Election 2009 (III): Halo Effect

Democrats believe they hold the moral high ground. They talk among themselves. They have a tough time accepting the legitimacy of any other perspective.

U.S. adults are 20% liberal, and 28% college graduates. College graduates are the people most likely to follow politics, to read and pay attention to news, to contribute money, to vote Democratic, and to do so because liberal Democrats are the “good guys.”

Democrats wear the halo for three big reasons:

1. After capitalism collapsed in 1929-32, Democrats used government power to help “the little guy,” “the common man,” those thrown out of work by failed businesses. Republicans argue, “government is the problem, not the solution,” and insist only private enterprise creates jobs. But liberals, college graduates, don’t fear government. After all, the people in government are much like them. Liberals want good government that helps those left behind. That means Democrats; the good guys.

2. Democrats delivered during the 1960s on America’s most important moral crusade, equality for African-Americans. Democrats led the fight for civil rights, unlike Republicans who gained from the white backlash in its Southern (“redneck”) and Northern ethnic (“Archie Bunker”) neighborhood base. Republicans used code words like “crime in the streets,” “welfare queens,” and “Willie Horton,” but their campaigns were about race. Race helped Nixon, Reagan, and George H.W. Bush win five of six times between 1968 and 1992. As Lyndon Johnson supposedly said, when signing the 1964 civil rights act, "We have lost the South for a generation." True, and a truly disgusting reality for most of America’s best educated.

The Democratic commitment to equality gained a bigger, more instant payoff when it expanded to include Hispanics and especially women. The party’s strong commitment to a woman’s right to choose locked in the support of America’s more educated and independent females. The Democrats’ subsequent battle for gay rights is proving more controversial, but partly because helping gays isn’t good politics, it solidifies the halo effect Democrats earn from pursuing female and minority equality.

3. Democrats oppose war. Vietnam tore our nation apart, but it also united much of the college-educated elite behind Democrats’ anti-war banner. So while Democrats lost millions of votes when they turned away from the anti-Communist foreign policy of Democrats Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson, other millions of Americans, mostly better educated, favored Democrats who put domestic reform before fighting tyranny abroad (thinking “Where’s the real tyranny anyway, if not inside the Republican Party?”). The Iraq “war of choice”, including the very “nation building” George W. Bush denounced as a candidate, has helped fix the halo even more firmly on the Democratic Party’s head.

Democrats won over America’s elite by being right on the three great battles that divided us since 1929. The moral sanctity Democrats feel supporting (good) government, pursuing equality, and opposing war leads to advocacy journalism from a self-righteous media and blogosphere, intolerant screams from entertainment and the arts, arrogant put-downs from intellectuals in universities, the government, and the non-profit sector, even pro-government posturing by business giants like Google’s Eric Schmidt. Democrats believe they are right not only because they are bright, but also because their cause is just.

And right makes might.