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

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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.

' 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.)

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.

When I first heard about "Why the Democrats are Blue", I wondered if the topic would have an expiration date of November 2008. Boy, was I wrong. This is a thorough and insightful examination of how the Democratic Party changed from a party run by the boss system (centered around blue collar, urban, and Catholic voters) to a party dominated by special interest groups.

The transition from the Old Dems to the New Dems is itself not a new concept. Many historians have pegged the year of the transition at 1972. Stricherz tells us how the party got to '72, who the players were behind the scenes, and what effects the changes made on the delegate selection process, future policy, electibility of Democratic candidates, and the redistribution of the party's power geographically, racially, and gender-wise.

The fact that Barack Obama won the general election in 2008 pokes a small hole in the secondary meaning of the word "Blue" in the book's title, but it did not diminish Stricherz' thesis. In many ways, it strengthens it.

I see this book having value to political enthusiasts, Democrats who want to know why their party is the way it is, and historians. This is not a polemic (the author is a Dem), so have an open mind and give it a try.

Stricherz does a great job of telling it like it was/is. This is a fantastic read and a must buy for anyone interested learning how politics has changed over the years in our country. Can't say enough good things about this one. Laura Ingram should bring this guy on!

How did the Democratic Party turn from being the natural home of socially conservative working class Catholic ethnics to a party largely dominated by the cultural revolution of the 1960's? Mark Stricherz's book is, in addition to being a great read, an important contribution to today's political debates, and a great history lesson on the evolving nature of our political parties. The book does a great job of explaining the importance of the McGovern Commisson's changes in party rules, and how that resulted in a sea change in the national Democratic Party's outlook and electoral fortunes from the '70s through the present day. Stricherz also highlights important, yet forgotten figures like Fred Dutton and David Bruce and gives them the attention they deserve. All in all a terrific book for serious political junkies (like me) and casual students of politics and history as well. Fairminded and well-written.

In Democracy in America, at one point in his observations of 1830's, almost-exclusively rural America, de Tocqueville turns to nascent industrialization and remarks that if America becomes industrialized, then its democracy will degenerate into political affiliations based on purely economic interests. American Democracy will fail since America's political discourse will be devoid of any principled discussion of the common good and how to lead her citizens to virtue and human flourishing. One of the most vexing political questions of recent decades has been why do the political parties no longer seem to align themselves with economic interests or even moral views?

Mr. Strickerz goes far in providing a great piece of this puzzle, a piece of the puzzle that all men of good will must heed. The devil is in the details and Strickerz provides us with a long overdue look at the details of the party's presidential nominating system. It is a system without any pretense of representing a constituency or of engaging in discourse on how best to pursue the common good or even of discourse on what is a proper understanding of the common good. Rather the 1968 McGovern Commission, to the great consternation of its more principled members, implemented a system with one goal--to nominate secular elites and to keep them in power. Although the immediate goal was to nominate an anti-Vietnam War candidate, the change in rules established a syste designed to ignore the views of the party's traditional constituency and to advance an ideology, an ideology foreign to most Americans.

Stricherz account of how this was done--soft quotas, primary nominating system, etc.--should be essential knowledge for anyone concerned with our political process, anyone concerned with fosterning our democracy. With such knowledge, such men of good will will be in a better position to toppel the alien elites--Clintons, Obama, Dean and company--at the controls of the party.

Although de Tocqueville's observations seemed largely true in the 1930's and 40's, they are not true now (nor could such a development have been predicted). However, his larger pessimism about maintaining a principled political discourse has proven well-founded.

I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in political history and who wants to know how the Democratic Party became secular and liberal when at one time it was the party of the working class, and Catholics. Mark Stricherz did an excellent job researching the information and writing it. His book answered my questions.

