftist "elites" took over the Democratic Party during George McGovern's disastrous 1972 campaign for the presidency. These wealthy anti-traditional values individuals were contemptuous of the lesser-credentialed blue collar Democrats. They also increased the presence of self-hating Americanism and dishonest pacifism into the national body politic. At the most, they were willing to throw a few bones to the hoi polloi. When push came to shove, however, issues like abortion were to dominate the agenda. The situation has only worsened considerably since that time. More recent Democrat politicians like Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton essentially learned how to best con the rubes. They pretended to be more conservative than they actually are. The author cites the difficulty of pro-life Pennsylvania Governor Bob Casey of being treated respectfully by the Democratic Party establishment. Sadly, his son was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2006---and has proven to be loyal to the pro-abortionists. In other words, it seems virtually impossible to remain a present day Democrat and still remain loyal to one's Judeo-Christian cultural values. Reading Stricherz's riveting book will compel you to concede that the less than perfect Republicans are the only game in town. Minimally everyone of its presidential candidates promise to select only strict constructionist judges to the U.S. Supreme Court.

There is another work that mandates your attention. It is James Piereson's Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism. This event also had much to do with pushing the Democratic Party leftwards.

17 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Watch the Primaries with This in Mind, January 6, 2008

By	Mary Meehan (Cumberland, MD USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

 Will the Democrats roar through a triumphant election this year and take back the White House? Or will they blow it once again because they can't regain enough of the Catholic and blue-collar voters they have lost in recent decades?
It's too early to tell, but those who wonder why the Dems have such problems with major parts of their old coalition should read Why Democrats Are Blue. And Democrats who want their party to moderate or abandon its support of abortion should read the book to find why the party decided to support abortion in the first place.
Mark Stricherz, like many analysts, traces the take-over of the party by "secular liberals" to the McGovern Commission that changed party rules in 1969-70. But where others have said this, Stricherz has done serious research in manuscript collections and elsewhere to prove it. He makes a compelling case.
The late Sen. Eugene McCarthy's antiwar presidential campaign against President Lyndon Johnson in 1968 made major gains against the Democratic Party establishment. But McCarthy and his volunteers were stymied by the automatic awarding of convention seats to pro-Johnson party leaders, winner-take-all rules in key primary states, and other practices that stacked the deck against them. (I worked in the '68 McCarthy campaign and gave Mark Stricherz, a fellow journalist, some information for his book from the McCarthy perspective. I don't agree, though, with all of his analysis.)
After President Johnson withdrew from the `68 campaign, Vice President Hubert Humphrey stepped in and picked up the Johnson delegates and many others. He won the Democratic presidential nomination even though he hadn't won any primaries. But Humphrey's loss to Republican Richard Nixon in November chastened the Democratic leadership enough that they were willing to reform the rules. They appointed then-Sen. George McGovern (D-S.D.) to head a reform commission to rewrite the rules. But Stricherz shows that commission members did not represent the party as a whole. In particular, few were Catholics or labor leaders. The AFL-CIO made the incredible error of virtually ignoring the commission's work, apparently having no idea how much it would influence presidential races of the future.
Many commission reforms were fair and much-needed. But influential
commission members and staff wanted to go beyond that point. They wanted special guarantees for representation of young people, racial minorities, and women among convention delegates--in part, Stricherz says, to guarantee that the party's 1972 presidential candidate would be antiwar. This led to a virtual quota system, although those who championed it didn't want to use the word "quota." (Stricherz calls the system one of "soft quotas" or "informal quotas.") When Sen. McGovern ran for
president in 1972, he understood the new rules, as did key McGovern supporters who had worked with or on his commission. The antiwar McGovern won the Democratic nomination that year.
Stricherz shows how feminist leaders worked hard to enforce the quota for women, producing a huge jump in the percentage of women delegates--from 13 percent in 1968 to 40 percent in 1972. Unfortunately, feminist leaders used their 1972 strength for a major effort to pass a pro-abortion platform plank. Although they lost the plank in '72, they established a major beachhead for the future. McGovern's crushing loss to President Richard Nixon in November--attributed partly to the abortion battle at the convention--didn't deter the feminist leaders. Nor did evidence that huge numbers of women around the United States were anti-abortion. In 1980 feminist leaders and others pushed through a platform plank that supported public funding of abortion.
Party rules changes had much to do with this. But so did other factors Stricherz doesn't deal with: Democratic moneybags who, like many of their Republican counterparts, strongly supported abortion; major failures and betrayals by Catholic intellectuals who blessed the "personally opposed, but..." position on abortion and influenced Catholic politicians to do the same; and heavy pro-abortion pressures from
the media in the 1970s and 1980s. Also, most abortion foes gave up the battle within the Democratic Party after 1976. They should have stayed and fought hard instead. Now a group called Democrats for Life is trying to make up for decades of lost time. (See democratsforlife.org; also, see MeehanReports.com for an article on "Democrats for Life Revisited.")
Stricherz makes a good case that the quota system "confirmed that the New Politics activists had become old-style bosses." He says they did exactly what they had criticized the old bosses for doing--"stacking the election process to get the results they wanted." Incidentally, although many of those involved were '68 McCarthy veterans, I don't think Sen. McCarthy himself ever endorsed the quota system. In 1974, referring to
it with typical McCarthy irony, he suggested that perhaps the party should just run Democrats through a computer system--and take "those who are thrown out by the machine and say, `Go to the convention.' You might run it once more," he added, "and take the last person as the candidate."
Democrats have continued to tinker with their rules; but it's hard to find much progress, and there has been some regression. While the McGovern Commission got rid of appointed delegates, for example, a later commission reinstated them; and Stricherz says they make up 20 percent of convention delegates. So the Dems still have a major kind of bossism that McCarthy insurgents were fighting 40 years ago!
In an afterword, Stricherz suggests several changes in current nomination rules. I like his proposals to eliminate all quotas, again eliminate the appointed delegates, and open Democratic primaries to independent voters. I disagree, though, with his proposal to eliminate caucuses and replace them with primaries. Caucuses are an old and
honored tradition in states like Iowa and Minnesota. They provide more personal involvement for voters than primaries do, and probably attract some people to deeper political involvement. They might not work as well in very large states; but no one suggests mandating them. This is a case where it's best to leave the decision to states.
Stricherz makes an intriguing proposal to change the primary schedule so that the first states to vote would be "the five most competitive states in the last presidential election." He admits here a political goal of producing a nominee who "would be much more likely to hew to the center of the political road, the spot where elections are won." Here, too, I would be more inclined to leave decisions to the states--though I wish they would stop pushing primary dates back to January. The date of this year's first-in-the-nation New Hampshire primary? January 8th. Forty years ago, that primary was held on March 12th. Candidates, I suspect, were less exhausted--and a little warmer--in the old days. And voters were not subjected to presidential campaigns
that lasted for nearly two years. Isn't one year enough to say what needs to be said?
Why Democrats Are Blue is a good place to start thinking about this and many other questions.

