Wednesday, December 20, 2006

'The Real America,' Redefined

Courtesy of the Daily Kos, the Washington Post's liberal guy, E.J. Dionne, declares victory:

It wasn't all that long ago that Democrats and liberals were said to be out of touch with "the real America," which was defined as encompassing the states that voted for President Bush in 2004, including the entire South. Democrats seemed to accept this definition of reality, and they struggled -- often looking ridiculous in the process -- to become fluent in NASCAR talk and to discuss religion with the inflections of a white Southern evangelicalism foreign to so many of them.

Now the conventional wisdom sees Republicans in danger of becoming merely a Southern regional party. Isn't it amazing how quickly the supposedly "real America" was transformed into a besieged conservative enclave out of touch with the rest of the country? Now religious moderates and liberals are speaking in their own tongues, and the free-thinking, down-to-earth citizens in the Rocky Mountain states are, in large numbers, fed up with right-wing ideology.


Click here for the rest.

Personally, I think it's a tad bit early to declare victory for liberalism, especially because what now passes for liberal is often just a rehashing of old-school conservatism, and, consequently, what passes for conservative these days is simply traditional right-wing extremism. Further, if liberalism is now victorious, it's only due to happenstance; that is, conservatives did it to themselves. Contrast that with the triumph of the conservatives back in 1994: they were organized and on a mission; the Democrats still haven't quite figured out what hit them. Today's liberal "triumph" has very little to do with the Democrats as a party and more to do with regional and internet activists pushing them to take advantage of a narrow window of opportunity. In other words, the Dems have stumbled into power.

Like I said, it's waaay too soon to call the US a liberal nation.

But I think it is fair to say that America has been recently revealed as not conservative. I know, I know, the right wing for years has been screaming that conservatism is mainstream and all that but they were as wrong as Dionne is in proclaiming the nation to be liberal. My take lately is that Americans are pragmatists: they want the state to function effeciently; they want social services but believe people should work for a living; they want security but not global dominance. For some fifteen years or so the American people have chosen Republicans, believing that they could achieve these goals better than the Democrats, who had, admittedly, become soft and bloated after decades of power.

But just because we now know that the Republicans don't have the answers doesn't mean that everybody thinks the Democrats do. For now they're the only other store on the block, so they're necessarily going to get our business. If I were a betting man, I'd say that there's a fifty-fifty chance that the Republicans are able to reinvent their image enough to get some wins by November '08. I mean, I hope not, but the Democrats really do have some pompous morons running the show, and they really look like easy pickin's in the long term.

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