BY DANIEL HENNINGER
Friday, February 3, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST
The most significant moment in Tuesday evening's State of the Union speech did not occur while President Bush was speaking. It was just before the speech, when TV cameras caught the two new Supreme Court justices, John Roberts and Samuel Alito. They are conservatives. They are what the Republican voting base wanted on the court and what George Bush promised he would nominate if elected.
Liberals are appalled. Those who are not appalled are apoplectic, filling Web forums with denunciations of the justices and the president whose election victory entitled him to name them. This is a fight over ideology.
Ideology isn't popular in Washington. The American press abhors it, going so far as to make "ideologue" a term of political opprobrium, if not suggestive of mental illness. Ronald Reagan, an ideologue, was a "cowboy." The press prefers "pragmatists," politicians who win elections then set ideology aside to "get things done."
Looks to me like the pragmatists are running out of covering shade. Ideology is back at the center of American politics. It is going to stay there through the 2008 presidential election. This is what happens when the reigning political class abandons ideology--as now.
What preoccupies the Beltway's conventional wisdom today and what interests voters could not be more different.
What matters most to the Beltway is who gets caught by the Abramoff scandals, the legal dicta of al Qaeda surveillance, and who takes the fall for Hurricane Katrina. These things can be fun but alone they reduce politics to an Xbox game.
What interests the most motivated Democratic voters now is "progressive justice," "our values," "our rights," "public needs," Roe v. Wade. What interests their GOP opponents is "big government," "spending," patriotism, the "ethics" of cloning, "activist" judges, Roe v. Wade.
At a time when the Democratic elites no longer have a vibrant ideology and the Republicans in Washington are deserting theirs, the public across the spectrum seems to be screaming for recognizable signposts, shared political principles.
Back in 1960, the sociologist Daniel Bell wrote a book remembered for its title, "The End of Ideology." Years later he said in the New York Review of Books that some had missed an important caveat in the book's last chapter: "I said specifically that there is always an emotional hunger and yearning for ideology and that these impulses are always present among young intellectuals."
And so today. I don't know if I would call the people running Democratic Web sites such as MoveOn.org or the Daily Kos "young intellectuals," but what they're hungering for can only be called ideology. One might prefer a less fanatic, less foul-mouthed faction than this, and their Democratic principles may seem a tad antique, but the unmistakable fact is that the Web Democrats are ideologues--proudly and defiantly so.
They're insisting that the party nominate a candidate who'll run unashamedly on "progressive ideas." They believe Clintonian triangulation is a sellout. And they matter more than similar ideologues going back to the Trotskyite cells on the Lower East Side because they've proven they can use the Web to raise millions to support or punish Democratic politicians. Even ideologues on the left need capital.
This is what John Kerry's obviously quixotic filibuster was about, not stopping Sam Alito. When Al Gore gives a speech that strikes you as crazy ("How dare they drag the good name of the United States of America through the mud of Saddam Hussein's torture prison"), it's about this internal ideological competition, not you.
Karl Rove in a speech last month to the Republican National Committee said that "a party's governing philosophy should be at the heart of our political debates." The Web Democrats agree with this. The left-wing American Prospect magazine writes in its current issue: "In private conversations, progressives recognize that there is a need to do something about broad social changes that they, too, find objectionable." That is about the search for a winning ideology, not mere polling tactics. John Boehner's upset defeat of Roy Blunt in yesterday's House leadership vote suggests the Shadegg insurgency woke up House Republicans to the fact that their voting base was prepared to abandon them in November after they abandoned their ideological moorings.
The argument of practicing politicians against all this is that politics is ultimately about control by whatever means. You win, you control. This is often true, but now amid Abramoff, "out of control" GOP spending and the Democrats' 24/7 carping, whatever works is in low esteem in the heartland, if not discredited. In the new media world, the political sausage factory is always on view. Ugh.
Many candidates in the off-year election this November will still try to hide from ideology. That will be hard. In his State of the Union message Mr. Bush said, "We've entered a great ideological conflict." His is unavoidably a wartime presidency, and with no respite from politics. There was a time when politics stopped at the water's edge. In our time the Web Democrats' search for an ideology ensures that the president's every move will be subject to challenge. The fact that they're fighting the Bush surveillance policy on hapless legal grounds rather than separation of powers suggests it may take until 2008 to make the primal Web scream ideologically coherent.
People who crave the middle are simply going to be disappointed in 2008. The Democrats have abolished the middle, and the Republican middle has discredited itself. There is a reason John McCain markets himself as more right than center; he knows ideology matters just now. So do George Allen, Rudy Giuliani, Sam Brownback and the rest.
How Hillary Clinton triangulates in the current atmosphere is the Rubik's Cube of our time. But for the Web Democrats and GOP refugees from the Congress they thought they controlled, the puzzling is over. They're looking for candidates "who represent my ideas." Ideologues.
Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.
