While Democrats of all kinds are humming along in upbeat fashion toward what they hope will be a triumphant return to the White House this fall, there's a very underdiscussed facet of it:

WHO exactly is on board in this wave toward hopeful victory and what exactly are they expecting?

While it may seem like a simple answer...especially to many Democrats...., it really isn't. Projection of the individual voters' tastes may be obscuring their vision of what an Obama presidency may look like in terms of policies. I, as a libertarian, harbor no illusions that my tepid preference for Obama over McCain in any way translates into a likelihood that Obama will do my bidding. For me, it's a calculated and pragmatic choice based on trade-offs as well as an understanding of the machinations of government and process. But this isn't really about me or other people like me. It's about the hodge podge group of people known as "Democrats". And Democrats, while they may share common principles, are extremely diverse in the details. And the devil is always, as they say, in the details.

The strand of Democrats that I find particularly depressing, dim and unwittingly masochistic is what is called the "Social Democrat"...or more precisely...what I call the National-(istic) Communitarian Social-(istic) Democrat. It is a group full of contradiction and..strangely enough...rife with illiberalism that rivals the likes of Tom Tancredo and Duncan Hunter. It is, at the same time, a caricature and a very real wing of the party. It is an ideological basket case that wants what the frightening fruition of its vision could never deliver and hates what its vision inadvertently and indirectly does deliver...while never realizing its role in the worst of the reality it despises. It is a desire for control that wreaks uncontrollable havoc which then begets more desire for control and continued havoc like a dog chasing its own tail. It desires an inclusion that causes and demands a want for exclusion. It wants the benefits that come from the antithesis of what it wants while claiming them as their own creations...all while seeking to destroy that very antithesis in the name of yet other values that are not borne from what it seeks. In short, its murky and compromised sense of true liberalism, of any kind, has a very, very low threshold...after which point it's extremely illiberal in an effort to keep what it has unsustainably gained and fend off the side-effects of what it has unwittingly wrought.

With that intro, we come to an article by Matt Welch from Reason which takes a look at what some in the Obama camp are fancying and cooking up for their seemingly imminent reign. The strange thing is that Obama does not really strike me as one of these National Communitarian Social Democrats. But that may not matter unless he fights and breaks rank with these types of Democrats once in power...like Bill Clinton did at times and on the major economic issues.

Matt Welch sums up an article by Michael Lind promoting the vision of this wanna-be-ruling wing of the Democratic Party as such:

eject the social liberalism and "liberaltarianism" of the "McGovernite" Democratic era of Carter and Clinton and failure, and re-embrace Franklin Roosevelt's "It's the New Deal, Stupid" approach.

...and in full blown up-the-ante fashion I might add by not only rejecting the value of social freedoms and choice but also by welcoming social conservatism into a big tent based unabashedly on economic populism. The marriage of William Jennings Bryan populism and the FDR-style command-and-control state capitalist dirigisme, if you will.

Says Lind:

to create an updated version of the New Deal, the Democrats have to treat economically liberal social conservatives as equal partners, with their own spokesmen and leadership roles in the party, not just as a handful of swing voters brought on reluctantly at the last moment. Conversely, Rubin Democrats and other economic conservatives should be invited to join Grover Norquist and the Club for Growth in a free-market deficit hawk party

OK, then. I must say, if THAT were to become the new Democratic Party and the GOP became the direct opposite of it, I think I could finally join a party with good conscience....provided the war hawks went blue as well. Hillary's base would finally a have majority. ;)

Does this vision for a new coalition have legs? I certainly hope not.

National Communitarian Social Democratic views that would persist or even intensify include:

unwitting support for increasingly bigger and more corrupt government, taxes, bureaucracy, special interests, fascistic corporatism and labor strife along with even less subtle hostility to open immigration, economic flexibility, free trade and TRUE diversity (not the fake one many Marxist college professors in "area studies" shove down people's throats).

Whatever Obama's faults, he is at least a true Modern Liberal of sorts, IMO. A true modern liberal at least shares many goals and aspirations of their classical liberal forerunners....even though the methods and priorities may differ slightly or greatly. I can live with that. I can also have many a fruitful conversation with such liberals. Such liberals should be wary of these illiberal Democrats with which they make common cause.

The battle for the GOP seems to have been won by Neo-Con/Nanny-State Conservative coalition with principled and tolerant small-government moderate types and libertarian-leaners shoved to the side. While I'm no Republican and never would be, I regret seeing the GOP become even more hostile to my values than they already were. The battle for the Democrats is at hand and it's happening. Liberals should beware lest your counterpart of the Neo-Cons takes control and moves the part even further away from liberalism....of any kind.