What Happened to the Democratic Party Nationally?

The National Democratic Party to me is more liberal than ever for the first time in a generation.

It's more antiwar than at any time since vietnam. Support is growing for such traditionally liberal values as using the federal government to help the poor.


Remember during the campaign season, presidential candidates Barack Obama & Hillary Clinton & others skipped the Democratic Leadership Conference gathering in Nashville, but went to the yearlykos convention. The DLC is the centrist group that pushed for welfare overhaul and a pro-business agenda in the 1990s, helped launch Bill Clinton to the presidency. One area where the party has unfortunately moved left is on national security and there's still political danger in adopting a McGovern-like image.

Liberal Democrats, in the beginning deeply antiwar, but their liberalism also was grounded in social issues of civil rights and women's rights. Union members, a foundation of the liberal coalition from the days of FDR through the mid-'60s of LBJ, were blue-collar, cultural conservatives and supporters of the war in Vietnam. That fissure began to break the Democratic coalition apart in 1968, and even more in the 1970s. The moment one would point to is the 1968 Democratic Convention where some say that night broke the backs of the democratic party for good.

Many blue-collar Democrats, better known as conservative democrats left the party altogether — becoming so-called Reagan Democrats by the '80s — and those who stayed lost clout in the Carter and Clinton eras.


The Georgia Demcoratic Party during those years kept a great distance from their more liberal counterparts, but the State Party started to move from being conservative to now a center-left party, with a few old-school moderate, conservative democrats left in the wings ( Alan Powell, Bob Hanner, Gerald Greene, Ellis Black, Jay Shaw, Amy Carter, James "Bubba" Epps, DuBose Porter, Rick Crawford, Barbara Massey-Reese, Tim Golden, George Hooks, J.B. Powell ) just to name a few. Others either switched to the GOP out of fear of losing their seats, redistricting, while other just retired all together. Maybe this fall whoever the democratic nominee is can bring the party back to its roots & away from the clutches of the National Democratic Party.