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DON'T POP THE CORK JUST YET. Don't mean to step on anyone's birthday cake or anything, but after reading David Paul Kuhn's Washington Post Magazine piece on the evangelist Jim Wallis (who is being touted as the savior of the Democratic Party), I'm not quite ready to declare, as Brothers Tom and Ezra seem poised to do, the triumph of the economic populism narrative. Yes, it's encouraging that Uchitelle is using it, and the Prospect, as demonstrated in Tom's smart piece on the Dems in the North, has got the real story.
That Kuhn's piece should appear, however, just yesterday, replete with references to core Democratic activists who are "hostile to religion," is a bit discomfiting. The narrative evolving here, thanks in part to the anti-choice but pro-safety-net Wallis, is that what kept "religious Christians" (a group Kuhn never really defines) away from the Democratic Party for so long was those pesky feminists and blackpeople.
Compared with the relative cultural homogeneity of the FDR coalition of labor, Catholics, ethnic whites and Southern whites, the modern Democratic Party began to focus on "a lot more little narrow constituencies under its big tent," such as the civil rights and feminist movements, which were like "little fiefdoms they had to make happy," [said Clemson University Professor Laura] Olson...Little fiefdoms? In this narrative, the rights of African-Americans and American women are nothing more than the provinces of little fiefdoms whose selfish demands have caused the Democratic Party to lose the greater, more important economic battle.
"When the Democrats became just the party of rights," Wallis tells Kuhn, "they lost something, a moral appeal."
This is a dangerous story, and one that will no doubt appeal to liberals who believe themselves not to have a prejudiced bone in their bodies. And it's packaged so nicely for easy media consumption.
--Adele M. Stan
