No, they're not all latent liberals

I really ought to be doing something useful this Monday morning, but I must share this piece I pirated from Jeff Goldstein’s Protein Wisdom site.
It gets right to the heart of the fallacious assumption that all of those heretofore silent non-voters were latent liberals and Democrats. That has always been the touchstone of Democrat ideology and, to some extent, believed/feared by those of us in the Center and on the Right.

Writing in the Weekly Standard, associate professor of political science at UVA Gerard Alexander argues that, in election 2004, “there wasn’t a huge untapped pool of Democratic voters, after all.” From “The End of a Left-Wing Fantasy” (subscription required, so I’ll quote liberally):
It’s not difficult to detect a level of demoralization among some Democrats that can’t be explained by the loss of a single presidential election by three points. One reason may be the death, on November 2, of a myth that has long nourished the hopes of the American left--the idea that tens of millions of non-voters (if only they could be turned out) were an ace up their sleeve.
For decades, liberals and progressives pointed out that Americans vote at much lower rates than Europeans. Since non-voting is especially high among groups that normally lean to the left--minorities and those with the lowest incomes and formal education--this meant that the building blocks of a more liberal, even social democratic, politics existed in the United States. But these people (so the thinking went) were excluded from the political process by complicated registration procedures and the failure of parties and candidates to raise issues that motivated them. To many on the left, it was a reassuring image: Outside the political system, looking in, were enough potential voters to swamp conservatives (and moderates for that matter). It meant history was still on their side, since ways would surely be found sooner or later to mobilize these citizens.
Many Democrats shared this belief, which is why they joined progressives in passing the “motor voter” registration law in 1993. Many journalists were believers, too, regularly reporting that high turnout naturally favors Democrats.
But there were always two things wrong with this line of argument. It exaggerated the number of non-voters and it mischaracterized their likely political views. Because turnout ratios are typically calculated as a percentage of all adult residents of the United States, the number of non-voters misleadingly includes millions of people who are not eligible to vote because they’re not U.S. citizens or, in many states, because they are convicted felons. There have always been millions fewer non-voters out there to be mobilized than was suggested.
More important, the myth mischaracterized non-voters politically. It’s true that minorities and the very poorest Americans have historically voted at disproportionately low rates. But it doesn’t follow that the average non-voter falls to the left of the political aisle. For example, U.S. Census Bureau data suggest that non-voters who didn’t finish high school at most made up one in five non-voters in 2000. The same data suggest that up to 30 million non-voters in 2000 had either some college education, a bachelor’s degree, or an advanced degree. In other words, non-voters included many millions of middle-class Americans. In other cases, the myth-making left politically miscategorized groups that historically voted at low rates. African Americans might vote overwhelmingly Democratic. But politically sluggish young people come close to splitting evenly between Democratic- and Republican-leaning views, despite 1960s memories to the contrary. Hispanics are turning out to be much more politically diverse than some hoped (and others feared), even if we aren’t sure exactly how many voted Republican this year. Finally, the ranks of non-voters have also included millions of rural and small-town residents--many of them religious--whose incomes might connote urban poverty but whose political sympathies don’t. In sum, it isn’t obvious at all that most non-voters would be heavily inclined to support left-of-center candidates if they entered a polling place.
The 2004 election results bear this out and may lay the myth permanently to rest. The campaign caused a healthy increase in turnout, but at least as many of the new voters cast Republican ballots as Democratic ones [...]
[...] And if we compare how many votes George W. Bush added to his 2000 totals with how many John Kerry added to Al Gore’s 2000 total, it’s clear that Bush gained heavily among these new voters, even though Kerry had the easy pickup of many former Naderites to his totals.
Much has been made of the impact of the Evangelical Christian voting bloc, but I suspect the real swing in George Bush’s favor this November came from erstwhile liberals who woke one morning to find they were suddenly more comfortable with the conservative label—progressivist Democrats having hijacked the Democratic party, and with it the home to traditional liberal moderates. For me, this realization occurred in the course of debating my progressivist friends in the academy over things like affirmative action, or diversity, or gender-based pedagogical theory. To my mind, a real commitment to egalitarian concerns had been eschewed by progressives in favor of a faux egalitarian impulse that sought to foist a superficial statistical “equality” on the American public by constantly jiggering policy to achieve the proportional results it idealized. And the ends justified the means. Which is how we ended up with illiberal liberalism—a liberal progressivist political culture that justifies racial quotas and free speech zones, hate crimes legislation and increasingly anti-male public education practices.
It’s worth remembering that Martin Luther King, Jr., a Christian civil rights advocate (and president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference from its founding in 1957 to his death in 1968), would today be pilloried by the progressivist left as a red state Uncle Tom—an “inauthentic” Black Bible thumping creationist whose dream that people be judged not “by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” would be dismissed as anti-Black “code”—or rather, as the right’s usurpation of the language of “fairness" to keep minorities permanently oppressed by removing from the social equation historical contingency. Which critique, of course, is a big steaming load of self-serving horseshit.
No, in the final analysis, I think the American liberal spirit is alive and well, just as it’s always been; but because much of that spirit resides in the ideals of modern conservatism, and because conservatism finds its home in the Republican Party, an increasingly “red” country has simply continued its principled embrace of classical liberalism. And until the Democratic Party recognizes that such a rebranding is in fact taking place, they’ll continue to lash out at what they perceive to be backward heartland rubes in a facile attempt to caricature those who embrace a constitutional liberalism that respects the separation of powers—and which places the will of the people over the slim partisan dictates of some or another activist judge hoping to cement his or her own judicial immortality.