According to Mark Stricherz, the Democratic Party, who championed for the working class and Catholics began to change in 1968, during the time of the Vietnam War and the anti-war protesters. Fred Dutton, a member of the Democratic Party who was responsible for reforming the party structure, wanted to add new members and change the issues that the party represented. The new members consisted of college educated people, young people, women, and African-Americans. The college educated and the young voters were secular opposed to the Catholic voters and other Christian denominations who voted Democratic. The new issues of concern to these new members were social, economic, cultural, and foreign policy (anti-war).

The Democratic Party also changed the way that their presidential candidate was elected for the purpose of electing an anti-war candidate. Gone was the old boss system, which was a group of a small few men that met privately to handpick the presidential candidate of their choice. Instead a newer Democratic system, where voters elected their candidate, was put in place. In order to have fair representation among women and minorities, the party established a soft quota system for them. The Democratic Party got their wish and elected an anti-war candidate, George McGovern, but he did not win the Presidential election in 1972. Sounds like the Democratic Party created an activist system to elect a particular candidate of their choice who could not win in the end.

Then the Feminists started to make demands on the Democratic Party in the early 1970's. Their first demand was that each of the state's delegates has a quota of 50% women. Surprisingly, the Democratic Party gave in to their demands, which allowed the feminists easy access to the party. The second item was to create a platform recognizing abortion as a woman's fundamental right. At first the feminists did not succeed, but they kept persevering and at the 1980 Democratic National Convention they adopted an abortion plank. From that point on it became evident that the Democratic Party became the party of abortion rights, and the pro-lifers could no longer influence abortion policies. Any politician who is a member of the Democratic Party and aspires to a higher position in the party such as the Presidency or Chairman of the Democratic National Committee will be not elected to either position if they are not pro-choice.

As a result of these changes that occurred from 1968-1972, and 1980, the Democratic Party is no longer the party of the working class, Catholics, and Pro-Lifers. The liberal elites who took control of the party, whether it be college educated people, the young people, or the feminists do not care for religious people and/or do not share their values. That is why the Catholics and the working class feel excluded and vote Republican not because they are the better party, but they are more inclusive to their values. The secular liberals, who are Democrats, will argue that the Republican Party panders to the Religious Right, which is true, but they will not admit that the Democratic Party is intolerant of religious people and their beliefs, especially those who oppose abortion.

Finally, the Democratic Party will very likely end up winning the Presidential Election this year, but not because the religious people and the pro-lifers are welcomed back, but because of the bad job that the Bush Administration has done with the war in Iraq, the bad economy, and high gas prices. In the future, it remains to be seen how the religious people and the pro-lifers will vote?

This is an interesting thesis: that the Democrats are now the party of the secularists, having identified themselves with issues that run directly against traditional religious beliefs. The secularists--a motley group of wealthy limousine liberals who advocate partial birth abortion and gay marriage and stamping out Christmas--are now firmly in charge of the Democratic party.

It is amazing to realize, as Stricherz details, that the ethnic Catholics and Southern evangelists were once the main props of the Democratic party.

And it is true that time and again, polls show that those who attend church once a week will not vote Democratic. They appear firmly in the Republican camp.

This year, the issues may well center around the housing market, oil prices, and war. But what about the trends through the next decades? Is Stricherz right that the Democratic party, having chosen to identify itself with abortion and gay rights, turned away too many voters?

I don't know. I do believe Stricherz does not consider the vast number of voters who now truly need the party of secularists: single women, especially single mothers. With an illegitimacy rate of about 40% single mothers rely on the government for handouts, and to heck with moral issues. Those women may prove to be a larger group than those who hold religious beliefs.

Is this a book, or a really, really long right-wing bumper sticker, designed for people who obediently listen to Rush Limbaugh?

I think this book has been discredited---you know, just a tiny little bit---by recent events. Don't you? A black man, with an African name, and the most liberal voting record in the United States Senate, has just been elected President of the United States. (Just in case the author and his readers haven't been keeping up with the news.)

Most people who take this book seriously are probably still putting cream on their buttocks after the severe kicking they took on Election Day.

Happy Inauguration Day! Ha ha!