Democrats vs the people

USC professor of history Kevin Starr knows what's wrong with the Democratic Party:

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.



The Democratic Party, in short, made a powerful alliance with the culture of Ordinary America, including its religious values. True, the party's links to segregationist Dixiecrats caused problems — big problems. But it was two Southerners — Martin Luther King Jr. and Lyndon B. Johnson — who struck the most significant hammer blows against the injustice of that dependency.

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.

The smarter-than-thous are never going to buy it. That's why Dean is chairman of the DNC.