Salon Columnists

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The liberal arts divisions of American universities, whose closest antecedent is the medieval monastery, constitute the last natural refuge for the socialist left, a place where the catastrophe of Marxism may not register for another 100 years or more.

Beneath the surface, however, the tectonic plates of American politics have shifted. This event first registered on the political Richter scale in 1994 with the Republican victory in the midterm congressional elections. At the time, the odd, oxymoronic term employed to describe what had happened was "the conservative revolution."

It was a term for which Newt Gingrich and his Republican radicals -- such are the ironies of history -- were made to pay a heavy political price by the liberal left -- a fact that only underscored the obsolescence of the political terminology. It is true that thanks to the effective and hypocritical attacks on Gingrich by liberal reactionaries in the Democratic Party and by the defenders of the ancien régime in the nation's press, there was a temporary slowing of the progressive tide that the Contract With America had unloosed.

After all, President Clinton was reelected in 1996. That was the superficial restoration. For it was only because of his surrender to Gingrich's balanced budget and welfare reforms (and possibly illegal campaign contributions from reactionary dictatorships overseas) that Clinton was able to survive at all. The simultaneous re-election of the Republican congressional majorities -- the first time this had happened in 60 years! -- consolidated the underlying trend even more profoundly and established it as an epoch-making fact of American political life.

In the four years since the Gingrich revolution, 357 Democratic elected officials have switched parties, including the only Native American ever elected to the United States Senate. Just last month, Herman Badillo, the most prominent Puerto Rican political leader in New York City -- a metropolis that was once a stronghold of Democratic liberalism and is now the power base of a Republican reform mayor -- became a Republican too.

For 30 years, Badillo had been a party-line liberal Democrat, as congressman, borough president and deputy mayor. But now he has had second thoughts. In a statement explaining his conversion, Badillo wrote:

Many Democrats believe that some ethnic groups, such as Hispanics, should not be held to the same standards as others. This is a repellent and destructive concept, a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure. Fortunately, the ethnic groups hurt by these patronizing policies are beginning to understand that low standards mean low results -- a realization that will move people in these groups to the GOP.

Democrats don't see that this is happening, because they take their historic constituencies for granted. They believe that Hispanics will vote Democratic in the future because they voted Democratic in the past. In the Hispanic community, however, there is a real desire for change -- the kind of change that Democratic policies cannot achieve. Indeed, Democratic policies harm minorities by permitting students to graduate from college without college-level skills, allowing crime to go unpunished and making welfare an absolute right regardless of one's ability to work.

The liberal party, the party of trade-union apparatchiks and government bureaucrats, of academic monks and kitsch Marxists, is the party of political statism and racial spoils systems. It is the party of political reaction. In contrast, the conservative party in American politics is the party of new ideas. It is the party of reform, and of little people -- small business entrepreneurs, blue-collar workers, upwardly mobile immigrants and cyberspace libertarians. It is a party described by Newt Gingrich as one that wants "to break down the old system and return the power it has usurped to the people for whom it was intended."

In the context of American-style democracy, you can't get much more "revolutionary" than that.
SALON | July 27, 1998

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