I had a conversation w/ a friend w.r.t. my previous post on what opportunities I saw for voting Democrat in '04.   She wanted my philosophical take on why - in light of Dubya, Ahnold, and so on - the Dems seemed to be in such retreat (FWIW, SDB recently provided a technical analysis of this question relative to my more fundamentals-oriented analysis). 

My answer paints with broad brush strokes and is perhaps responsible for about 40-60% of the Dem's erosion -  it does NOT count for all by any means (and, for that matter, the Dem's are NOT really in headlong retreat on ALL fronts - Cruz carried SF, for ex.) - if you want to find exceptions with this, you will.  But I hope it explains a good % of the momentum shift nevertheless.

For a really long time, the Democrats have rode atop the politics of victimization.   The message was something like:  If you're a victim, you're virtuous, you're owed something, and we're here to give it for you.   

The counter message:  If you possess Power, you're evil and it's your social responsiblity to help the victims, we're here to get it from you.  The ones among you who recognize this are morally superior and have earned the right to thumb your noses at the others.

As a result, the Dem's opened their umbrellas to the dispossessed of all stripes and so much of their polemics contained the message - both emphatically (the impoverished, minorities, unemployed, etc.)  and subtly ("if men could get pregnant, abortion would have been in the Bill of Rights...").   The Republicans were implicitly painted into the corner of "Rich, White, Men."  Cruz Bustamante's election message in the Cali recall epitomized all of this.  Den Beste writes:

Right now the Democratic coalition includes environmentalists, the labor movement, minority groups, radical feminists, and people who think of themselves as being compassionate and who want to use tax money to help out the less fortunate.

This general message worked for them (in the sense of garnering votes) the further our social memories moved past the carnage of WWII .   And it got a particular kick during Vietnam.   As Tip O'Neil famously said, all politics are local and most Americans have felt generally safe & secure domestically at least.   We benchmarked our lot in life not against Mexico but rather the Jones family up the street.  Domestic power was adjudicated in courts, managed via contract, taxed, and transferred at the ballot box. 

The Cannon also created and relied upon a certain divisness - it wasn't enough for a policy to "also" benefit victims (for ex., School Choice and Afro-Americans), the policy had to DIRECTLY and EXCLUSIVELY benefit the victims to "count" as a policy solution (Affirmative Action in Universities).   Helping the victim counted far more if it exacted some penance from the privileged.

9/11 changed all that.   We were threatened and we subsequently wielded our instruments of Power on all fronts.   As large as the difference between black, white, brown, rich, and poor might be in the US, they are far smaller than the difference between American and Islamo-fascist.

Now, instead of calling cops "Pigs", we now (occasionally at least) also think of the cops who ran up the stairs at the WTC while everyone else was running down.   He's a "cop" instead of a "white cop."  Instead of the famously incompetant Dr. Strangelove, we think of Spec Ops A-teams and 18 yr old soldiers toiling around in dark caves in Afghanistan and Iraq.   As a film commentator once noted, this generation had already started trading in Platoon for Saving Private Ryan.   And 9/11 gave us our particular kick.

Power, as it turned out, wasn't automatically a bad thing and quite a few folks (there are ALWAYS recalcitrants) are coming to grips with the fact that it also ain't such a bad thing that we possess SO MUCH of it relative to say, France or Iraq.   The simple existance of imbalance had been a cannon of left wing victimization and political thought for a LONG time.   Some are even beginning to wake up to the unique cultural / social attributes that got us that power - oh my gosh, not only is Power pretty cool, we actually deserve it?  Bill Whittle had MUCH to say about this.

This realization - and the extent which it has permeated the society of swing voters - eats away at the heart of the Democrat's platform.   In the minds of the party's deep faithful, it's only a few precious inches away from saying that the Victims somehow got what they deserved as well.  That the rich deserve to be rich and the poor....  well, you know.   It's no fun to wear the mantle of "victim" if it isn't also the mantle of "virtue."  

Borrowing SDB's conclusion:

[this doesn't] necessarily prove an increased commitment to the Republicans. What they both do prove is decreased support for the Democrats.

Victimization just doesn't motivate the same way it used to.

And it's why so much of the rhetoric coming from that camp is so unbelievably heated - it's the language that's bubbled up to the surface from a deep, underlying philosophical crisis.  (Iraq isn't Vietnam, Bush isn't Hoover, Suicide Bombers don't stop just cuz the soldiers are wearing UN Blue helmets, Patriot Act hasn't turned us into a police state...).

I don't think the Dem's are down for the count.   Nor do I consider it a good thing to have a Republican ascendency as powerful as the Democrat's was in the Post Vietnam / Watergate era.  The Dems will, however, have a real tough time for at least one or 2 more election cycles as long as their messages emanate from a core assumption that Power is intrinsically Evil and the Powerless are intrinsically Good.  Like any large organization, the Dems will find a way to mutate their platform into something consummable by the swing voters (I hope it's fiscal restraint!) but I don't think it will happen until after '04.

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