Steyn vs. Dowd: Perceptive/Clever vs. Formulaic/Predictable

Mark Steyn has a few comments on the Vermontization of the Democratic Party, a "lo-fat" retreat from its former "commanding heights" of leadership to the Dems present Seurat-pointillist impressionism of bike-path poop-scoop gentility. Steyn is the Maureen Dowd of the Right, fresh, clever and perceptive rather than Dowd's descent into her formulaic and predictable Bush-bashing bon-mots. Here Steyn on the slow withering decay of Democratic aspirations:

Vermont may now be America’s leading Canadian province, yet Patrick Leahy is still the only Green Mountain Democrat ever to be elected to the US Senate and only the second Democrat Vermonters have ever sent to Washington.
“the growth of government – the dominant social feature of this century” and “the Social Engineers, who seek to adjust mankind to conform with scientific utopias”. But these old battles don’t seem quite as epic today as they did back in November 1955. To paraphrase Norma Desmond, the government’s still big; it’s the big picture that’s got small. The utopian progressivism of the left is a shriveled parochial thing these days.
Half a century ago, Leahy’s Senate seat was held by George Aiken, a Republican and the soi-disant “wise old owl” famous for advising LBJ on Vietnam, “Declare victory and come home.” Today’s Democratic line on Iraq seems to be: Declare defeat and come home to Vermont. It’s not just that Vermont has been Democratized, but that the Democratic Party has been Vermontified

Mark now takes the most straw-filled hollow-man of all as a punching bag:

[This is] a process encapsulated in Howard Dean’s explanation to CNN as to why he left the church he was raised in and became a Congregationalist:
I had a big fight with a local Episcopal church over the bike path.
He had a “big fight” over a bike path? Apparently so. “I was fighting to have public access to the waterfront, and we were fighting very hard in the citizens’ group," he told Judy Woodruff. Fighting, fighting, fighting – for a bike path. Dean’s church had strayed from the gently undulating and narrow. The road to hell is paved, whereas the shared-use trail to hell has attractive wood chips. And so Dean quit the Burlington Episcopalians and took up with the UCC. In the same week the Governor re-lived his profound doctrinal struggle over the bike path, he’d also professed himself utterly indifferent to the question of whether Osama bin Laden should be tried in a US court or at the Hague. “It doesn’t make a lot of difference to me,” he sighed, stifling his yawns, fighting vainly the old ennui. War? What is it good for? The Dems can’t even stay awake for it.

Steyn has more on the Global Bike Path the Dems would pave toward world unity.

Perhaps all cultures have their Howard Deans. Perhaps there are Governors of Peshawar who storm out of the Sword of the Infidel Slayer mosque over its refusal to declare a jihad on Jew bike trails. But, for all their talk about thinking globally and acting locally, today’s Democrats have a huge problem focusing on the first half of that bumper sticker. In our current existential struggle, the debates on the way forward are between factions of the right: the Bush Doctrine vs “realpolitik”, with “assertive nationalism” coming somewhere in between. Proponents of all three worldviews are Republicans. The Democrats appear not to have a dog in this fight. The dog is on the Burlington bike path, where Democrats are busy drafting revisions to the new poop’n’scoop legislation.

Steyn leaves out Mugabe, but includes the Dems new heroes in their struggle to achieve true defeatism and throttle Bush simultaneously:

Governor Dean’s bike-tunnel vision is not an isolated phenomenon. Everywhere you turn Democrats are linking arms and singing their new all-star fundraising anthem “We Aren’t The World”. John Kerry on the campaign trail: “We shouldn’t be opening firehouses in Baghdad and shutting them in the United States of America.” …………You can still glimpse the remnants of the internationalist left on their fading T-shirts – Fidel, Che, Mao, Allende, the Sandinistas. And admittedly today’s global celebrities are a tougher sell – Saddam, Mullah Omar, Kim Jong-Il, miscellaneous clitorectomy enthusiasts in West Africa, etc. But even so the left’s retreat to hicksville is impressive: the western progressive has ideologically downsized and relocated to a remodeled farmhouse outside Montpelier.

