Including voters out: the Dems do it better than Buchanan.

The conventional judgment about Pat Buchanan's speech at the 1992 Republican National Convention goes something like this: It was angry, negative, divisive and full of hate-mongering; it gave the GOP a terrible image of intolerance; and it may well have cost George Bush the election.

That year's Democratic Convention, by contrast, was a love feast. It abounded in prochoice and progay placards, which drove home the point that the United States is a tolerant and freedom-loving country. You do your thing, I'll do mine, we'll tolerate one another, and we'll live happily ever after. Three cheers for Bill Clinton and the spirit of upper-middle-class liberalism!

And if there happen to be any dissenters at the convention (like Bob Casey, that pain-in-the-ass governor of Pennsylvania), we'll simply ignore them; better still, we'll silence them. We'll make sure that Casey doesn't get a chance to address the convention. And who cares if he's the governor of the fifth largest state, a career politician with impeccable Democratic credentials. We're tolerant people. But there are some things even the most tolerant will not tolerate. Casey is one of these things, Buchanan another. Pity those poor Republicans in Houston. If they had silenced Buchanan the way we silenced Casey, Bush might have had a chance.

I remember at the time finding it odd that the mainstream press generally agreed that the Democratic Convention--which silenced all dissenters--was a model of tolerance while the Republican Convention--which permitted speeches not only from Buchanan but also from the prochoice governor of Massachusetts--was a model of intolerance. The odd thing about this was not that the press would collectively misrepresent matters; they do that commonly. What was odd was that they would misrepresent events we had all seen with our own eyes. Weren't they afraid the masses might notice they were being lied to?

At the time I wrote an article that appeared in Commonweal (August 14, 1992)--and in a shortened version on the op-ed page of the New York Times (August 10, 1992)--in which I said that the treatment given to Casey at the convention was a way of saying to all prolife Democrats, "Get out! We don't want you in the party!"

I added that this was not simply a philosophical division on the merits of abortion. It was a class division as well. The social base of the prochoice movement is the upper-middle class. Believers in the prochoice religion are privileged people: good educations, good jobs, good incomes, good homes, good cars, good dogs, good boutiques in the neighborhood, good everything. They have their reward. Prolife people, by contrast, are blue collar and lower-middle class, the great unwashed and semiwashed. Viewed from the point of view of the typical prochoice snob, they are unspeakably vulgar. Their income level and class culture are deplorable enough, but their antichoice position puts them absolutely beyond the pale.

No wonder the choice-dominated Democratic party said to these people, "Get out! We don't want you!" Unfortunately for the Democrats, these vulgar masses, these "middle Americans," have traditionally supplied the bulk of Democratic votes. To throw them out of the party is tantamount to partisan self-destruction, an act of what may be called "particide." Yet since many liberal Democrats are great believers in the right to suicide (another "choice" issue), I suppose it is fitting that they should try their favorite remedy on their own party.

And now look at what has happened. Look at the masses accepting the invitation to leave. Look at them stream out of the Democratic party. And where are they going? Well, for the time being at least, to Pat Buchanan.

For a generation these people have been treated like dirt by the leadership of the party. Their values have been insulted, their economic interests ignored. For Americans below the upper-middle class, the national quality of life has deteriorated badly in the last thirty years. Their incomes have stagnated or fallen; their jobs have become insecure; their marriages have failed; their children have grown up in a world rife with violence, drugs, premature sex, out-of-wedlock births, and poor public schools. And what remedies are proposed for America's ills by the moral idiots of privileged-class liberalism? Such pertinent solutions as taxpayer-funded abortions, condoms in schools, gay marriage, and euthanasia. Who can blame the plebeians for seceding from a Democratic party that welcomes such ideologues into its leadership ranks?

Buchanan has found the perfect formula for leading them out of the party. (It isn't, however, a formula for leading them into the GOP, though it may be a formula for creating a new party.) When he speaks about a "culture war" or "religious war" he makes himself attractive to these unhappy Democrats. And when he denounces Wall Street and the transnational corporations, he makes himself more attractive still, for at the bottom of the old-fashioned Democratic soul is a distrust of the rich. Ironically, the lifelong Republican Buchanan, probably because of his Irish-catholic background, understands that Democratic soul far better than privileged Democratic liberals do.

Cromwell said to the Rump Parliament: "You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!" Too bad the Democrats don't say this to the progay, proabortion, prosuicide, prosecularism element of the party. Anyway, it's probably too late now.

I don't know what Pat Buchanan's future might be, but the future of the Democratic party looks exceedingly bleak. Alas, it was once a great party, and there were those of us who loved it.