The Party of Potential

Whither the Democrats is becoming the default topic for pundits and bloggers to write about on a slow news day. Can’t think of anything to write about? Try to figure out what’s wrong with the donkeys.

Tony Blankley calls the Democrats nihilist:

But not satisfied to be a head in the sand, reflexively negative opposition party, an increasing number of Democrats and their supporters in the leftish fever swamps have started calling for President Bush's impeachment.

While I haven't seen any polls yet on the subject, I would guess that
something less than 10 percent of the American voting public would look forward to seeing the last two years of the Bush presidency consumed with a Democratic Party-controlled Congress trying to impeach the president during a time of war.

Somehow the Democratic Party -- for 180 years the most electorally successful political party on the planet -- has now almost completely mutated into a party too loathsome to be seen in public, and too nihilistic to be trusted with control of even a single branch of government.

Bull Moose says the Democrats should move to Bush’s right on national security.

If some Democrats have a modicum of imagination, they would move to the President's right on national security. Of course, that would require to take on some of the those on the left flank. But, if a donkey is ever to occupy the Oval Office in the foreseeable future, he or she must be perceived as being as tough or tougher than the Republicans on national security.

There’s a name for Democrats who are tough on national security. They’re called neoconservatives. In other words, the Scoop Jackson Democrats have all left the party and what’s left is anti-American New Leftists.

During the 2004 Presidential election, I thought that if Kerry was smart he would make a dramatic run to Bush’s economic right. Make the campaign about Bush’s big spending and the outrageous growth of government. Had he done that, I would have voted for Kerry, but such a tactic was obviously beyond his imagination. A liberal campaigning against big government would be like the Ku Klux Klan campaigning against racism. If you throw out their core principle, what is left?

Still I think that some kind of right-wing Democrat is not impossible. They’re the party of big government, but they never seem proud about it. Campaigning as honest, open socialists would be electoral suicide.

As nihilists who stand for little but hating Republicans, the Democrats are beginning to resemble the black hole of modern philosophy. Modern philosophy has demolished all absolutes and left nothing but the insane word-chopping of linguistic analysis and the radical skepticism of postmodernism. Its most important Founding Father, Kant, was called the “all-destroyer.” But when the actual is destroyed, all is potential. The emptiness of modern philosophy leaves our culture wide open for real ideas. And the emptiness of the Democrats is a wasteland waiting for a politician with imagination and energy and maybe even some new ideas.

I know it sounds crazy, given that the Dem constituency is pressure groups dependent on big government, but if they lose enough elections, a candidate with some free market ideas might succeed in Democrat Party. Who knows, with the rise of the religious right in the Republicans, it might turn out that the black hole of the Democrat Party is freedom’s last hope. Or am I dreaming of that which could never be?