WHY THE DEMOCRATS LOSE ELECTIONS

I've finally figured out what the real problem is about writing without getting paid for it--you can't stick to an agenda. If you get hired to write an article on The Miracle Weight Loss Soybean, you write an article on The Miracle Weight Loss Soybean. It doesn't matter if the subject bores you to death, or if you get a better idea in the meantime, or if the press of public events makes something else seem much more important. It really doesn't matter what goes on on web sites and Usenet and Internet discussion groups. You tell your everyday American magazine editor that you can't deliver the piece she's expecting on The Perils of Standardized Sizing in the Tampon Industry because you wrote 3000 words on The Image of Trailer Park Residents on the World Wide Web, and you not only won't get paid, you'll be in serious danger of never getting paid again. Magazine editors have printer's deadlines. They'd rather be called fat by Brad Pitt on Oprah than miss a printer's deadline.

But there is no magazine editor here, and my piece on Shaking the Finger, which I promised you last week, is tucked in another file. It's Thursday, November 7^th, 2002, and I still haven't recovered from the American midterm elections, when the Democratic Party--my party, the one I've been voting for since I first stepped into a booth, squeezed my eyes shut, and flipped the tab for Jimmy Carter--swallowed a hand grenade and blew itself up. I'm staring fitfully at a liberal Democratic web site called American Politics Journal, which declares its intention to give George W. Bush the same treatment the Republicans gave Bill Clinton. I'm thinking that I ought to like this site, since it promises that it "will never endorse the policy of any elected official who seeks to foist their views of morality or religion on the American people..." I mean, for God's sake, that's my mantra. It's practically the only message I have. Some people find God. I found Leave People Alone to Do It Their Way. I ought to be leaping around the room going, "Whee! Whee! They're for freedom for everybody and they get 39 million hits a year!"

Instead, I'm sitting here with a 32 ounce cup of Constant Comment tea steeped so long it looks black, wondering if I'd be in violation of some law or other if I started shooting these wild turkeys that have invaded my back yard.

Maybe it's a good thing I don't own a gun.

So, okay. Let's be honest about just what went on here. The Democrats didn't lose a few key races last Tuesday. There wasn't a surprise upset here and there. What happened was a complete, utter, and virtually unrelieved disaster.

The news was so bad--and so utterly, stupefyingly shocking--that hyperrouged television pundits couldn't think of a thing to say about it for days. They'd note that it happened, and mumble a bit, but the best they could come up with for an "explanation" was something along the lines of "Bush is a popular wartime president." Then they'd smile at the camera, as if the sight of $40,000 worth of dental work was supposed to take our minds off the fact that they weren't making any sense.

In fact, what happened was worse than the 1994 GOP takeover of the House of Representatives, because it was so unexpected. In 1994, the Democrats had a President in the White House, the President had some baggage, and the President's party always loses seats in the off-year elections. This time, not only did the President's party not lose seats in the off-year elections, it managed to gain them, something that hadn't happened for a hundred years.

And it wasn't as if this President didn't have baggage. He had enough to tip the weight limit on any airline. He'd only been half-elected. To a lot of Americans, he hadn't been elected at all. If there was one thing you heard about George W. Bush on a regular basis, it was that he'd lost the popular vote in his own election.

Then there was his performance since, which in most respects resembled a cross between a train wreck and a Karen Finley performance art piece with the real stuff substituted for the chocolate. The stock market had collapsed. One gigantic corporation after the other was disintegrating into accounting scandals and bankruptcy. Overpaid CEOs were being led away in handcuffs. Mass retail stock brokerages were being charged with selling out their small investors. 401Ks and retirement funds were crumbling into dust.

Even his behavior after 9/11 wasn't completely clean--that image of him wandering around the country on airplanes and cowering in Louisiana bunkers while the twin towers burned certainly stuck in my mind, and probably stuck in a lot of other people's too. Nor was the country sold on the idea of starting a war in Iraq. Dubya might want to go hauling off in a stealth bomber to inflict a little regime change. The public wanted him to go talk to the U.N.

In other words, every single sign on the horizon indicated that the Republicans would lose seats in this election, and the Democrats would retain control of the Senate. Instead, the Republicans ended up with control of the Senate, increased control of the House, and control of more than half the state governments besides.

