For nearly four decades, the Republican Party has "owned" the cultural values issue in America. During the Vietnam War era, Richard Nixon won the presidency by championing the "silent majority" of Americans who believed in patriotism, God and family. After the humiliation of the Iran hostage crisis, Ronald Reagan made the flag once again a beacon of national pride. A "cultural democrat," Reagan became "Mr. America." More recently, George W. Bush has claimed the support of the religious faithful by defending the "culture of life" and the sanctity of family.
It has not always been so. For more than three decades -- from the New Deal to the Great Society -- it was Democrats who embodied the values of the heartland. Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy and Johnson articulated values that were at the core of the American creed -- a belief in equal opportunity, the well-being of the entire community, pride in being a caring and compassionate people, the whole much larger than the sum of its parts.
What happened?
Most importantly, Democrats allowed themselves to be entrapped by the politics of identity rather than the politics of community. Instead of uniting as a national family, joined by a shared sense of a "common wealth," they became captive to single issue politics and the grievances of individual constituencies.
It all began when Lyndon Johnson, the ultimate consensus politician, rejected the demand of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) to be seated as delegates at the 1964 presidential nominating convention. The MFDP had democratic values on its side. They were citizens who had been denied the vote. They wanted to be part of the national party. But Johnson turned them down, breaking a bond of faith. A generation of potential future leaders who might have sustained the grass-roots strength of the party left instead. Feeling betrayed, some moved toward a politics of separatism -- the beginning of what became a sequence of aggrieved constituencies who insisted on being recognized for who they were rather than the larger community they belonged to.
By 1972, the Democratic Convention in Miami had become a parody of "identity" politics, each group seeking quotas of delegate seats as they out-shouted each other for recognition. In the meantime, Richard Nixon assumed the mantle of speaking for the average American who believed in God, family and country.
Now, three decades later, the Democrats have a chance to recapture their voice as a party of the people. How? First, by once again speaking on behalf of the community as a whole, articulating that sense of a "common wealth" that animated their forebears -- from the Puritans in Massachusetts to New Deal Democrats. Americans desperately want to believe in something bigger than themselves. They want a government that represents their values as a community, and delivers in a crisis like Katrina.
George W. Bush has trampled on that idea of community, directing his tax breaks to the top 1 percent of the country, favoring the oil rich over those committed to conserving our national resources. Democrats need to trumpet once more the doctrine of equal opportunity, and celebrate the caring and compassion that are at the heart of the American community. Whether the issue is health care, the environment, poverty, the existence of "two Americas" or education, putting community interest ahead of self-interest is the best way to re-connect the Democratic Party with its heritage.
"I see one third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clothed and ill-fed," FDR said in his second inaugural address, calling all Americans to a "rendezvous with destiny" to deliver on the promises of the Founding Fathers. "Who among us would wish to be born a Negro," John F. Kennedy asked his fellow citizens in June of 1963, imploring his audience to support civil rights and think as a community rather than as individuals, and identify their own fate with that of black Americans whose unemployment rate was double that of whites and whose children were twice as likely to die young. Kennedy and Roosevelt asked Amercans to live up to the values embodied in the faiths of the world's religions -- to do unto others as you would have them do unto you -- and discard the politics of selfishness.
Today, the Democratic Party can reach for its own rendezvous with destiny by reclaiming that tradition. If and when it does, it will once again become a party that speaks for the "common wealth" of America, not the selfish needs of a few individual, isolated interest groups.