How to balance northern and southern strategies is as central a challenge for the national Democratic Party in the 2000s as it was for the Republicans in the 1960s and '70s. The irony is that some of the same tactical considerations apply -- at least if one reverses regionalisms.

Three decades ago, the GOP's obvious need to concentrate on realigning the South engendered an obvious corollary debate: Should the Republican Party, in the process, write off the Northeast? My own 1969 book, The Emerging Republican Majority, was cited as saying so, when it certainly did not. It would be equally crazy for today's Democrats to dismiss the South completely rather than simply give it a low priority when the White House is at stake.

Market extremism doesn't wear hoods, white sheets, or armbands. Skinheads in its ranks are few. Suicide bombers in its cause are even fewer.

But the essence of extremism, as opposed to other specific "isms," is to extend -- harshly, rigidly, and dangerously -- a commitment and ideology that in softer and milder forms can be acceptable or useful. Worship of an unfettered, self-justifying marketplace developed in exactly this harsh, rigid form during the 1980s and 1990s. The infamous practices of Enron -- where market mania turned abusive, with the help of the Bush family -- are only the tip of one berg in an ice field that continues to threaten national political and economic navigation.