Victor Davis Hanson: "Democratic Suicide"

It's Friday and it's Victor Davis Hanson on National Review Online: Dr. Hanson's sub-title to this explains his remarks this Friday: "When will the Dems start winning again? When they start living and speaking like normal folks."

"We are in unsure times amid a controversial war. Yet the American people are not swayed by the universities, the major networks, the New York Times, Hollywood, the major foundations, and NPR. All these bastions of doctrinaire liberal thinking have done their best to convince America that George W. Bush, captive to right-wing nuts and Christian fanatics, is leading the country into an abyss. In fact, a close look at a map of red/blue counties nationwide suggests that the Democrats are in deepening trouble.

Why? In a word, Democratic ideology and rhetoric have not evolved from the 1960s, although the vast majority of Americans has — and an astute Republican leadership knows it.

CLASS
So the Democrats need a little more humility, a notion that the country is not so much an us/them dichotomy, but rather all of us together under siege to maintain our privileges in a tough global world — and at least one spokesman who either didn't go to prep school or isn't a lawyer.
RACE
A Democratic "minority" appointment to a cabinet post at education or housing is one thing; a Republican belief that the best candidates for secretary of state, national security advisor, and attorney general are incidentally minorities is quite another.
AGE
So ossified rhetoric about the "aged" in the social security debate — increasingly now not so much the Greatest Generation of WWII and the Depression as the first cohort of the self-absorbed baby boomers — is self-defeating. George Bush is appealing to a new group that really is threatened — the under-35's who cannot afford a house, have student loans, high car and health insurance, and are concerned that their poor therapeutic education will leave them impoverished as China and the rest of Asia race ahead.
DEFENSE
The problem with Democrats is that Americans are not convinced that they will ever act in any consistent manner...Whatever we think of George Bush, we know he would do something real — and just what that something might be frightens into hesitation — and yes, fear — many of those who would otherwise like to try something pretty awful.
WILL THEY EVER LEARN?
When we see Democrats speaking and living like normal folks — expressing worry that the United States must return to basic education and values to ensure its shaky preeminence in a cutthroat world, talking of one multiracial society united by a rare exceptional culture of the West rather than a salad bowl of competing races and tribes, and apprising the world that we are principled abroad in our support of democratic nations and quite dangerous when attacked — they will be competitive again.

Since they will not do that, they will keep losing — no matter how much the economy worries, the war frightens, and the elite media scares the American people. "

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Read all of Dr. Hanson's work you can find, please.