From Tom Paine
By Michael Kazin

The members of the new Democratic majority that takes control of Congress next month do not support every progressive ideal and policy. Dozens of House members, especially from the South and Mountain West, oppose abortion rights, gun control, and same-sex marriage. Other lawmakers still believe the U.S. can emerge victorious in Iraq; they criticize the way the Bush administration has managed the war, not the decision to invade and occupy the country in the first place.

Some liberal journalists and bloggers warn us to beware of such red-hearted wolves in blue garments. They warn Democratic leaders to prevent the conservatives in their midst from gaining influence, lest they stall the revival of a solidly progressive party.

Although the argument may sound logical, it is a prescription for failure. Over the past century, the Democrats, as their very name implies, have nearly always been a broad yet fragmented party–and they were seldom able to reform America unless they could keep those fragments from flying apart.

The party that lifted Woodrow Wilson into the White House in 1913 and strengthened its hold on Congress was a crazy quilt of ideological and regional diversity. Agrarian populists from the West and Dixie caucused both with Southern conservatives who still revered Robert E. Lee and with wily, often corrupt pols from Tammany Hall and similar urban machines. But all Democrats agreed on the need to rein in the corporate rich and give aid to struggling workers and small businesses. So Congress managed to pass the income tax amendment, an eight-hour day for railroad workers, and forged an alliance with organized labor. Only after World War I, when Prohibition became law and the Senate rejected Wilson’s vision of a new global order, did the Democrats devolve into warring factions.

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