the Democrats' dilemma

The title of a provocative, insightful and perhaps prophetic piece from Joel Kotkin in the July/August issue of The American (what used to be called The American Enterprise)...

His thesis: "A major shift in the composition of the American economy has transformed the Democratic Party and poses deep challenges to its future."

His intro: there are "numerous reasons to be optimistic, if not giddy" and various demographic groups "are shifting heavily to Democrats".

But he's not so sure about the long-term for the Dems. First, Kotkin points out the obvious political cycles and Dem success in 2008 as "a reaction to the Bush years".

Then, he moves to some tremendous value-added, concerning the changing nature of "class" politics-- and the need for Dems to adjust and make a vital decision about addressing the various classes within their own potential constituencies:

Yet over the past two decades, and particularly the last few years, the party’s base has shifted decisively in both demographic and geographic terms. Increasingly, the core Democratic constituency—and, even more so, the base of Senator Barack Obama’s campaign—consists not of working- and middle-class whites but of African-Americans and a rising new class of affluent, well-educated professionals.

This second group, largely white but certainly spread across racial groups, has begun to supplant the old working- and middle-class base of the party. For the most part it differs from the old middle class of shopkeepers, skilled industrial workers, and small farmers, constituencies that have struggled as the economy has globalized and been transformed by the information revolution....

Absolutely. We saw this, most notably, in the competition between Obama and Clinton voters in the Dem primary. They were very different sorts of voters-- an (uneasy) alliance which was successful in 2008 because of Obama's charisma and antipathy toward Bush.

At the highest level of this new class stand the reigning elites of the Democratic Party—top university administrators and academics, venture capitalists, media and Internet barons, the cutting-edge firms on Wall Street....differ both culturally and stylistically from the super-rich who supported conservatives in the past....Their recent experience as entrepreneurs differentiates them from traditional power elites....

In this way our greatest liberal cities are becoming centers of the stratified neo-Victorian class structure that economic liberals purportedly despise. One statistic that speaks volumes: the San Francisco, Washington, New York, and Boston regions all boast the highest percentage among major U.S. metros of people who earn money in classic plutocratic fashion: from stocks, bonds, and rents.

These factors may make it difficult for Democrats to govern as the party of what used to be called “economic justice,” even given the presence of a widening gap between the rich and the poor than express outrage at the huge payouts to the Wall Street elite, Democrats generally prefer to demonize oil company executives, whose pay, if more than generous, pales in comparison to that earned by the traders and speculators.

Even for politicians, it must seem somewhat of a stretch to troll for dollars in the luxury condos of Manhattan and Chicago one day, and play class warfare the next. Once in power, it’s unlikely Democrats will do much more than talk about curbing the excesses of the rich. Already, one of their leading lights, New York Senator Charles Schumer, has emerged as chief defender of the hedge-fund industry, an emerging bulwark of Democratic support.

If he becomes president, you can’t expect much negativism about rapacious hedge-fund managers from Senator Obama, who emerged as the early favorite of highly compensated, younger Wall Street executives....

For [President-Elect] Obama, the biggest danger comes not from the right but from his own base, whose predilections may over time limit his appeal and stunt the party’s gains....

How to deal with the environment may be a critical area of conflict between the interests of the traditional middle class and the postindustrial new class. By its very nature, people working in the key institutions of the information economy—software firms, entertainment, Wall Street—are not unduly harmed by attempts to regulate reduction of carbon emissions....In contrast, workers in transportation, wholesaling, and manufacturing sit on the carbon front lines....

The new class’s disdain for suburbia and middle-class lifestyles could produce a new version of the cultural warfare exercised by the Republicans in recent years....Now the Democrats could soon be in danger of duplicating the Republican mistakes. The Clintons won by “triangulation” and appealing to the broad range of middle-class voters. But Obama’s Democrats could become the mirror image of Rove’s Republicans, extolling the superiority of their base and its values over those of other, less “enlightened” populations....

This conflict could come to the fore very quickly, as Democrats generally believe in using government to achieve goals more fully than their political rivals do. Republicans are often far too willing to repress individual rights for security reasons but generally have proved less eager in reality to tell people how to live on a day-to-day basis....

Ultimately this is Senator Obama’s choice: follow a broad winning strategy based on traditional middle class-oriented policies, or adopt the ideological and economic predilections of his core base. If he does the latter, many Americans may find themselves alarmed by the Democrats' resurgence.