(Mary Meehan is a Maryland writer who has written widely on politics and issues of life and death.)

20 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Should be read along with Ponnuru's "Party of Death", December 8, 2007

By	Bradley O'brien "Border ruffian" (Balad Air Base, Iraq) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Bravo to Stricherz! A book examining how the party became captive to fanatical Abortion Uber Alles stormtroopers has long been needed! Readers should put this on the shelf right by Ramesh Ponnuru's superb "Party of Death".
I was drawn to this book after I read that Maria Schwarzenegger's Alzheimer's afflicted father was the last ProLife Democrat to be on a national ticket. It is an interesting read showing how the defeated McGovernite/proAbortion clique was able to remold the Democratic party. Folks have often claimed that just as Goldwater lost the election but "won" his party, McGovern did the same for his: the Democratic party was recast in the image of McGovern and the single issue proAbort crowd. (Odd how Kate Michelman or Gloria Steinem are NEVER identified as "single issue" voters)
So the elites' rigid celebration and support of abortion essentially put up a "You're Not Welcome" sign for otherwise reliably Democratic voters. Working class Catholics --and I suspect a fair amt of their Protestant brethren in the south-- were once loyal supporters of a Democratic party which espoused solid paycheck populism.
What I found interesting is how abortion could have become a Republican issue but instead became more closely identified with Democrats. The late 60s also marked the triumph of a not-so-subtle antiAmerican pacifism within the D party. The old Adlai Stephenson-styled Democrat wanted to see the rest of the world become more like the USA. The New Democrats viewed the USA as a corrupting presence.
The perceived unwillingness of Democrats to modify abortion policy in the USA has been a great help in getting more Republicans elected up and down the ballot.
Abortucrats control the party in much the same way that slave owners did in the 1850s. There is some hope when groups opposed to abortion are at least recognized by state party leaders. My own experience is that proLife Democrats have to frame themselves as antiDeath Penalty first, and anti-abortion secondly.