And then, just to add insult to injury, there was Florida. Not only did Dubya's brother win the gubernatorial election in Florida--the one he was supposed to lose because the public was so angry at him because of the way he'd helped his brother "steal" the presidency--the race wasn't even close. Jeb Bush became the first Republican governor of Florida to be elected to a second term since Reconstruction. Katherine Harris--the evil bitch who, as Florida's secretary of state, had cheated Al Gore out of his rightful place on Pennsylvania Avenue--became the Congresswoman from Florida's 13^th District. That race wasn't close, either.

By now, you're either so depressed you'd be cheered up by a marathon run of Kurosawa movies, or ready to break out the champagne and dream about finding a way for Arnold Schwartzenegger to run for President. You've probably also settled on your "explanation" for what happened in the election. The Democrats had no message, you say. They veered too much to the right. They veered too much to the left. They didn't raise enough money. They didn't get their voters to the polls. They couldn't compete with Bush's popularity. We're at war.

If you're a different kind of political junkie, your "explanations" might require more imagination. Republicans won because a secret cabal of American media moguls engineered the campaign coverage so that the American public was fooled into thinking the Republicans were benign. Republicans won because they didn't screw up their murder of Paul Wellstone the way they screwed up their murder of Mel Carnahan. Republicans won because they energized the worst trailer park white trash, too addled on beer, racism and target practice to realize they were being used as tools of Big Money.

The conspiracy theories are a lot more interesting than the Thoughtful Musings stuff--that's why The Matrix made more money than Deconstructing Harry--but if you look at them closely, you'll see something interesting. Both sets of explanations are really the same explanation. So far, the pro-Democratic media pundits and Internet punters have been able to come up with only one explanation as to why people vote Republican: they do it by mistake. It's not the economy. It's not a considered investigation of party policies on health care, social security and the environment. It's not a hard-headed understanding of what's in their best interests. People vote Republican because they don't know what they're doing.

Okay. Democrats don't think everybody who votes Republican does so by mistake. There are some people, rich people, who know what they're doing, because the Republican Party truly represents their interests. This select group includes major religious media players, like Jerry Falwell and James Dobson. No matter how spiritually committed they might appear to be, their real concern is with their own pocketbooks. It makes sense for rich people to vote Republican, because the Republicans are the party of the rich. They're in favor of cutting taxes on billionaires and gutting the public school system to pay for it. That's okay with the billionaires, because billionaires don't send their children to public schools. Billionaires like Republican policy on the environment, too, and on free trade, and on health care. They wouldn't use government health insurance even if it existed, free trade fattens their bank accounts, and they can afford to move away from the environmental messes they make to pricey pristine enclaves like Maui.

No, the trouble, the confusion, the angst, is over those other people who vote Republican, the ones who make it possible for Republicans to win elections. Those people were once, and sometimes still are, called "Reagan Democrats," because back in 1980 they left the Democratic Party to vote in droves for Ronald Reagan--white, working class men and women, "angry white males" and traditionalist housewives, whose underlying motivations were racism, antifeminism, and fear of change. We knew those were their motives because, well, why else would they have elected a man who couldn't think his way out of a paper bag and didn't try to hide his ties to union busting moguls who thought of their employees as modern-dress serfs?

Of course, it's been twenty-two years since that election, and reality has been getting more uncomfortable by the minute. The Reagan Democrats have been joined by millions of middle class men and women who say all the right things when they're taking part in focus groups--more money for public education! do something about health care insurance! we want a cleaner environment! what gay people do in the privacy of their own bedrooms is their own business!--and then go out and vote Republican anyway. Time after time. Election after election. They do this in spite of the fact that, on many issues, they seem to be getting more liberal with every election cycle. The sea change on homosexuality alone has been truly astounding. Back in the supposedly much more liberal 1960s, you could never have gotten a majority of Americans to say that gay men and women shouldn't be discriminated against in housing or employment. Now they say it all the time, and conservative religious groups trying to repeal or defeat anti-discrimination ordinances find themselves routed more often than not. The same is true on a host of other "social" issues: working mothers, divorce, sex outside marriage, abortion. The same is true on economic issues. They support public schools and would like to see public schools get more money. They're suspicious of school vouchers and downright phobic on the subject of privatizing Social Security. They think the government should do something to make sure all Americans have access to health care.

It's enough to drive a sane Democrat into the arms of the conspiracy theorists, and Democrats are by no means all sane. Still, even if we bypass the truly lunatic left wing--you know, the ones who claim that George W. Bush engineered the attacks on 9/11 in order to give himself an excuse to invade Iraq and take over its oil, and that Republican Party hit men downed Paul Wellstone's plane--what we find is a group of people made nearly comatose by the apparent contradiction. If The People support all these things, and vote Republican anyway, then--then--

Then what?

