Call them werewolves

The blogosphere has shown some ability to change the terms and terminology of the terror-war debate in the U.S. It's time for a bit of meme-hacking. Let's see if we can displace terms like "insurgent" or "Saddam loyalist" with one that conveys the true depth of evil we are facing. I have a candidate to propose.

A little more than sixty years ago, the U.S. and its allies went to war another psychopathic, mass-murdering dictator — Adolf Hitler. In 1944, as the Third Reich was collapsing, the SS organized a Nazi resistance to commit assassinations, sabotage and guerrilla warfare behind Allied lines. The parallels in organization and tactics with Baathist-holdout activity in Iraq are very close.

It is a matter of record from Saddam Hussein's autobiography that he admired Hitler's ruthless efficiency and sought to emulate it. We should revive for these remnant Baathist thugs the term, redolent of willful evil and darkness, that the Nazi resistance fighters used for themselves.

Call them werewolves. It's what they deserve.

Advice for Democrats:

Well, the election results are in. The Democratic Party took a beating yesterday — a worse one, I think, than it has really assimilated. The Pew Research Center has analyzed the results. If you guys don't want your butts handed to you in 2004, I have a few suggestions.

First, a reminder for new readers or old readers in any doubt. I am not a Republican. I am not a conservative. There are some people who are going to think my giving advice to the Democratic Party is disingenuous or some form of point-scoring. They're wrong. Politics is an intrinsically evil game, but it might become at least less evil if the Democrats cleaned up their act. I'd like to see that.

The most important message the voters delivered yesterday is that running against George Bush is a fast road to failure. Where Republican candidates successfully tied themselves to national issues and ran on a boost-Bush platform (as in Kentucky and Mississippi) they won. Only where the Democrats were able to divert attention to local issues (like the FBI bug in Philadelphia Mayor Street's office) did they succeeed.

U.S. troops out of Iraq? Jobless recovery? War for oil? Tax cuts? Halliburton? All these favored taglines of the anti-Bush crowd got no traction at all. Zero. Zip. Nada. There is no evidence that they helped and some inferential evidence in the poll numbers that they hurt. The Democratic incumbant in Mississippi knew this was a'comin' — he actually worked at keeping Bill Clinton and the whole gaggle of Democratic presidential candidates out of his state. This didn't save him.

The Democrats had already lost southern conservatives. The Pew analysis says they're losing moderates, too. Republicans gained in every voter stratum except blacks — rich, poor, male, female, whites, and hispanics. The angry-left pitch not only doesn't work, it's accelerating a long-term tend of Republicanizing the South.

This has direct implications for 2004. The way the regional arithmetic of the Electoral College works makes it effectively impossible to take the White House without a strong showing in the South. If the 2004 elections were held today, Bush couldn't lose — and the trends favor Republican gains in the next year.

So. What can the Democrats do to win?

1. Support the war.

   The U.S. is at war. We will continue to be at war until there is no credible threat from an alliance of WMD-wielding rogue states and the Islamist terror network. The American people have accepted this, and they will back George Bush's war policy unless or until it appears that he cannot competently execute it. Arguing that we should not have a war policy, or should have a less ‘unilateral’ one, just lost the Democrats two governorships and will almost certainly lose them a third in Lousiana on 15 Nov.

2. Stop trying to personalize the 2004 campaign.

   The only loser bigger than running gainst Bush's war policy is running against Bush himself. The Bush-is-Hitler/Bush-is-a-moron thing has no zorch anywhere outside a set of bicoastal Brie-nibbler patches and university campuses that can be counted on one hand. The American people like and respect Bush, even when they question his policies. (I find this part difficult to understand myself, but the evidence is undeniable.)

3. Actively support gun rights.

   Of all the single-issue blocs, gun owners are both the largest and would probably the easiest to pry loose from the Republican base (remember, Bill Clinton himself said gun control swung the last election cycle). Over 50% of American households own guns and their demographics cross over many narrower political classifications. A lot of swing voters like me simply will not vote for any Democrat without an actively pro-Second-Amendment record, but will give Republicans the benefit of the doubt on this issue. If you want us back, dump the gun-grabbers overboard.

4. Drop the prescription-drug entitlement

   I pick on this one because there is just now no more obvious example of domestic-policy fecklessness. The American people said no to single-payer health care ten years ago. If you think they can't spot a multi-billion-doller Medicare boondoggle in the making, you're fooling yourself. Passing this turkey will bring no credit on either the Democrats or Republicans supporting it. Let it die.

5. Give us some presidential candidates who aren't jokes

   I look at the Nine Dwarves and the first thing reaction that comes to mind isn't even disgust but a sort of weary incredulity. I think of P.J. O'Rourke's line: "What the fuck? I mean, what the fucking fuck?" A major party in the wealthiest, most powerful, fourth most populous nation in the world can't do any better than these?

   I think I have a lot of company in judging that these guys looked better six months ago, before they cheapened themselves with their endless indistinguishable yapping and their blatant pandering to the silliest barking moonbats on the fringe of the Democratic left. Bush has actually gained stature by comparison after every debate.

