October
30, 2005
The New McGovernites Will Fail to Win Again
By John
Leo
The editor
of The New Republic suggested the other day that "the
new liberal political culture emerging on the Internet" looks
a lot like the McGovernite revolution that descended on the Democratic
Party in 1972. In a lecture at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School
of Government, Peter Beinart said the mostly young Internet activists
are clearly taking over the party.
If so, this
would be the first ray of sunshine for conservatives and Republicans
in almost a year. The McGovern movement severely damaged the party,
pushing it toward four presidential defeats in five tries, until
Bill Clinton won by dragging the party back to the center in 1992.
If the Internet people had prevailed in 2004, Howard Dean would
have won the nomination and then been buried in an enormous landslide,
just like George McGovern.
Beinart wrote
one of the most impressive magazine articles of 2004, a 6,000-word
piece on the failure of liberalism to reshape itself in the wake
of 9/11 and the rise of Islamofascism. He was highly critical
of liberal "softs" who tolerate Michael Moore and MoveOn.org,
the potent Internet-based group that has urged antiwar liberals
to cooperate with the totalitarian left, specifically with International
Answer, a front for the World Workers Party, which has defended
Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic and North Korean madman Kim
Jong Il.
Beinart called
on liberals to cut themselves off from totalitarian movements
and from people who imagine that the terrorist threat is minor
or nonexistent, just as mainstream liberals in 1947 girded themselves
for the Cold War by ejecting pro-communist and soft-on-communism
types like the followers of Henry Wallace.
That article
was blunt. The speech last week was more circumspect and polite
-- no harsh words for the soft-on-totalitarians types like the
George Soros-financed activists at MoveOn. Still, Beinart fears
that the new activists are "largely in the dark about what
they believe" and will come to power without the ideas they
need to govern.
Let's assume
that Beinart is right and that the Deaniacs are today's McGovernites.
This would be an excellent time to ponder what the McGovern reformers
did to the party. The changes at the 1972 convention removed the
power of the city bosses and party regulars to determine the nominee
and, in theory at least, increased the number of Democrats involved
in selecting nominees. In reality, though, the reformers, through
rule changes and some stealth and manipulation, stacked the convention
and radically changed the party.
Affluent,
well-educated liberals were in -- a "new elite," as
The Washington Post termed it. Party regulars, officeholders
and blue-collar Democrats were out. New York, a union state, had
only three union members as delegates, though it had at least
nine members of the gay liberation movement. No farmer was a member
of the Iowa delegation. Only 30 of the 255 Democratic members
of Congress were selected as delegates. A full 39 percent of delegates
had attended graduate school. Over a third of the white delegates
were classified as secularists, compared with 5 percent of the
general population.
The reformers
installed rough quotas for blacks, women, Hispanics, and people
ages 18 to 25. The total of female delegates tripled, to 43 percent,
with heavy emphasis on supporters of abortion and the hard-edged
feminism represented by Bella Abzug.
Jack Newfield
and Joe Flaherty, both pro-McGovern Village Voice reporters from
working-class backgrounds, asked, "Where are the quotas for
Irish, Italians and Poles?" "The McGovernite movement,"
wrote Murray Rothbard, a prominent libertarian, "is, in its
very nature, a kick in the gut to Middle America."
The regulars
who picked candidates before the McGovern revolution always looked
for a mainstream candidate who could win. McGovern's activists
had to be mobilized and sustained by ideological appeals that
put the movement and the candidate decidedly left of the electorate.
So McGovern couldn't have won.
The McGovern
reform commission and the people who changed the party in 1972
wrought lasting damage, and not just to Democrats: They helped
mightily to create the modern split between red America and blue
America. Many members of disfavored groups -- Catholics, Southerners
and much of the white working class and lower-middle class --
decamped for the Republican Party, while the Democrats emerged
more clearly visible as the party of well-off liberals, the poor,
identity and grievance groups, secularists and the cultural elite.
A second coming of McGovernite guerrillas wouldn't do much to
improve that image.
Copyright
2005 John Leo
Distributed
by Universal Press Syndicate
