As I watched Ted Kennedy laid to rest at the end of August, I found myself thinking about 1987. That was the year Kennedy castigated Reagan Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork. During Bork's hearings, Kennedy said, "Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the government." In retrospect, many people think Kennedy's speech was the beginning of the end for Bork. Critics also charge that the harshness of his words caused of our current culture war. Maybe so. As recently as Aug. 28 of this year, The New York Times ran an editorial stating as much.
Whether or not he caused it, Kennedy certainly was on the right side of the culture war. Like all good progressives, he battled social conservatives who seek to suppress anything they personally find un-Christian, immoral or inconsistent with traditional American values. It is a struggle that still rages today.
The current Virginia gubernatorial race is rife with culture clash. The Washington Post recently reported on Republican candidate Bob McDonnell's college thesis for Regent University (Pat Robertson's school). In said thesis, McDonnell writes that working women are "detrimental" to families. He argues that government should prefer married couples to "cohabitators, homosexuals or fornicators." He also calls a 1972 Supreme Court decision legalizing contraception for unmarried couples "illogical." He wrote that at age 34. McDonnell is starting to look like George Allen, a Virginia Republican whose 2006 Senate re-election campaign was eventually derailed when he was caught using an ethnic slur.
The Democratic National Committee has released a statement on this issue and its wording sounds familiar. It makes reference to "Bob McDonnell's preferred Virginia," and pundits are already describing Democratic attacks on the thesis as "Borking" McDonnell. "Borking" is the term Republicans created for when Democrats show their backwards-looking nominees and candidates for what they really are. This entire episode illustrates why despite Democratic struggles, the Republican Party is far away from returning to power. And why? Perhaps because the GOP is a party made up of white men looking out for the interest of white men.
The problem for Republicans is that the number of white men in America continues to decline. Women outnumber them today, and in just a few decades there will be no racial majority in America. The election of a black man who campaigned on the change undercuts the decades-old GOP strategy of appealing to certain white, male fears. There are still plenty of scared white men. They are the armed nuts you see at town halls, and they would love to live in Robert Bork's America. But let us always remember Ted Kennedy. As we look around at our country as it exists now, not in a Republican fantasy of yesteryear, let us realize something. We don't live in Robert Bork's America. We live, mostly, in the America of Ted Kennedy's dreams.
Nick Field is a sophomore in the School of Public Affairs and a liberal columnist for the Eagle. You can reach him at edpage@theeagleonline.com.