   Nobody expects these guys to sound like Republicans — but, you know, once, there used to be a Democratic position that didn't sound like a petulant "Nyah, nyahhh". I haven't heard any credible plan for the war or the economy. Clue: Neither "Repeal the Bush tax cuts" or "Hand Iraq to the U.N. and the French" will fly to anyone who can string three facts together about economics or history. I don't think these characters even believe their own bullshit.

Sigh. You Republicans out there will be comforted by the thought that the Democrats are utterly incapable of taking this advice. I am not comforted by that thought — but you're probably right.

The Whig Maneuver:

VodkaPundit asks: Is the Democratic Party becoming increasingly likely to pull a Whig Maneuver and disappear into history? If so, what replaces it?

The Democrats certainly seem to be trying pretty hard to self-destruct. But this is not a new story; it's been going on ever since the New Left captured the party apparat in the early 1970s. My first experience of political activism was standing athwart that particular tide of history, yelling "stop!", as a campaign worker for centrist Democrat Scoop Jackson in 1975. I think I already half-understood that he was doomed. What I didn't foresee was the completeness with which the Democrats would abandon their southern and rural wings to become a party run exclusively by Brie-nibbling urban elites. Call it the NPRization of the party.

Recently they've abandoned the private-sector labor unions as well. Just before 2000, a key Democratic strategist noted that party's demographic power base consisted solely of blacks and the public-employee unions. Bill Clinton, charming sociopath and perfect acme of the American political creature that he was, had managed to paper over that problem for a while. But it keeps getting worse. The liberal-Democrat lock on the national media is crumbling under pressure from talk radio, Fox News, and the bloggers. They're losing their ability to control the terms of political debate.

Finally, there is the notorious fractiousness of the smaller Democratic interest groups. While the black establishment has largely settled into the role of party wheelhorse and the trial lawyers play financial sugar daddy without demanding much except a complete block on tort reform, feminists and gays and the hard left continue to cause the party problems out of all proportion to their voting strength. The structural problem is that the small factions are disproprtionately strong in the Democrats' grass-roots organization; they therefore exert a big influence on party primaries and tend to pull the candidate list and the platform to the left.

Ever since the early 1990s, there's been a tug-of-war going on within the urban elites that now run the party; the Democratic Leadership Council versus the inheritors of the New Left. What's happening now with the Dean campaign demonstrates that the DLC has lost its grip. The left is winning. The trend that has taken the Democrats from solid majority status in my childhood to the point where it needs a Bill Clinton to win elections, if it continues, might very well result in it disappearing into history.

The DLC's most recent effort to reverse this tend — to stop talking about gun control — only highlights the depth of the problem. They know, because their own analysts and Bill Clinton have told them, that gun owners are the swing vote that cost them the 1994 and 2000 elections. And yet, the left, for whom hatred of civilian firearms is a religious absolute, has such a lock on the party machine that the DLC can only talk about spin, not about a substantive change in platform.

I expect the Democrats to lose heavily in today's elections. Like VodkaPundit, I expect the loss to change not a damn thing. The DLC will continue to wring its hands, and the New Lefties, comforted by convenient rationalizations in the major media, will continue to march the Democratic Party towards a cliff's edge.

Suppose they do succeed in self-destructing. What then?

No crystal ball is required to answer that question, just a look at the minor-party voting statistics. If the Democrats crumble, the big winners have to be the Greens and the Libertarians. The New Lefties who run most levels of the modern Democratic apparat would run to the Greens en masse; in fact, whatever organization emerges would probably view itself (with some justification) as the Democratic Party's successor. They'd probably take the public-employee unions with them.

The interesting question is whether the black establishment would follow. Blacks, as a voting group, are more conservative on social issues than Democrats as a whole -- heavily opposed to gay marriage, for example, and more in favor of school vouchers. The strain between general opinion among blacks and the strident leftism of many of their public figures has been growing. If the party of Lyndon Johnson were to disintegrate, it would become acute. I think the most likely scenario is that the Al Sharptons. Cynthia McKinneys and Carol Moseley-Brauns would run to the Greens, lose their popular base, and the black vote would fragment. Blacks would become a normal ethnic group, not tied to any one party.

The second-order effects on the Republicans would be just as interesting. The youth demographic Andrew Sullivan and others call "South Park Republicans" would bolt the GOP in a second if the Libertarians looked like a credible alternative. So, albeit more slowly and partially, would more traditional (and older) small-government/classical-liberal/free-trade types. The big question, given current pressures, is whether the Libs would remain isolationist or reluctantly slide into the pro-war camp and start behaving a bit more like a European party of the center or center-right.

In either scenario, the effect on the Republicans would be to resove their split-personality problem in favor of cultural conservatives and the hard right. They'd become a lot more like a Tory party. The really entertaining part comes when you look at how this change would tie in with regional demographics -- in this future, the Republicans would become the party of the old South!

UPDATE: My prediction came two-thirds true. Democrats got shellacked last night and the major media is making excuses for them this morning. Anyone want to bet against the last third (no change in the Democrats' platform)? No? I didn't think so...