The eminent California historian Kevin Starr has an eloquent lament for the Democratic party, his party, in today’s Los Angeles Times.
His title, “My Party Is Leaving the Faithful Behind,” says it all, or rather almost all.
Those of us who label ourselves Democrats have stood for economic fairness since the New Deal, but in the last three decades our once-majority party has embraced a take-no-prisoners cultural agenda that now threatens to relegate Democrats to permanent minority status. The hostile takeover driving this drift to irrelevance is especially painful to cultural moderates, who remember that social democracy was born of traditional values….
Today’s Democratic Party leaders have apparently forgotten, however, that the social programs that came of age during the New Deal had their origins in Judeo-Christian tradition, even more than in secular humanism. Indeed, it might be argued that popes were as influential as politicians in shaping policy….
But now the Democratic Party elite — the activists, the pundits, the big-bucks donors — have succeeded in pitting social democracy against the very values (one is tempted to say the very people) that gave rise to social democracy in the first place….
As a former Democrat myself, I think this potentially future former Democrat issues a warning that his party would do well to heed. The rub comes, of course, in identifying which particular values to heed. Most Democrats have no trouble swearing unbroken fealty to “values,” or even “traditional values.” Even Howard Dean believes in “values,” “for goodness sake.” (“For goodness sake” is in quotes because Starr uses that expression throughout his piece.)
The problem is that for many (but not all) disaffected Democrats, abortion violates their values, but Democrats can hardly reverse their position on that. For many others (but not all), same sex marriage violates their values, but Democrats as a party would have trouble coming out against it. For still others, like me, the complaint is not that Democrats have turned their backs on “values,” “cultural values,” or “traditional values,” but on the formerly fundamental American value that every person has a right to be treated “without regard” to race, religion, or national origin.
I would dearly love to see Democrats abandon their abandonment of that one.
