More on the End of Ideology

It looks like I'm not the only one who sees 2006 as marking the dying gasp of 20th century ideological politics. Matt Bai writes today in the New York Times Magazine: "The era of baby-boomer politics — with its culture wars, its racial subtext, its archaic divisions between hawks and doves and between big government and no government at all — is coming to a merciful close." With this election, the Democrats have become a 21st century party, assembling a coalition committed to effective, pragmatic leadership; the voters rejected the GOP based not on ideology but on the incompetence born of their ideological rigidity. The Democrats, in the long run, benefited from the earlier disintegration of their ideological position, as even the word "liberal" became a pejorative; Democrats have spent over a decade moving away from ideological positions to craft policies that appeal to the growing pragmatic center. According to a new poll by Stan Greenberg, the word "conservative" has become almost as unpopular as "liberal"; but the old ideological right remains firmly in control of the Republican Party.