Beyond Left and Right. Check out this piece
from Sunday's Washington Post by political reporter Thomas B.
Edsall, titled
The Sum of Its Parts No Longer Works for the Democratic
Party:
But perhaps the most significant recent development in the makeup of the electorate was found in an exhaustive August survey of 2,886 adults by The Post, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and the Harvard University School of Public Health.
The survey found that the nation's youngest voters, who turn out in very low numbers on Election Day, are significantly different from the rest of the electorate. Their libertarian views cut across the social and economic spectrum. They support gay marriage and are more suspicious of religious values in public life, making them fair game for the Democrats. But they are also the only age group with majority support for partial privatization of Social Security (62 percent) and school vouchers (56 percent), both Republican issues.
As these voters grow older and turn out in larger numbers over the next decade, they are the only age group in which a plurality of people identify themselves as Republicans, edging Democrats by a 46-to-41 margin. This suggests not only that the Democratic Party cannot depend on the electorate of the future to restore its competitiveness, but also that the party faces intensified conflicts between its traditional constituencies and the more libertarian young electorate.
For the nation's sake as well as their own, let's hope the
Democratic Party moves away from its reactionary opposition to
Social Security reform, legal liability reform, and school choice,
and begins to put the nation's well being above pandering to
government employee unions and trial lawyers. And let's hope the
Republican Party continues to break ranks with its own reactionary
constituencies, which want to use the power of big government to
control and diminish people's private lives.
--Stephen H. Miller