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11/17/02--
M. Houghtaling
To understand that, we have to go back to the beginning of the New Democrats.
Socialism, and it's integral components, The Cause, Activism and Revolution, became enormously popular during the '60's on college campuses in free countries worldwide. "Activism" is THE way to impliment the agenda of your group, no matter how small it is compared to the majority, by convincing the majority that they are ACTUALLY in the MINORITY; that more hold the views of the activists than the mainstream. A Socialist activist is also called a social activist.
After graduation, many of these former hippies remained social activists throughout their lives. Those social activists socialized with other activists and convinced others to become activists.
During the '70's social activism became a sub culture. The Cause replaced God. The activist organization became their church, and activist leaders became the leaders of this new quasi-religion.
During the '80's, careers and industries revolved and thrived around this new subculture. Journalists, news anchors, screenwriters, actors and authors joined The Causes of the Day and sold the fruits of their labors to the newly converted faithful. Leaders of the Church of Socialist Activism roused the faithful to louder and more militant protests. Lobbyist social activists then got politician social activists to write and fund the implimentation of new laws and regulations. The social activist news media convinced the public that every new law and regulation was the miracle cure for a virulant social ill.
If those laws failed, so much the better. More activist groups would be created. More laws, regulation and funding would be lobbied. Job security was ensured, for the politician, the lobbyist, the journalist, on down the line.
During the '90's, The Clintons and their associates took social activism to the next level by creating the Third Way Movement as a kind of blanket corporation for various subsidiary organizations like the DLC. Activist groups were the base of the New Democrat heirarchical ladder. They voted the groups above them into power. Those voted into power implimented the new agenda. This new, streamlined, corporate structure allowed the social activist industry to bloat as large as the artificial tech bubble.
In the latter half of the Clinton years, incomprehensible, dysfunctional, laws and regulations, as well as the 34 percent taxes required to pay for them caused mainstream America to balk. Ironically, the mainstream slowly learned to counter the social activism bubble via that symbol of the Clintonomic tech bubble: the .Com.
Instant, unrestricted access to data, the ability to cross check the validity of that data against an unlimited number of similar reports, allowed the mainstream to discover that the social activism bubble was every bit as phoney as the tech bubble. The left-wing social activists had been lying to us about energy, the environment, the economy, wildlife statistics...EVEN THE CONCEPT THAT THE SOCIAL/ACTIVISTS OUTNUMBERED THE CONSERVATIVE MAINSTREAM. Finally, we could prove that.
Voter turnout had been apathetic for decades. The social activists won elections only because left wing voters were slightly LESS apathetic than the conservative majority, not because the majority of Americans care about The Cause of the Day. Mainstream America has always been slow to anger, but when that anger comes to a boil, things happen. Real revolutions are won.
The 2000 election re-re-re-re-re-count fiasco was the straw that broke mainstream America's patient suffering with it's leaders, the media - the whole Clintonista Third Way antidisestablishment establishment.
Democrats lost because mainstream America did not agree with their ideas of important issues, and we were tired of being taxed and lied to and treated as fools. One would think that the self-styled "intellectual elite" would have recognized the error of their ways by 2002. They didn't, and they're still asking the same question today.
Alas, aggressive, power hungry people believe that everyone else is just as aggressive and power hungry as they are. Republicans didn't win by using "better tactics" - unless you define "clean tactics" as better. The concept of fair play is a mainstream American ISSUE which is alien to the New Democratic party. All mainstream ISSUES have become alien to the Democrat party, because years of intellectionally and emotionally distant theorizing in the subculture of social activism have completely divorced the left from the practical mainstream here in the real world.