Then they must have been duped by the media. They must not be able to understand their own interests. They must be uneducated, or irrational, or so brainwashed by religious fundamentalism that they do just what their preachers tell them, like robots or sheep being led to slaughter.

They must be something, because they cannot possibly be voting Republican on purpose and with their eyes wide open. It all has to be a mistake.

This is the place where you expect me to announce that the theme of this essay is how the Democrats have to learn to accept that people are voting Republican because they want to, not because they've been duped--and I do want to say that, but I want to throw a little caution in here first.

The problem is that when Democrats have tried to accept the fact that people vote Republican because the Republicans are giving them something the Democrats are not, they've done so by descending into a frenzy of irrationality, ignoring the polls, ignoring the focus groups, ignoring reality itself in order to decide--on the basis of God only knows what--that no matter what people say, what they want is market-based health care insurance, education vouchers that take tax money away from public schools, and an immediate pre-emptive strike on Iraq.

If they can't quite stomach coming out for that sort of thing in public, they try to run on their closeness to the Bush administration, emphasizing just how often they voted in favor of the President's initiates. As a strategy, that one didn't work too well. In all the races I saw it tried in--Jean Carnahan, Max Cleland--the result was a defeat for an incumbent Democrat. You have to ask yourself what else the result could have been. If the most pressing issue at hand is to elect someone who will go to Congress and support the President, it makes a hell of a lot more sense to elect a member of his own party instead of a member of the opposition.

And yet--anybody who looks closely at the election returns can see that moderate Republicans did better than ideologically right wing ones in all but a few states. The public might not have been interested in voting for Democrats in Republican Halloween costumes, but they weren't interested in voting in clones of Strom Thurmond, either. In fact, they seemed to want to have their cake and eat it, too--to get more money for public schools, a strong and government-guaranteed Social Security program, and live and let live policies on everything from gay relationships to women advancing in the workplace, and get it all by voting Republican.

So, the pundits must be right, yes?

The voters must be confused. Or brainwashed. Or just too stupid to know any better. They are voting Republican by mistake.

Unfortunately, no.

What nobody has yet been able to force himself to face is this: since 1968, there has been only one issue in any race for national office, and it hasn't been social security, or the welfare state, or race relations, or union busting, or gays in the military, or corporate greed.

It's been elitism.

I can see you now--all six of you who read these essays--tearing your hair out by the roots. If elections have been about elitism, you say, then the Democrats should have a solid lock not only on the White House, but on both houses of Congress. It's the Republicans who are the party of elitism. They're the party that serves the interests of the sort of people who live in mansions on the North Shore and vacation by renting entire villas in Crete. They're the party that cuts the taxes of fat cats and puts the burden of public funding on the middle class. They're the party of Enron and Worldcom and Imclone. They're--

--winning.

And they're winning, by and large, by presenting themselves to the American public as the voice of ordinary middle class people, fighting the good fight against a Democratic party entirely under the sway of Ivy League college professors, upper middle class professionals, cultural snobs and stridently hysterical movie stars.

What's more, the American public has bought it. Go take a look at the archives of message boards and Usenet newsgroups where people discussed the election when it was over. The theme is echoed again and again and again. Go take a look at any collection of right-wing magazines, from The Weekly Standard to The National Review. The theme is always the same. The Democrats are the party of the elites, and the elites despise you.

David Brooks wrote an excellent article, called "One Nation, Slightly Divisible" and published in the December, 2001 Atlantic Monthly, about just this issue, and especially about just how much of an effect it has on people with no particular ideological commitment at all--but nobody was listening.

Democrats in general and liberal Democrats in particular have a blind spot, called money. They think that an "elite" is necessarily a group of people with lots of money. Therefore, William F. Buckley is part of an "elite," and Al Gore is no more or less part of one than George W. Bush. Sam Walton is part of an "elite," but the head of the social work department at the local community college is just another working stiff, with budget problems like the rest of us. Millionaire Senate candidates are part of an "elite," but the public school teacher who volunteers during pledge drives at the state public TV station is a powerless middle class nonentity.

Exactly how crazy do people have to be to turn all that around, to feel that George W. Bush is more like them--and less of an elitist--than that public school teacher, even though Dubya went to Andover and Yale and had more income from trust funds at the age of eight than the people who identify with him will have in all their working years combined?

