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It's tough to have a Goldwater moment when you're so close |
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By Josh Marshall
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Posted: 11/04/04 12:00 AM [ET] |
Given the profound polarization in the country today and the stakes in Tuesday’s election, one side — roughly half the country — was going to wake up yesterday morning shattered. And now we know which half it is.
The fact that so many people — Democrats and Republicans alike — spent the last day or so before election night expecting a John Kerry victory only makes the blow all the more difficult to take.
Tuesday evening on CNN, as the reality of Kerry’s probable defeat was starting to set in, Tucker Carlson said that Bush’s victory could set Democrats on the course for a “Goldwater moment.” By that, of course, he meant an Election Day repudiation that could set the party on an eventually beneficial process of rebuilding and
reevaluation. As so many histories of modern American conservatism explain, after the trouncing Barry Goldwater took in 1964, his movement went deep into the political wilderness and spent 16 years building up an ideology and a movement that finally swept to power in 1980 and in many respects has defined American politics ever since.
Unfortunately for the Democrats, though, it’s not nearly that easy. In many ways, what Democrats will be facing in the coming days and weeks would be easier to take — at least at some conceptual or emotional level — if they had in fact been trounced, if their ideology and candidates had been clearly repudiated at the polls.
But the results don’t really show that.
A quick look at the electoral map tells the story. A few states remain outstanding as of the writing of this column, but the essence of the story is clear. The country not only remains divided, it remains divided almost exactly as it was four years ago — even after all that has happened over the past four years, even as terrorism and Iraq and deficits have replaced surpluses and lockboxes and the rest of it.
Almost all the blue states are still blue and the red ones red. There’s no getting around President Bush’s magic number of 51 percent. But still, the country remains divided almost exactly as it was four years ago — right down the middle.
The truth is that the country remains divided almost certainly with more embitterment and entrenchedness now than at any time in the last four years. The Democrats represent half the country. Unfortunately for them, it’s just a tad less than half. And that — along with a great deal of organization and infrastructure — has allowed Republicans to take control of the whole of the federal government.
But about 48 or 49 percent of the American people seem as fixed to what the Democrats support in presidential elections as the other 51 or 52 percent do for the Republicans. Given that fact, it’s hard to see how the Democrats can simply toss aside their current model with the ease they might if Bush, who won narrowly four years ago, had won decisively this time around.
The same applies to claims that the Democrats are going to undergo some kind of internal civil war in the aftermath of Kerry’s defeat. I don’t doubt that a bunch of consultants will be vilified endlessly over Kerry’s defeat. And I don’t pretend Kerry won’t come in for a drubbing either (though I don’t think that’s merited). But what would the basis of a civil war be exactly?
The party’s left and right were remarkably united through this election. Neither wing of the party was clearly leading the way, as was the case in either 1972 or 1992. In its opposition to Bush, the Democratic Party was arguably more united than it has been for generations. Besides a bunch of consultants who might all be swept away by the tide, it’s not clear that either side has more blame than the other for anything that went wrong.
For all of those reasons, Democrats have reasons for both hope and consternation.
How do they make sure they don’t squander all the progress they’ve made over the last two years in building up an infrastructure of activist groups, political organizations, alternative media and fundraising networks? How do they function as a meaningful opposition that represents almost half the country but yet has no hold over any of the levers of government in Washington? How do they grapple with such issues as gay marriage and civil unions — a hot-button issue that seems to have provided Bush a crucial advantage last night?
Those are the questions Democrats must now start reckoning with. And it won’t be easy.
Josh Marshall is editor of talkingpointsmemo.com. His column appears in The Hill each week. Email:
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