The Unknown Candidate: The Fighting Democrat

Saturday, November 04, 2006

The Fighting Democrat

Once upon a time, the Democrats were the majority party, but then came the 1960s and many middle-class whites like Jim Webb drifted away. Webb served heroically in Vietnam and came back disgusted with the liberal elites who reviled the military and, as he wrote in 1997, “were trying to destroy the foundations of American society.”

“Jane Fonda can kiss my [behind],” he once told a radio interviewer in the bracing and irrepressible manner that is his trademark. “I wouldn’t go across the street to watch her slit her wrist.”

Webb found himself at Georgetown Law School. “Webb came to view the majority of his fellow students as the most miserable, neurotic and obsessive collection of individuals he had ever met,” Robert Timberg wrote in “The Nightingale’s Song.”

He began to see an America riven by a social divide. On the one side were people like himself: tough, independent, hard-working traditionalists who know how to shoot, fight and endure; and on the other side were what he has at various times called the “drug-drenched,” “sex-enshrined” narcissists, who cower in their parochial elite enclaves and pass judgment on everybody else.

Webb named his son after Robert E. Lee, and wrote a book, “Born Fighting,” which is a full-throated defense of “Rednecks. Trailer-park trash. Racists. Cannon fodder. My ancestors. My people. Me.”

As Andrew Ferguson noted recently in The Weekly Standard, he took white Protestants — who have always been the villains in movies from “M*A*S*H” to “Remember the Titans” — and he described them as an oppressed minority group. And their oppressors were the highly educated liberal snobs from New York, Washington, San Francisco and L.A.

“For the last 50 years,” he wrote in “Born Fighting,” “the Left has been doing everything in its power to sue them, legislate against their interests, mock them in the media, isolate them as idiosyncratic, and publicly humiliate their traditions. ...”

Jewish culture produces a lot of lawyers, Webb has argued, but Scots-Irish culture produces fighters, and he has spent his life defending the interests and values of these manly, individualistic, brawling populists. He’s criticized affirmative action and women in combat. He at one time opposed the Vietnam memorial, which seemed to rebuke the warrior virtues. “Watching the white phallus that is the Washington Monument piercing the air like a bayonet, you feel uplifted,” he said. But the “degrading ditch” of the Vietnam memorial seemed to do no such thing.

He was continually irritated by the Democratic Party and its leaders. “I cannot conjure up an ounce of respect for Bill Clinton when it comes to the military,” Webb told The American Enterprise magazine. “I don’t think Bill Clinton cares one iota about what happens in a military unit.”

The Democratic Party, Webb argued in a 1995 Wall Street Journal op-ed, was “once a champion of the worker-producer,” but abandoned him “in favor of special interests who define their advancement mostly through the extent of his own demise.”

Yet here is Jim Webb running for the Senate as a Democrat. The events of the past few years — especially the Iraq war — shook people like Webb loose from the Republican Party and weakened their aversion to the Democratic Party. In state after state, white married parents making between $35,000 and $50,000 a year are shifting in the Democratic direction.

So the Democratic Congressional delegation that convenes next year will be different from the ones we’ve seen. It will feature ideologically and culturally diverse people who cannot be silenced or reduced to lockstep party loyalists, whether Webb wins or not. (I suspect he will.)

Among other things, this election has shown how important it is to be independent. You do not want your opponent running ads calling you a rubber stamp, because in this climate that hurts. That’s especially true for Republicans — all around the country, there are G.O.P. loyalists pretending to be moderate mavericks, like Jeff Flake and Mark Kirk. But it’s also true for Democrats.

And we may be about to learn if the party of Nancy Pelosi can make room for the Jim Webbs of the world. We’ve already learned that the party of George Bush and Tom DeLay did a terrible job making room for its own mavericks and moderates.

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In last week’s column, I cited a positive statement Bono made about Rick Santorum. I should have mentioned that Bono made that statement in a profile by Carrie Budoff in The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Photo credit: David Brooks. (The New York Times)