You want an answer? Go back to American Politics Journal, except this time look at the article called "The Devil Made Me Do It" by Bryan Zepp Jamieson. It's the one subtitled "How The Religious Right Get Led Around By Their Noses."

Look, I'm nobody's conservative. I favor universal single payer health insurance, a high and equitable level of funding for public education nationwide, very strict gun control, and the right of gays to marry. I think pornography is in the eye of the beholder, and abstinence-only sex education is idiotic.

But--and this is a major-league but--there's a difference between holding those opinions and believing that people who hold the contraries are stupid, duped, brain dead fools who are "led around by their noses" or bamboozled by the media or otherwise just too mentally challenged to know their own minds.

It is the foundational belief of American democracy that ordinary people are the best judges of their own interests, and fully capable of governing themselves. A country full of Intelligent Exceptions and Brainwashed Masses is not democratic, it's feudal, and it's feudal even when the Intelligent Exceptions want to institute all kinds of nice benefits like free access to health care and great public schools with all the money they need to provide every child with a quality education.

What's worse is the simple fact that those Brainwashed Idiots are our base. They're the men and women who actually need universal single payer health insurance and good public schools. If we have a constituency for a wider sphere of public provision, it's among those auto mechanics and registered nurses who now vote Republican at nearly twice the rate of heart surgeons and college professors. What are we doing to ourselves when we respond to their mere existence with distaste and revulsion, and declare, with Bryan Zepp Jamieson, that "They're easy to lead. They wear their religion like a ring through the nose"?

Republicans are good at trashing people, but at least they're careful not to trash the people whose votes they need to get into office. If they send a few zingers at Hillary Rodham Clinton, they know in advance that the people who identify with her were never going to vote Republican anyway. We turn around and fire on our own troops.

Up until 1980, those very same people too many of us now think of as Brainwashed Idiots were the very core of the Democratic Party. When they started to bolt in 1980, we started to manufacture reasons why we didn't need to listen to them, or to respect them. Obviously, we said, they're just racists. They hate and fear women. They hate homosexuals. Whatever explanation we came up with, it was always about how awful they were.

We haven't come up with anything better in the years since, it's just that some of us have gotten more polite about it. What else is "they were fooled by the media" but a less rude way of saying "they're just so much stupider than you and me"?

People will not vote for a political party they believe despises them, and they shouldn't. People cannot be persuaded to change their minds or accept a compromise on issues that are important to them if they perceive the person making the case for gay rights or universal health care to be approaching them as Benighted and Ignorant Dupes. If you were a born-again construction worker with a deep and serious commitment to your church, would you listen to a man who thought that your religion was something you wore "like a ring through the nose"? If you were a nonreligious but conservative registered nurse with grave doubts about government-provided health insurance, would you listen to Jeff Koopersmith after he'd told you that, by voting Republican, you'd just done "what the Germans did in 1930"?

Democrats don't need to abandon their convictions about public schools, or health care, or gay rights, or even the separation of church and state. We do need to learn to respect that born-again construction worker for his religious commitment, instead of treating it as a disease we'll cure him of if we ever get him tied down long enough, or as a distraction that can be finessed by pledging allegiance "under God" on national television. We need to rework our image as the party of the kind of people who are just so...pained...at the spectacle of people eating at McDonald's after coming out of the latest Die Hard movie. We need to accept the fact that people can oppose the things we favor without being stupid, venal, duped or brainwashed. We need to address the concerns behind the positions, and we can't do that if we define those concerns as being irrational and illegitimate on their face.

It's time we all got a grip--just because somebody didn't make it to college or believes that Christ rose from the dead or prefers Big Macs to arugula with balsamic vinegar or can't keep his eyes open during the latest A and E production of a Jane Austen novel doesn't mean he's stupid, or that he can't understand the issues and know what's in his own best interest. It doesn't mean he's being tricked by the media. It doesn't mean he's being brainwashed by fundamentalism. It doesn't mean that we, the Intelligent Exceptions, have to save the country from him. He is the country, at least as much as we are, and he deserves to be treated as a fellow citizen by his fellow citizens.

Because that's what we are, and that's all were are. We're his fellow citizens. We're not his betters.

And now, if you don't mind, I'm going to go play Joe Diffie's "Pick-Up Man" out my kitchen window.

Maybe it'll get rid of the turkeys.

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