If we didn't know it already, one critical fact was confirmed by the recent Pew Research Center survey of Howard Dean's 2004 campaign activists: There is a cultural
divide in America. What's troubling is that it's inside the Democratic Party.
The Pew study, while focused on 11,500 Dean supporters, nonetheless opened a revealing window on the thinking of liberal activists in the Democratic Party as a whole. One thing it told us is that the party's most active wing lives in a rarified universe of what Pew calls "a different kind of Democrat."
Listen to the numbers: Among these liberal faithful, only 1 percent are black compared to 22 percent in the rest of the party. Of those polled, 79 percent have college educations; in the Democratic Party, only 25 percent have college degrees. In this activist community, 29 percent have annual family incomes above $100,000; that's nearly three times the percentage among Democrats as a whole. Fully 38 percent of the activists say they have no connection to organized religion, and don't go to church. In the Democratic Party, that figure is only 10 percent.
I know these people. These are my people. I am, for all cultural and demographic purposes, one of them: white, well-educated, secular, a heavy news consumer, regular
NPR listener, reader of political magazines, constantly online -- the list goes on and on. The Pew poll is, in fact, a perfect description of the liberal ghetto, a kind of prosperous
intellectual's nirvana concentrated on the bluest flecks of the political map, in places like Madison and Chapel Hill (where I grew up) and Chevy Chase (where I live now).
In a former life, I was one of these people politically, too. For decades, I cast wistful looks at Europe, where the educated elites have been able, seemingly forever, to run
things pretty much to their liking. (The death penalty, for example, is outlawed in France because the intelligentsia hates it; polls show that the general public favors it.) Not
so in America, and that's the challenge of life in the liberal ghetto.
By living to a large extent in a world of academic isolation and activist enclaves (41 percent have post-graduate degrees), the liberal wing is often alienated from many
traditional Democratic constituencies -- even the minorities that liberals have always claimed to work so hard for. It's painfully ironic for an old civil rights liberal like me
to note that the presence of more blacks in the Pew sample would have made it much more conservative, especially on issues like gay rights and church attendance.
Yet if you've tasted the successes of, say, the Voting Rights Act and the near-impeachment of Richard Nixon, when the liberal view was the winning view, it's easy to keep confusing your beliefs with the popular will. From there it's a short step to the conceit -- which I harbored for many years -- that liberal views on everything from gun control to same-sex unions to suburban sprawl should be the majority view of the Democratic Party, if not of the nation. If you say it long and hard enough, they'll finally get it.
That's wrong. Liberals today are a minority party within a multiparty system known as the Democratic Party. In any other country, they would run separately, and then
negotiate a coalition government afterward. In America, we need to negotiate our coalitions before the general election. This requires a readiness to compromise that, alas, is not always a hallmark of dedicated activism.
Indeed, because of the good old days, the liberal wing's instinct is to try to take over the party -- to force its agenda on the other parts of the Democratic coalition -- as we were able to do in the civil rights era. We did it again in 1972, nominating a presidential candidate who was the clear choice of liberal activists -- and was rejected by voters in 49 states in the general election.
Rather than seek better gun safety laws, liberals seek total gun control. Rather than fairness and restraint in the death penalty, the liberal instinct is to swim totally against the popular tide by trying to ban it. Rather than enthusiastically embrace a strong federal role in school accountability, liberals have let Bush hatred reflexively force them to take the states' rights side of the most important civil rights battle of our time. Imagine that!
If liberals consider themselves progressives, they must take seriously the progress part of the word -- as in change. That means sometimes releasing old dogmas and embracing new ones.
Heaven knows we need our activists, and God bless 'em. Let's just get them engaged in the larger center-left undertaking so Democrats can win elections, not just arguments. The Pew survey strikes a sobering note, and we should take it as a wake-up call.
