Why The Left Keeps Losing

By Charles Krauthammer

% The first thing a party does after it loses an election is round up the usual suspects. The Democrats' postmortem of the Dukakis debacle has produced a fairly standard list of fall guys. It starts with:

-- The candidate: cold, arrogant and weak. Funny, that's not what they were saying in Atlanta, when he was 17 points up, and where his absurdly praised convention speech led one giddy columnist to compare him with "the heroes of ancient Greece."

-- The handlers: too green, too smug, too Harvard. They lost it on tactics, it seems: poor timing, shifting themes, lousy commercials, unreturned phone calls.

-- The process: modern sound-bite campaigning never let the challenger get his "message" -- too complicated and cerebral for television -- across to the viewers. But since the viewers are also "the people," that leads to . . .

-- The people: too dumb to see through the smoke, too emotional to resist the "hot-button" ads. As one disgusted commentator put it (on this page), "The voters are idiots."

Thinking so may be a comfort to Democrats, but it is the reductio ad absurdum of election analysis and the first step toward losing the next election. How long can Democrats go on missing the point? After a while -- say, a quarter-century -- a pattern begins to emerge. Since 1964 Democrats have lost every presidential election save one. And that one (Carter in '76) was a squeaker and a fluke, coming immediately after Nixon's fall, the Ford pardon and the biggest gaffe in the history of presidential debates (Ford liberating Poland).

Tactical explanations don't go far. After all, the biggest tactical error of this campaign, Quayle, was made by the other guy. And tactical explanations miss the bigger picture. The Democratic Party is not the only left-of-center party to find itself increasingly shut out of national power. Earlier this month Israel's Labor Party lost its third election out of the past four. Its decline appears irreversible. The same is true for Britain's Labor Party, defeated for the third time in a row last year.

What happened? In all three countries, the left-of-center party has allowed the party of the right to become the nationalist party and claim all the national icons, foremost among them the flag. In Britain, Labor has never recovered from its embrace of unilateral disarmament. In Israel, where politics does not suffer from subtlety, Likud and its allies simply call themselves "the national camp." Of course, parties of the right always appeal to nationalism. But formerly the nationalist idea was successfully challenged by an equally compelling idea: socialism or social democracy.

The current crisis of the left stems from the brutal fact that the idea of socialism is dead (its obituary is being written even in China and Russia) and the agenda of social democracy is exhausted. In Britain, Israel and the U.S., the social-democratic party has completed its historic and heroic task of creating the structure of the modern welfare state. Its agenda enacted, the party has run out of energy and ideas. Consequently, the party of the right, with its claim on the nationalist idea and all its attendant emotional and political power, has been handed the game almost by default.

Which is why the most successful left-of-center parties are precisely those that have seized the nationalist issue themselves. Take the French Socialists. There is no great debate in France about its place in the world. The Socialists learned decades ago to accept the Gaullist vision of French grandeur, with all the trappings, military (e.g., the force de frappe) and geopolitical (e.g., the intervention in Chad). Not surprisingly, the Socialists keep winning. This year Francois Mitterrand became the first President of the Fifth Republic to win re-election.

In Spain, too, the Socialists have not permitted the right to corner the nationalist market. Having taken Spain into the Economic Community, Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez has demonstrated that the adept use of anti- Americanism (e.g., kicking a U.S. air wing out of Spain) is an excellent way to shore up nationalist credentials and retain popularity.

In Canada, only one month ago, the Liberal Party was moribund. It was running last, 14 points down in the polls, behind even a minor third party. Then it suddenly found its voice as the fierce defender of the nation against the American threat, disguised this time as a free-trade agreement. The Liberals turned the election into a referendum on patriotism. That did not win them the election -- though the left would have won had it not divided its 52% of the vote between two parties -- but it did save them from catastrophe. They doubled their representation in Parliament and remain a viable alternative to the Conservatives.

Parties of the left that plausibly present themselves as nationalist parties can survive, even flourish. Those that cannot, flounder. American Democrats began absorbing that lesson four years ago. Having sought vainly for some new, galvanizing social vision in the New Deal-Fair Deal-New Frontier tradition, and having found that mere nostalgic invocation of the past does not work, they figured they had better retake the flag.

Accordingly, four years ago in San Francisco, they filled the convention hall with a sea of waving flags. That did not quite do the trick. So this year they went one step further. They started bashing foreigners -- not Communists, to be sure, but second best -- ruthlessly efficient Asians. Starting with Richard Gephardt's "$48,000 Hyundai" ads and finishing with a Dukakis TV spot that featured a rising Japanese flag, the Democrats' appeal to economic nationalism has not been subtle. Attacking allies is not nearly as satisfying as attacking enemies (say, the Evil Empire), but it is a start.

After Dukakis, the Democrats have only two avenues to recovery. They can present a rethought social-democratic vision that challenges the nationalist party by presenting an alternative to it. Or they can try to seize the nationalist issue themselves. Failing that, they have one hope left. They can pray for a depression.