The Obama Democrats
This isn't the party of FDR, Truman, JFK or Clinton. They're different.
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It is no accident that the Chicago teachers union would walk off the job, seeking a 29%, two-year wage settlement, days after the Democratic convention in Charlotte, N.C. The Chicago teachers union and the podium speakers in Charlotte are part of the seamless political fabric that has been created by Barack Obama and the modern Democratic Party. They've got goals, and what they want from the people of Chicago or America is compliance.
The speakers in Charlotte fastened the party to a theme: We're all in it together. This claim is false. The modern Democratic Party, the party of Obama, is about permanent division and permanent opposition. You'd never have guessed they were speaking on behalf of an incumbent and historic presidency. One speaker after another ranted that the America system remains fundamentally unfair.
Columnist Dan Henninger on how the Democratic party has become a party whose agenda is avenging hurts, slights, wrongs and the systemic theft of "our democracy." Photos: Associated Press
Despite seven Democratic presidencies since FDR, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Harvard still grieves, "The system is rigged!" Jennifer Granholm, who seems to have summered in Argentina, shouted that for Mitt Romney, "year after year, it was profit before people." The economics of San Antonio Mayor Julián Castro (Stanford, Harvard Law): "It's a choice between a country where the middle class pays more so that millionaires can pay less." Sandra Fluke: "Six months from now, we'll all be living in one [future], or the other. But only one."
How is it that this generation of Democrats, nearly 225 years after the Constitutional Convention, sees 21st century America at the precipice of tooth and claw?
Recall all the talk about Bill Clinton's politically "generous" speech. His speech was an outlier. Set against the furious voices roaring off that stage, Bill Clinton was a figure from the Democrats' crypt.
The Obama Democrats are no longer the party of FDR, Truman, JFK or Clinton. All were combative partisans, but their view of the American system was fundamentally positive. The older Democratic Party grew out of the American labor experience of the early 20th century, which recognized its inevitable ties to the private sector. The systemically alienated Obama party more resembles the ancient anticapitalist syndicalist movements of continental Europe.
In its 2008 primaries, the Democratic Party made a historic pivot. The center-left party of Bill and Hillary Clinton was overthrown by Barack Obama and the party's "progressives," the redesigned logo of the vestigial Democratic left.
The internal tension between the party's liberals and the left blasted to the surface at the Chicago convention in 1968, when the famous Days of Rage street protesters vilified the party of LBJ and Hubert Humphrey. The "San Francisco Democrats" dominated the 1984 convention, but the party still nominated the establishment liberal Walter Mondale.
While liberals owned the party apparatus, the left took control of its ideas. By 1990, liberal Harvard Law School was torn apart by a left-wing theory called critical legal studies, which condemned the American legal and economic system as . . . rigged.
The Harvard proletariat: Elizabeth Warren at the Democratic convention.
What binds Barack Obama, Elizabeth Warren, Sandra Fluke and the rest of the Charlotte roster is the belief, learned early on, that their politics has made them a perpetual band of American outsiders.
It's an irony now that one of their touchstone ideological works has been Richard Hofstadter's "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" (1964), which was about the American political right back then. Today it's the Obama Democrats who insist that something like voter-identification statutes are a racist conspiracy. Barack Obama in his grave acceptance speech fears that "this nation's promise is reserved for the few." And so out on the plains, the Obama Democrats will assemble a voter army from that vast proletariat, the U.S. middle class, to pull down "the wealthiest."
This is a party whose agenda is avenging slights, wrongs and the systemic theft of "our democracy." For all this injustice, someone must be made to pay. How far all this is from the America called for in Lincoln's first inaugural: "We must not be enemies."
The Obama administration's battle with the Catholic Church over contraceptive services is symbolic and important. The tradition of religious independence, which even liberal Catholics thought legitimate, has no standing with the do-the-right-thing politics of the Democratic left. Kathleen Sebelius to American Catholics: Get out of our way.
An Obama victory wouldn't be just a defeat of the GOP. It would be a defeat of the post-World War II Democratic Party. And they know it. The progressive left has wanted to push Democratic liberalism over the cliff for decades. This is their best shot to get it done.
Mitt Romney—whose own political conversation is remarkably bereft of history—ought to be explaining to Democrats-turned-independent how far Mr. Obama has moved their party from its traditions. FDR's Social Security and LBJ's Medicare asked all to buy in to supporting it. ObamaCare doesn't; Mr. Obama revels in explaining how "they" will pay for "you." Left unanswered, demagoguery can win elections. And take a generation to undo.
Write to henninger@wsj.com
A version of this article appeared September 13, 2012, on page A13 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Obama Democrats.
