First, let’s state for the record that we may be simply practicing Mickey Kaus’s first law of journalism: generalize wildly from personal experience. We feel there is something in the air. We have read and heard and watched on TV the MSM, Democrat-Left playbook for years, and we have spent the last three years writing about it — and we’re tired, so very tired, of it. The tedious business with Alito is only the latest example. So we are extrapolating that fatigue and projecting it onto all of you.

But don’t you feel it too — the exhaustion, the now mindless oppositionism? Dots unconnected; that’s a breach. Connect the dots and you’re impeached. There was Enron and al Qa Qaa, Cindy Sheehan and Joe Wilson, MoveOn warnings and global warming, NSA and CIA, phone call scanning and no war planning, museums flattened and oil profits fattened, Club Ghraib and Abu Gitmo, Roe v. Wade versus Roadside Bomb, planted military questions and Jordan’s targeting suggestions, 2000 of us and 100K of them, black churches burning and old people starving, Gore votes stolen and Ohio machines hidden, Swift Boats lying and Rather memos trying, anti-Hispanic and minorities must panic, no end to torture and no beginning to cloture, Katrina marauders and dike-blowing orders, Abramoff and DeLay ripoff, Murtha and Pelosi and Dean and Defeat, Durbin and Shumer and Ted and Retreat, MTV and WMD, vote or die and lie, lie, lie. There were Ashcroft and Bolton, Cheney molten, Rummy verboten. Today it’s Alito, the civil rights bandito. Tomorrow it’ll be something else.

Not only was everything the work of the stupidest, evilest genius ever, but every act of his — every thought, word, and deed — was worse than the last, was the end of the Republic, and would hunt down and kill every woman and minority, even worse than they were killed by the last evil plot of Chimpy. And when it didn’t happen, the wash-rinse-spin cycle was repeated for the next event or decision.

Here’s the crux of the matter: the relentless and mindless attack strategy serves to obscure real weak points of the GOP in the cloud of constant criticism, and it has prevented the Democrats from responding to the real “crime” of the GOP. The Republican crime is this, and it is specifically a crime of Karl Rove and George Bush: they have been plotting and executing the extermination of the Democratic Party. The GOP strategy has been clear and on display: keep the base, including the religious and the tax-cutters, fully committed; try to forge a broad majority on defense issues; attempt to use wedge issues to good effect, like the 2002 Iraq vote or remaking the judiciary in line with the large conservative plurality in the country; steal or inoculate against Democrat issues like Social Security, Medicare and Education; and collect just enough votes from minorities and the elderly to render impotent the New Deal / Great Society coalition. The Bush strategy is not some stealth deal to rip off the polity for temporary gain; it is rather the first majoritarian strategy that the GOP has had since McKinley.

The best Democrat strategy would be to appear: strong on defense, pro-religion, pro-growth, and always be for the little guy, each a 60% issue, not the 40% issues they have chosen. (Many issues could be framed costlessly in easy symbols: it would cost Democrats almost nothing to be pro-creche and pro-Commandments; Bill Clinton understood the uses of symbolism, to the dismay of Ricky Ray Rector.) But, tragically, that appears no longer possible for the Democratic Party, which is now the party of the intelligentsia and the super-rich. When your only winning educational demographics are high school dropouts and PhD’s, that should tell you something. When you have become the Party in which 5 people give $78 million and can thereby define a major portion of your message and media strategy, you risk being all spokes and no hub. The spokes have come to define the Democrat Party, not by a positive program, but by opposition to Republican policies, whether in defense, taxes, military affairs, religion, abortion, etc.

Oppositionism has come to define the Democratic Party. Whatever Republicans and Bush are for, they are against. And the saddest truth for Democrats, no matter what elections they manage to win, is this: oppositionism is one hallmark of a minority party.

UPDATE

No matter how low you sink, you can still go lower in the modern Left. Here’s a university professor proving it, be comparing Tookie Williams to Martin Luther King. (HT: Powerline)

UPDATE II

One open and important question is how powerful the MSM remain today in red-trending America. The New Media have been on the rise for well over a decade now, and have helped fuel the shift to the GOP. What are the limits to their market penetration, particularly now, since the MSM have shed their veneer of neutrality in favor of a more overt partisan stance on behalf of the Democratic Party? We just don’t know yet, though this is one of the serious issues in play for 2006 and 2008. Thomas Lifson at The American Thinker has some interesting reflections on matters related to these questions.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 10th, 2006 at 8:07 am and is filed under Democrats, General, Left of Left, MSM, Red Shift, Religion, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.