The Election

Or, for that matter, those of E.J. Dionne Jr., a veteran Washington Post columnist. Although Dionne may lack Hertzberg's inimitable wryness, he possesses in spades other traits that also epitomize the liberal sensibility: Painstakingly fair-minded, his writings radiate an earnest resolve to ponder complex problems and reach reasoned judgments. In Stand Up Fight Back: Republican Toughs, Democratic Wimps, and the Politics of Revenge (Simon & Schuster, $24), he too addresses the dilemma of how such progressive values as pluralism, toleration and equality can endure -- and even thrive -- while the Limbaughs crowd the dial and Fox rules cable news.

"The United States is not naturally a right-wing nation," Dionne asserts, contra Micklethwait and Wooldridge. Delving deeper than Brock's it's-the-media analysis, he sees the right-wing propaganda apparatus as just one factor in the conservatives' ascendancy. More fundamental, he observes, is the asymmetry between the two parties' political styles.

Since the 1990s, Republicans have brooked little dissent or compromise in pursuing their agenda. From the Clinton impeachment to the 2000 election recount to the post-9/11 debates over war and patriotism, Dionne says, conservatives have engaged in ferocious, unyielding and effective partisanship. They can use the media so well because they have "forged a united front" and a clarity of purpose that "does not exist in any comparable way on the center-left."

The Democrats, meanwhile, have been consistently timid and defensive, whether in legislative tussles, political street-fights like the Florida recount or the war of ideas. In the 2002 elections, most Democrats avoided taking a firm stand on whether to invade Iraq, worried that, as in the first Gulf War, they'd choose the wrong side. In 2003, they collapsed in their opposition to Bush's third straight tax giveaway to the rich.

Dionne traces this Democratic meekness back to the McCarthy era, when conservatives smeared liberals as "pink" and unmanly for their Cold War stances. In time, the "soft on communism" slur spawned a litany of like charges: Liberals were soft on crime, defense, morals -- and now terrorism. Eventually, many voters put stock in these accusations, and so did Democrats. They grew fearful of taking liberal stands, lest they seem out of touch with the electorate's putative toughness. Now, after years of muting their convictions or taking up conservative ones, Dionne concludes, "Democrats forgot how to fight back." Ironically, by failing to defend their values, they've given substance to the perception that they won't lead decisively.

The gendered rhetoric of "soft" and "tough" that Dionne adduces represents but one dimension of another conservative feat: controlling the language of politics. "It is hard to express your own beliefs," Dionne says, "if you are forced to speak in the tongue of your opponents." From the sullying of words like "government" to the justification of policies in market terms -- calling the immunization of babies, for example, "an investment in human capital" -- conservatives have tipped the public debate in their favor by shaping the vocabulary we use to wage it.

Also incisive on this topic is the linguist Geoffrey Nunberg, whose journalism is compiled in Going Nucular: Language, Politics, and Culture in Confrontational Times (PublicAffairs $18.95). Although Nunberg ranges over many kinds of words, including shrewd meditations on the teenager's "like" and the growing vogue of "Caucasian" instead of "white" -- his observations on political speech are especially valuable in revealing how words inform our understanding of issues.

For example, Nunberg sees the word "capitalism" as making a comeback, replacing the old staple "free enterprise" -- "the homey, chamber-of-commerce name" devised in the age of robber barons "to dispel the noxious images that had grown up around capitalism." ("Capitalist," however, "is still in the closet.") He ruminates on why the archaic-sounding "class warfare" can continue to perform rhetorical heavy-lifting for the right. And his essay on George W. Bush's fondness for "evil" simultaneously credits the president with wresting potency from the overwrought word while warning that his overuse of it -- five mentions in the 2002 State of the Union address, 10 in a speech the next day -- risks draining it of meaning.

Given how skillfully the right now sets the terms of political debate -- framing issues in the media, throwing Democrats on the defensive, molding the political vocabulary -- liberalism, whatever currency its principles continue to enjoy, would seem beleaguered indeed. What are the prospects for a revival?

It's possible that conservatives will overreach, as they did in 1995 after winning the House and Senate; Bush's decision to govern from the right and not the center has already alienated some moderate Republicans and independents. It's also possible that the Democrats will get the backbone transplant that Dionne prescribes. Gov. Howard Dean has proved that being liberal need not mean projecting a wimpy image, and the unexpected popularity of numerous Bush-bashing books points to a new feistiness on the left.

There's another scenario for a liberal renewal, too. Jorge Ramos, a Miami-based broadcaster on Univision, argues in The Latino Wave: How Hispanics Will Elect the Next American President (Rayo, $24.95), that the nation's rising Hispanic population is scrambling the old electoral formulas. Ramos's book isn't exactly rigorous scholarship. He states, for example, that Latino voters delivered Texas to Michael Dukakis in 1988 and Bill Clinton in 1996, and that Bush's inroads with Latinos in 2000 reversed the trend; in fact, no Democratic presidential candidate has won the state since 1976, and Bush was always a shoo-in there. Still, Ramos's wide-ranging portrait of Latino politics confirms that this critical constituency, though hardly monolithic, gravitates naturally to the Democratic party -- and the White House's efforts to woo them are forcing the Democrats to address their concerns ever more assiduously.

On the other hand, no iron law of demography or history guarantees a midcourse correction. Sometimes, power begets not a backlash but more power. History can be a snowball as well as a pendulum. For now, the conservative temper that Micklethwait and Wooldridge detect in America can be safely judged an overstatement. But if the administration and its foot soldiers keep playing politics with their characteristic zeal, and if liberals continue to equivocate, this fantasy may, before long, become a reality. •

David Greenberg is the author of "Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image," the winner of the 2003 Washington Monthly book award. He teaches American history at Rutgers University.