Why the Democrats Are Blue: Secular Liberalism and the Decline of the People's Party

by Mark Stricherz

Why the Democrats are Blue argues that secular, educated elites, using a commission created at the 1968 convention in Chicago and later chaired by Senator George McGovern, took the Democratic Party away from working class and religious Democrats. This quiet revolution helps explain why six of the last nine Democratic presidential candidates have lost.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: B001L85UZ0
• ISBN13: 9781594032059
• Release Date: October 2007
• Publisher: Encounter Books
• Length: 350 Pages
• Weight: 1.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.4" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

de Tocqueville Confirmed?--No He Missed This One

In Democracy in America, at one point in his observations of 1830's, almost-exclusively rural America, de Tocqueville turns to nascent industrialization and remarks that if America becomes industrialized, then its democracy will degenerate into political affiliations based on purely economic interests. American Democracy will fail since America's political discourse will be devoid of any principled discussion of the common good and how to lead her citizens to virtue and human flourishing. One of the most vexing political questions of recent decades has been why do the political parties no longer seem to align themselves with economic interests or even moral views? Mr. Strickerz goes far in providing a great piece of this puzzle, a piece of the puzzle that all men of good will must heed. The devil is in the details and Strickerz provides us with a long overdue look at the details of the party's presidential nominating system. It is a system without any pretense of representing a constituency or of engaging in discourse on how best to pursue the common good or even of discourse on what is a proper understanding of the common good. Rather the 1968 McGovern Commission, to the great consternation of its more principled members, implemented a system with one goal--to nominate secular elites and to keep them in power. Although the immediate goal was to nominate an anti-Vietnam War candidate, the change in rules established a syste designed to ignore the views of the party's traditional constituency and to advance an ideology, an ideology foreign to most Americans. Stricherz account of how this was done--soft quotas, primary nominating system, etc.--should be essential knowledge for anyone concerned with our political process, anyone concerned with fosterning our democracy. With such knowledge, such men of good will will be in a better position to toppel the alien elites--Clintons, Obama, Dean and company--at the controls of the party. Although de Tocqueville's observations seemed largely true in the 1930's and 40's, they are not true now (nor could such a development have been predicted). However, his larger pessimism about maintaining a principled political discourse has proven well-founded.

Interesting thesis, not sure it's correct however

This is an interesting thesis: that the Democrats are now the party of the secularists, having identified themselves with issues that run directly against traditional religious beliefs. The secularists--a motley group of wealthy limousine liberals who advocate partial birth abortion and gay marriage and stamping out Christmas--are now firmly in charge of the Democratic party. It is amazing to realize, as Stricherz details, that the ethnic Catholics and Southern evangelists were once the main props of the Democratic party. And it is true that time and again, polls show that those who attend church once a week will not vote Democratic. They appear firmly in the Republican camp. This year, the issues may well center around the housing market, oil prices, and war. But what about the trends through the next decades? Is Stricherz right that the Democratic party, having chosen to identify itself with abortion and gay rights, turned away too many voters? I don't know. I do believe Stricherz does not consider the vast number of voters who now truly need the party of secularists: single women, especially single mothers. With an illegitimacy rate of about 40% single mothers rely on the government for handouts, and to heck with moral issues. Those women may prove to be a larger group than those who hold religious beliefs.

Watch the Primaries with This in Mind

Will the Democrats roar through a triumphant election this year and take back the White House? Or will they blow it once again because they can't regain enough of the Catholic and blue-collar voters they have lost in recent decades? It's too early to tell, but those who wonder why the Dems have such problems with major parts of their old coalition should read Why Democrats Are Blue. And Democrats who want their party to moderate or abandon its support of abortion should read the book to find why the party decided to support abortion in the first place. Mark Stricherz, like many analysts, traces the take-over of the party by "secular liberals" to the McGovern Commission that changed party rules in 1969-70. But where others have said this, Stricherz has done serious research in manuscript collections and elsewhere to prove it. He makes a compelling case. The late Sen. Eugene McCarthy's antiwar presidential campaign against President Lyndon Johnson in 1968 made major gains against the Democratic Party establishment. But McCarthy and his volunteers were stymied by the automatic awarding of convention seats to pro-Johnson party leaders, winner-take-all rules in key primary states, and other practices that stacked the deck against them. (I worked in the '68 McCarthy campaign and gave Mark Stricherz, a fellow journalist, some information for his book from the McCarthy perspective. I don't agree, though, with all of his analysis.) After President Johnson withdrew from the `68 campaign, Vice President Hubert Humphrey stepped in and picked up the Johnson delegates and many others. He won the Democratic presidential nomination even though he hadn't won any primaries. But Humphrey's loss to Republican Richard Nixon in November chastened the Democratic leadership enough that they were willing to reform the rules. They appointed then-Sen. George McGovern (D-S.D.) to head a reform commission to rewrite the rules. But Stricherz shows that commission members did not represent the party as a whole. In particular, few were Catholics or labor leaders. The AFL-CIO made the incredible error of virtually ignoring the commission's work, apparently having no idea how much it would influence presidential races of the future. Many commission reforms were fair and much-needed. But influential commission members and staff wanted to go beyond that point. They wanted special guarantees for representation of young people, racial minorities, and women among convention delegates--in part, Stricherz says, to guarantee that the party's 1972 presidential candidate would be antiwar. This led to a virtual quota system, although those who championed it didn't want to use the word "quota." (Stricherz calls the system one of "soft quotas" or "informal quotas.") When Sen. McGovern ran for president in 1972, he understood the new rules, as did key McGovern supporters who had worked with or on his commission. The antiwar McGovern won the Democratic nomination that year. Stricherz

great book!

Stricherz does a great job of telling it like it was/is. This is a fantastic read and a must buy for anyone interested learning how politics has changed over the years in our country. Can't say enough good things about this one. Laura Ingram should bring this guy on!

The Democratic Party has Been Captured by the Leftist "Elites"

Mark Stricherz convincingly argues that the leftist "elites" took over the Democratic Party during George McGovern's disastrous 1972 campaign for the presidency. These wealthy anti-traditional values individuals were contemptuous of the lesser-credentialed blue collar Democrats. They also increased the presence of self-hating Americanism and dishonest pacifism into the national body politic. At the most, they were willing to throw a few bones to the hoi polloi. When push came to shove, however, issues like abortion were to dominate the agenda. The situation has only worsened considerably since that time. More recent Democrat politicians like Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton essentially learned how to best con the rubes. They pretended to be more conservative than they actually are. The author cites the difficulty of pro-life Pennsylvania Governor Bob Casey of being treated respectfully by the Democratic Party establishment. Sadly, his son was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2006---and has proven to be loyal to the pro-abortionists. In other words, it seems virtually impossible to remain a present day Democrat and still remain loyal to one's Judeo-Christian cultural values. Reading Stricherz's riveting book will compel you to concede that the less than perfect Republicans are the only game in town. Minimally everyone of its presidential candidates promise to select only strict constructionist judges to the U.S. Supreme Court. There is another work that mandates your attention. It is James Piereson's Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism. This event also had much to do with pushing the Democratic Party leftwards.