Campaign '04: Anger Management 101

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The grass-roots dismay began with the disputed election result in Florida, 2000. The Republicans seemed far more tough-minded in pursuit of the prize, bringing in their heavy guns--the Jeb Bush operation, family consigliere Jim Baker and, ultimately, five Supreme Court justices--to win the presidency. Then the Democrats in Congress made the disastrous assumption that Bush would be amenable to bipartisan compromise. "Bipartisanship is another name for date rape," the fanatic G.O.P. tax cutter Grover Norquist later said, in what could stand as an epitaph for the gullible Congressional Democrats. No less a liberal than Ted Kennedy gave his imprimatur to Bush's No Child Left Behind education bill, only to find that the money he expected to fund the program had been left behind. Democrats also enabled Bush to pass his tax cuts, his Medicare prescription-drug plan, the Patriot Act--and, the most egregious case, the Iraq war resolution. When Howard Dean made his landmark speech to the Democratic National Committee last February, he opened by asking, "What I want to know ... is why in the world the Democratic Party leadership is supporting the President's unilateral attack on Iraq?" The audience--leading Dems from the outback--went wild.

Democratic factions tend to be sedimentary. The oldest Old Democrats are blue-collar economic populists like Dick Gephardt, who also tend to be pro-military, churchgoing and socially conservative. In the 1970s they were supplanted by radical-liberal activists, refugees from the 1960s protest marches who tended to be antiwar, antipoverty, passionate about civil rights and civil liberties and more secular than the lunch-pail crowd. Bill Clinton's New Democrat movement was an information-age reaction against the two previous generations--a free-trade, business-friendly revision of traditional Democratic economics and a socially conservative reaction to the excesses of 1960s liberalism (especially when it came to law enforcement and welfare reform).

The New-News borrow from all three factions, but they most resemble the radical liberals. They are defined by their opposition to the war. They are militant on most civil rights and civil-liberties issues, especially support for gay rights and opposition to the Patriot Act. They are overwhelmingly secular. Indeed, they seem to have replaced religion with cybercommunity; the monthly Meetup is their church. One of the strangest but most telling passages in Dean's recent stump speeches comes when he indulges in a romantic vision of 1968--a terrible year when America seemed to be falling apart but a time he remembers fondly as a moment of misty social communion. That, he says, is the America he seeks to re-create.

Unlike the original radical libs, who clashed with the blue-collar Dems, Dean has cleverly embraced Gephardt's lunch-pail populism. To do so, he had to delete Howard Dean 2.0, who was a militant New Democrat. He abandoned his support for free trade. He now opposes the New Democrat impulse to reform traditional liberal programs like old-age entitlements, public education (Dean is even skeptical about charter schools, a New Dem staple) and affirmative action. Indeed, about the only Clintonian remnant that Dean supports is fiscal conservatism.