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Now What?
By P. Edward Haley

P. Edward Haley is W. M. Keck Foundation Professor of International Strategic Studies and Interim Director of the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights.

Date Issued: 11/03/2004

Was it personality?

The below-the-radar registration drives everyone was talking about?

The war in Iraq? Bombs exploded in Baghdad nearly every day for the past 18 months, killing thousands of Iraqis and hundreds of Americans. That had to count for something.

The Supreme Court? The hospitalization of Chief Justice Rehnquist a week before the election underlined the likelihood of retirements during the next administration and the vulnerability of Roe v. Wade.

Terrorism? The president had a good two days right after his bad two days right after 9/11. And Afghanistan. That was what, three years ago?

The environment? The undecideds? The economy, stupid?

We've heard all there is to hear about such things, or at least I've heard all I want to hear.

On the morning after a campaign so shallow that it shriveled the brain of anyone who came within 6,000 miles of it, I'd rather invite you to join me in thinking about the United States, the rest of the world, and the future of the Democratic Party.

About the U.S. and the world: After the election, the new president will be free to deal with one undeniable fact:

For the first time since Jimmy Carter, the United States finds itself weaker and more isolated internationally at the beginning of a new presidential term than it was four years earlier.

George Bush can rely on the options that are always available to a country whose power is as great as that of the United States, even at times of serious loss and duress. And he can count on the resilience of the American people, something that Ronald Reagan understood more surely, perhaps, than any president since Franklin Roosevelt.

Even so, prudence requires bringing the post-war occupation of Iraq to a successful conclusion, restoring the country's reputation, and repairing its alliances.

About the Democratic Party: In one of history's weirdest twists, Will Rogers' "no organized party," this once-upon-a-time party of the "left," this mythical monster of Republican propaganda crammed with liberals, Blacks, Jews, pointy-head academics, bleeding hearts, tree-huggers, welfare queens, big government, big labor, Hispanics, feminists, gays and lesbians—has become something else.

To commentators such as Paul Krugman, today's Democrats are actually conservatives, fighting to preserve the watershed achievements of Franklin Roosevelt and his disciples, Harry S Truman and Lyndon Johnson. They're losing the battles and the war, Paul. Tell the Democratic Leadership Council, will you? Their latest fancy is to ask people to download articles on Palm Pilots. Out of touch doesn't begin to cover it.

To followers of Bill Clinton such as Al Gore and John Kerry, the Democratic Party is all things to all people—more government involvement in our lives and greater opportunities for business to become more efficient. All it takes is a bit of triangulation, staying to the left of the conservatives and the right of the liberals. That kind of thinking produced Clinton's welfare reform which works, but only if the economy is flying along 1990s style, which happens once every fifty years or so.

Conservatives are steadily pulling the United States farther and farther to the right. If you triangulate on them you're going to end up farther and farther to the right yourself. Clinton's decision to stay grafted to the left side of a rightward lunging Republican Party ripped the moral and political guts out of the Democratic Party and turned its brains into Tootsie Rolls.

Now that John Kerry has lost, his party's greatest challenge will be to re-discover the political and economic beliefs that defined the Democratic Party of Franklin Roosevelt: unregulated markets are a moral and economic disaster, and democracy's flaw is its tendency to prefer what is popular over what is right: "The test of our progress," Roosevelt said, "is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little."

The 2004 election occurred 75 years after the Great Depression. Its agonies and the political and economic mayhem that flowed from them are distant memories. Republicans count on the vagaries of memory as they seek to end the reforms the Great Depression institutionalized and the conservative Democratic Party defends.

If he is to make his defeat meaningful, John Kerry and his successors must find new ways to explain the centrality of reform to the American people or this market democracy will cease to be a decent place to live and work and continue to lose its way in the world.