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The Democrats have every reason to look forward confidently to November's off-year elections. The polls look good, electoral history is overwhelmingly on their side, and their opponents have succumbed to the internal grumbling and murmurs of disaffection to which majority parties in trouble are prone. The Iraq war, long a burden to the Bush administration, shows signs of becoming its albatross. More generally, the public seems caught up in a widespread if inchoate discontent, expressed in the frequently reported view that the country is headed in the “wrong direction.” This is a mood that those in power have reason to fear.

Of course, Democrats have difficulties of their own. Attempts to exploit Republican weakness have been hobbled by internal divisions among foreign-policy doves, ultra-doves, and (the few) semi-hawks—and, more fundamentally, between partisans and ideologues. The former simply want to win at the polls and tend to concentrate on what winning will take; the latter, for whom politics is a venture in virtue, disdain any compromise of principle as a mark of shame.

There are, however, some Democrats who combine an interest in principle with an almost desperate desire to help the party regain the congressional power that has long eluded it. One of them is Peter Beinart, the former editor and now the editor-at-large of the New Republic. Beinart's recent book, The Good Fight: Why Liberals—and Only Liberals—Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again, ¹ argues for a principled Democratic politics that, in his view, will also commend itself to majority opinion. In making this argument, Beinart goes against much of what now passes for liberal orthodoxy—a point that in itself speaks volumes about the present disposition of forces within the Democratic party.

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To make sense of this controversy, a bit of history is in order. Beinart begins by noting that the liberal persuasion he favors is currently “so reviled that its adherents dare not speak its name.” When pressed, people of the Left tend to call themselves “progressive,” before going on to explain that “they don't really like labels.” In thus declining to identify themselves as liberals, he explains, they “cast off decades of disappointment and failure.”

Such embarrassment was not always the case. When, in the late 1930's, Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed to redefine the Democrat-Republican divide as one between liberals and conservatives, he clearly assumed that the choice of terms would favor his own party. And he was right. In the 1950's, it was still considered an audacious act for Dwight Eisenhower to urge an assembly of Republicans not to be ashamed of the term “conservative.” Today, however, things are different. Conservatives take pride in their self-description, while liberals maneuver to avoid theirs.

As Beinart balefully recounts, liberalism fell apart politically in the 1960's, having become identified with Great Society programs mired in overreaching ambition and racial antipathy, and with a war in Vietnam that tore the nation apart. It has never fully recovered either its fortunes or its good name. The Democrats have suffered accordingly, so much so that many Americans who grew up with a sense of the party as the nation's natural majority still find it difficult to comprehend the degree to which things have been turned around, or how long ago. Had Richard Nixon not handed Democrats the political gift of Watergate in the early 1970's, the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress would likely have occurred much earlier. Democrats have lost seven of the last ten presidential elections. Their standings in the House of Representatives are the worst since the days of Harry Truman, and in the Senate since the presidency of Herbert Hoover.

It was largely Ronald Reagan who in the 1980's managed the remarkable feat of rewriting the terms of our national political debate. The New Deal dichotomy—compassionate liberals pitted against heartless conservatives—was transformed by him into a struggle between, on the one side, statist ideologues and economic sentimentalists and, on the other, Americans sensibly attuned to market realities and committed to an ethos of personal responsibility. Although Democrats still poll better than Republicans on issues of economic security, even in this area they have increasingly had to play by conservative ground rules. It was thanks to conservative pressure that Bill Clinton was brought to declare, memorably if not quite accurately, that the era of big government was over. The dramatic reduction in dependency brought about by Clinton's most notable domestic achievement, the Welfare Reform Act of 1996, has easily overshadowed the defections of those on the Left for whom the New Deal paradigm still defines political reality.

Democrats have also suffered from the perception that they are on the wrong side of a whole range of social issues: crime (the death penalty in particular), gun control, late-term abortion, affirmative action, school prayer (and the overall role of religion in public life), same-sex marriage. On at least the first two of these, and possibly the third, they have largely given up the struggle. The latter three they mostly prefer not to talk about, or they re-describe them as “wedge issues” that should not be allowed into public discourse. More ambiguous is the political resonance of other social issues—abortion in general, assisted suicide, stem-cell research—but no serious analyst doubts that in general the culture wars, as they have come to be called, work against the Democrats.

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Granted, it would be a mistake to exaggerate the depth of the turnaround. Even leaving aside foreign policy and national security, where at least until now Republicans have enjoyed a decided advantage, the contest at the polls can be close-run. Although Republicans generally win national elections, they win, as George W. Bush can testify, by narrow margins. Bush aside, moreover, Republicans have reason to be grateful that the 22nd Amendment precluded the otherwise entirely plausible prospect of a Bill Clinton now entering the late phases of his fourth term. The same holds true for Congress, where consistently tight margins offer no grounds for conservative complacency. America is today a center-Right society, but it would not take a political earthquake to nudge it back to the center-Left.

Still, even such a center-Left government would be constituted on essentially negative grounds. Clinton's success, based first of all on his extraordinary personal appeal, also depended on a skillful politics of triangulation. Clinton presented himself as a commonsense progressive whose policies were aimed primarily not at those requiring semi-permanent custodial care but at those who, while “working hard and playing by the rules,” needed a temporary helping hand. He made the Left viable again by redefining it modestly rightward.

Thus the liberal dilemma. Liberal and left-wing Democrats supported Clinton, but they did so because he was a winner (and also because, due to acts of astonishing personal recklessness in the later stages of his presidency, he needed to be defended against conservatives determined to bring him down). But Clintonism was not and is not where their hearts are. Their problem is that they cannot expect to make a comeback if they allow themselves to say what they really think. This leads to frustration, which leads in turn to curious forms of rhetorical excess.

I say “curious” because, in historical terms, actual disagreements between liberals and conservatives are less pronounced today than they have been for most of our post-1960's past. George Bush, as Republican Presidents go, is not all that conservative, while congressional Democrats, for their part, are less likely to flirt with outright radicalism, foreign or domestic, than was the case with their counterparts during the Reagan years. Yet it often seems that mutual animosity between the parties—and between liberals and conservatives in general—has never been more strenuous.

The reasons for this are various. Most obviously, the defection of the South to the GOP has made both parties more ideologically monolithic, thus weakening instincts of accommodation and compromise. This partisan hardening has rippled through the politically informed electorate, and has been reinforced by the echo-chamber effects of proliferating talk radio, cable TV, and Internet sites that regularly practice politics as a blood sport. On the Democratic side, the effects have been intensified by the bitterly controverted presidential election of 2000 and the disappointing vote four years later. Compounded as it is by the drift toward partisan polarization, the agony of those defeats has issued in the seemingly irresistible impulse to demonize not only George Bush but also those within Democratic ranks who are seen to be insufficiently invested in the cause. The internecine assault on Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman, primarily on account of his support of administration policy in Iraq, is a salient case in point.

There is yet another element at play in the rhetorical vehemence displayed by many liberal Democrats. Recent election results notwithstanding, liberalism retains a prestige status in American society and culture. Our educational, media, and intellectual elites are mostly liberal elites, and it puzzles and galls them that their otherwise secure control of leading American institutions no longer extends to the political arena as well. Instead, the reins of power have slipped into the hands of those lacking either the traditions, the competence, or the wisdom to manage the country's affairs. Conservative rule, in this reading, is illegitimate rule by definition, and all the more infuriating for that.

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