For the last 3 or 4 years, I've been privately predicting the complete collapse of the Democratic Party by 2010. Once a party of innovative social policy and reform, the Dems have long ago abandoned that mission. Instead, they've continued to milk their past contributions for all they're worth. To hear a Dem campaign, you'd think that we are currently living in the great depression. To hear a Dem tell it, you'd think that the Civil Rights Acts had never been passed.

The Dem strategy has consistently been to keep recasting every problem we face as being the result of racial or class injustice. And as they've steadily lost power, they've shifted further and further to the extreme left, employing what I like to refer to as the PETA strategy, which is "Even after his cause has been made moot, a guy can keep using it to push another cause of his that's been rejected. And it helps to be shocking and extreme."

PETA, when they first started out, did some good work in stopping a lot of animal cruelty on large factory farms. People were receptive to that message and that cause, and they reacted by supporting PETA. Becasue that practice has been largely stomped out, that point has been made moot. PETA has also always preached that vegetarianism is the only way to go - that point, on the other hand, has been largely rejected.

So PETA's strategy has been to use mooted point #1 to shock people into supporting them so that they can push already rejected point #2. When you see PETA distributing videos of animal cruelty, notice that the video that you are seeing is over twenty years old. People see this, donate $, and support PETA. They look the other way when PETA does wacky attention-grabbing stunts, and mistakenly rationalize supporting them by saying "well, they do some good work in other areas."

The Dems do the exact same thing with issues of race and class. In the past, the Democratic party has been very successful in winning elections when vast and widespread problems existed in these areas. And now that problems in these areas are much much fewer and are much more isolated, thanks in large part to the efforts of the Dems, do they apply their problem solving prowess to new problems? No. They instead choose to invent problems, to allege problems that don't exist, and to vastly distort the problems that do exist because they have no ideas on how to tackle the new and actual problems of today. This is exactly why they allege racial injustice at every turn, and this is exactly why they make every issue into a "rich v. poor" problem.

They've had great success harping on their two pet issues, race and class. For example, when the economy was failing in the 1970's, the Dem response was "People are out work because the rich have too much money!" With that, the people had someone to blame for their problems, and the Dems succeeded in raising taxes on the rich. When their "solution" of blaming the rich didn't solve the problem, but in fact made it much, much, worse, they just kept blaming the rich. And as more people lost their jobs, they gained more and more voters. And people kept voting for them. And they kept raising taxes. Around and around, until the hghest income tax rate was over 70%.

They are doing the exact same sort of thing today, with almost every "issue" - take health care, for instance (which I hesitate to call an "issue," but that's a subject for another post) - t's just the "rich v. poor" strategy, dressed up in a new tux. They parade around some unfortunate soul who lost everything because he didn't have health insurance, and they want you to think that this is a widespread problem - it isn't. To put it in PETA terms, they're showing thirty year old tapes. The real problem here isn't that people don't have insurance, it's that health care is too expensive. The reasons that health care is so expensive are many, and I think that those problems need to be addressed. But one thing that won't solve that problem is letting the government to step in and start making the too-expensive payments. That solution will accomplish the same thing as their solution to the 70's economy problem - it will only make the problem way, way worse, while making people increasingly dependent on the party that supports the plan. In short, the Dems want to be your coke supplier, they want to be your crack dealer. They want to be a necessary middleman, so that you always have to "go through them" to get what you need.

Ronald Reagan showed people that government is not the answer to their problems, but that government is the problem - he came in and slashed tax by over 50%, and the economy flourished. Freed from the yoke of government oppression, people began to see that he was right. This was the beginning of the Democrats' demise.

The Dems have been steadily losing power over the last 20 or so years, and their drastic shift to the extreme left is all too telling evidence of that. Like PETA, the Dems have been forced to get more and more extreme just to get your attention. I think that one way to put it is to say that "they want to solve your problems, they just don't want your problem to be solved." And people have this pesky way of thinking that when solutions are implemented and conditions drastically improve, that the problem has been solved. "Oh No," screams the Dems. "Just pay attention to me for one second. I'll show you problems you never even knew you had!"

Ask yourself, when is the last time you ever heard a Democrat talking about how good we have it? When is the last time you've heard a Dem say "We did it. We solved that problem. Now lets move on to something else." You've never head a Democrat utter those words. If you put a Dem on a stage, all he'll do is tell you how terrible you have it, how terrible America is, and how he can fix the problem. He'll scold you for being happy and content, tell you you're a bad person for not supporting his program to help the group of the day. You're shameful, you're selfish. He will guilt you into voting for him. All he needs is that stage, and he will do literally anything to get it.

I ran across this great article by Christopher Ruddy today that really shows what a dire position the Dems are in:

The Democrats are desperate.

How desperate? Very.

As Anderson sees it, the Democrats are almost totally out of power.

He reviewed the political landscape for me. The White House is Republican.

And so are the Senate and the House. Even the Supreme Court predominates with Republican appointments.

At the state level it gets worse. In the last election cycle, a majority of state legislatures became Republican, and Republicans hold a majority of state governorships.

The largest four states in population have Republican governors: George Pataki in New York, Rick Perry in Texas, Jeb Bush in Florida ­ and we even snatched one from the Democrats in California with Arnold Schwarzenegger's election.

Dems have been telling folks "this is the important election of your life!" They've got it wrong - this is most important election in their lives. This election will determine the fate of the Democratic Party. You've already seen the cracks in the foundation - Kerry's campaign is apparently split into warring factions, other Dems are following Zell's lead and breaking rank, even bolting from the party. This is it folks - you may one day tell your grandchildren stories about the "democratic" party just like your grandparents may have told you about their support for the Progressives or Southern Democrats.

(linked to today's otb traffic jam)