That’s what David Brooks got wrong in Bobos In Paradise.

He visited Burlington and other "latte towns" and concluded that they were "relatively apolitical". What he took as the evidence of lack of politics – bike paths, independent bookstores, skinny espressos – is the politics, albeit a lo-fat version. The pre-Tony Blair Labour Party believed it needed to control "the commanding heights of the economy". The pre-Gorbachev Communist Party wanted to control the commanding heights of everything. But the big-picture left collapsed in 1989, and for a Vermontified Democratic Party small is the new big. That’s what Bill Clinton had in mind when he said the era of big government was over; instead, he’d be ushering in the era of small government, lots and lots of it, all over the place, like a map of America re-painted by Seurat – and, when you add up all the little dots, you find out that small government works out far more expensive than big government. Thus, the Clinton legacy is all small print, starting with the Federal toilet-tank legislation: he’s the first President to flush himself down the toilet of history.

Steyn is excellent on the see no, hear no, speak no evil smiley-face---let Osama leave Kharthoum to fly to Afghanistan where he can't blow up our embassies---laissez-faire Clintonian desire to turn the USG into an NGO:

You can understand why the Dems miss the Nineties. There was nary a word about war. Okay, you’d get the odd million-man genocide in Rwanda, but you tended to hear about it afterwards, usually as a late-breaking item in the Clinton teary-apology act. Instead, it was an era of micro-politics, a regulation here, an entitlement there, a recycling program everywhere you looked. Venusian Americans assumed they’d entered an age of permanent post-Martian politics, and they resented 9/11 as an intrusion on their minimalism. When you’re at an event for the “anti-war” movement, you realize it’s no such thing: it’s an I-don’t-want-to-have-to-hear-about-this-war movement.
That’s why they like to mock Bush, Cheney, Rummy and co as the real terrorists – the ones determined to maintain America in a state of “terror…….
If I had to do what the Democrats no longer seem willing to do and raise my sights from their narcissistic poseur politics to the big geopolitical picture, I’d put the bike-path left in the context of one of the most disastrous trends in the developed world. Today most of the west has elevated what one might call the secondary impulses of society – government health care (which America is slouching toward), government paternity leave (which Britain’s just introduced), government day care (which Canada’s thinking of introducing) - over the primary ones: national defense, population growth, faith (in a higher power than government). If you’re a secondary-impulse society like Canada and most Continental countries, it seems perfectly natural that the Defense ministry is now somewhere an ambitious politician passes through on his way up to a job that really matters – like Health minister. America is not there yet (I doubt Don Rumsfeld would regard it as a promotion if he were moved to Health & Human Services) and I’m optimistic enough to think it never will be. Secondary-impulse states can be very agreeable – who wouldn’t want the celebration of one’s sexual appetites to become a key political priority? – but they’re agreeable only for the generation or two that they last. And, as we’re about to see in demographically barren, economically sclerotic Europe, for good or ill it’s the primal impulses that count. The social democratic agenda is a suicide cult, which is why the Continent will be well past semi-Islamified at the time of our hundredth birthday.
It doesn’t even really work on a cute homey Vermonty scale: the Green Mountain State’s signature boutique business, Ben & Jerry’s, is now part of the European multinational Unilever. I’m a believer in a two-party system because in the end the integrity of the dominant party isn’t served by the collapse of the only alternative, and I would love the Democratic Party to get back in the game. But to do that they’ve got to get off the bike path and back on the unlovely central thruway of geopolitical reality. As I said at the beginning, it would be a rash man who’d bet on the contours of the political map in another 50 years. But let’s be rash: given blue-state demographics, the Democratic Party faces a bleak future. If they remain mired in trivia, by 2055 even Vermont will have woken up sufficiently to have ceased electing Deans and Leahys