The WSJ on "Doughnut Democrats"

A doughnut is a snack without a middle--and The Wall Street Journal now believes that the Democrats have no middle.

Yet the doughnut analogy is still inaccurate. A doughnut at least has a balance to its extremes. The Democrats are the doughnut with the big gaping tooth-mark-bordered hole where its right wing used to be. They're all left wing now.

Or maybe the Journal believes that the Democrats represent two extremes of personal income. A few "moderate" souls tell this cautionary tale: that the Democrats lost the votes of those making between $30,000 and $75,000 a year. That means that they represent the poorest of the poor, to whom they promise an endless supply of goodies, and the richest of the rich, to whom they offer Lincoln Bedroom overnight stays and photo-opportunities to show how charitable they are--always with someone else's money, sometimes Daddy's, and sometimes the money of adoring and myopic fans.

The Journal does a good job pointing out that the Democratic Party hasn't even been this hostile to free markets, a properly aggressive foreign policy, and limited government in its history. Even Franklin D. Roosevelt would be shocked, they say. Well, I had my doubts--but now that I think about it, I think FDR would seek to throw out some of his party's least temperate members. Like Dick Durbin, out there comparing American troops to Nazis. I can just hear FDR right now:

Now you listen to me, young man. I knew what the Nazis were--and I know what these Muslims are. The Muslims are not the Communists. They were in league with the Nazis in my day, and they are worse than Nazis today. Did it ever occur to you that if they ever had their way, many of your most valuable contributors would get their heads chopped off? Did no one on your research staff ever tell you that Muslims have a worse social-censorship agenda than any that the Christian Fundamentalists ever dreamed of? What will you say when they kill your daughter in a drive-by shooting, to uphold the honor of maledom, like those Hamas idiots we heard about the other day?

Yes, indeed--a President who took absinthe and indulged in many other activities for which the Muslims might have chopped his head off might indeed want to take Dick Durbin to the woodshed for that remark on the floor of the Senate.

I do have this one quarrel with the Journal: in their analysis of the situation, they state that the Democrats no longer provide effective competition in the marketplace of ideas. This, the Journal states, lets the Republicans get off easy with free-spending ways.

Not so. The Republicans spend freely because they still believe that this is what their particular constituents want. They're still competing on how many federal projects they can bring back home, and not on how to lower the tax burden on everyone. How many elections, I wonder, are really decided on whether someone failed to bring home the bacon, or someone else failed to stop a military base from closing? Maybe a few people who had one less job to bid on might stew about that a little bit, but why would most voters care? I certainly don't.

But more than that, Republicans still think that the electorate is as enamored of big government as it ever was. Or maybe those guys aren't really Republicans. If that's the way they feel about it, then why don't they all join the Democratic Party and turn it into something that FDR might recognize again? I still wouldn't appreciate all the make-work projects, but maybe we could stop a lot of the loose talk about setting a date for the withdrawal of the American garrison in Iraq. (Or maybe not.)

In any case, the last time a particular party folded up, leaving nothing behind, was in 1820, when the Federalists finally disbanded. The resulting "Era of Good Feelings" lasted but two years, before Jefferson's original Republican Party split into two other parties--one being the Democratic Party we know today and the other being the so-called National Republican Party, known to history as the Whigs. So if the Democratic Party folded up, then the Republicans would split into rival wings--the Highwaymen (as in highway projects) and the Churchmen (including myself). That might be healthier for our society than the present situation.