Republicans, Obama charged, are engaged in an attempt to impose a “radical” change of vision on the country – “thinly veiled social Darwinism” that allows us to “think only about ourselves” and not about “our fellow citizens with whom we share a community.”

After decades of Democratic evasion, from Mike Dukakis’ “it’s about competence” to the new Democrats’ “reinventing government,” Obama chose a great moment  to join the fight between individualism and community at last. This cannot be happenstance. The Republicans have chosen the perfect symbol for the Democrats to confront  – the stunningly wealthy scion of a privileged family who made his fortune in the most individualistic of all capitalist enterprises – leveraged buyouts.
Mitt Romney lost no time in taking up the ideological challenge. Just days after Obama laid down the gauntlet, Romney agreed that this was the philosophy election: “This November, we will face a defining decision.  Our choice will not be one of party or personality.  This election will be about principle.”

And the principle is that “if you worked hard, and took some risks, that there was the opportunity to build a better life for your family and for the next generation.”

Let the great race begin: “Instead of picking winners and losers with taxpayer dollars, I will make sure that every entrepreneur gets a fair shot and that every business plays by the same rules.  I will create an environment where our businesses and workers can compete and win.” And not only will the strongest Americans win, the race is wide open: “I will welcome the best and the brightest to our shores.”

Americans should be grateful to both candidates for finally giving us the choice (not the echo) as the original conservative revivalist, Barry Goldwater, presciently put it so long ago. Smart men, they both understand that it’s ideology all the way down. As we philosophers have always known (I love saying that in an election piece), political contests are ultimately about what each side counts as evidence and what the evidence tells them about what it means to be a good person.

What can people know? The Democratic vision recognizes that people can feel the pain of others.   “Who are these Americans?” Obama asks, invoking that capacity. “Many are someone’s grandparents who, without Medicaid, won’t be able to afford nursing home care without Medicaid.  Many are poor children.  Some are middle-class families who have children with autism or Down’s Syndrome.  Some are kids with disabilities so severe that they require 24-hour care.  These are the people who count on Medicaid.” The Republican vision does not see pain; it sees only “success.” Romney’s characters are “risk takers,” “winners” (and “losers”) in “races” won, presumably, by the fittest, who then raise up . . . their families.
People who can see the pain of others and the risks that cannot be controlled by individual effort make one kind of politics. People who see success and think that people are responsible for protecting themselves and their families make a different kind of politics.

When the debate that Obama and Romney have revived started in western politics centuries ago people had not made their own politics for a long time. They lived under the hereditary rule of various kings and princes. So they argued mostly about what kinds of societies they should make, being human. But Americans have been governing themselves for more than two hundred years. It is an unchallenged assumption of American politics that Americans are basically the good guys. So the debate is shaping up over what kind of societies Americans do make, being American. Barack Obama called it a matter of patriotism, not human nature.

From 2012, Obama has the better argument, as a society of some empathy and collective risk management and opportunity creation has been the norm at least since the Progressive movement of the early twentieth century and certainly since Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in 1933. Predictably, then Obama calls the current Republican ideological crusade “an attempt to impose a radical vision on our country.”  Not surprisingly, Romney harks back to a mistier America, where his “grandfather” pulled himself up by his bootstraps and started the Romney family success drama.

To the Republican ideology, American politics since the New Deal at least is a usurpation, not a genuine expression of American character.  Not coincidentally, constitutional lawyers around the country are holding their collective breath waiting to see if an ideologically conservative majority of the Supreme Court will reverse the health care law and roll back the understanding of the constitution that made the New Deal possible as a first step in restoring the old order.
The election is the second.

New Deal analogies are rampant these days. This is not hyperbole. Not since the election of 1932 has the direction of America’s future been so starkly contested. Let the wild rumpus begin.

With this week’s Supreme Court hearings — which will end, liberals worry, with the justices overturning healthcare reform — we are nearing the apotheosis of conservative power. Let us recount how we got here: In 2000, a mob of conservative thugs stopped the vote recount in Florida. And that was before the court got involved, the five conservative justices seizing the election and handing the White House to George W. Bush. Secure in the tenure of their undemocratically selected president, the two older conservative justices, William Rehnquist and Sandra Day O’Connor, retired from the bench. Bush replaced them with two young conservatives, destined, by constitutional design and the miracles of modern medicine, to dominate the court into the foreseeable future. At the Supreme Court, it’s always winter (and never Christmas).

The stunningly inept performance by the Bush administration unforeseeably produced the first Democratic federal government since 1994. Immediately thereafter, the conservative Supreme Court majority ruled that the GOP’s wealthy sponsors could spend an unlimited amount of the money putting conservatives in office. Now, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court, appointed, in part, by the conservative president they put in the White House, is preparing to wipe from the statute books the only piece of meaningful progressive legislation in the last half century, passed during the brief Indian summer of a two-year Democratic majority.

And it’s not just the federal government. In 2010, fueled, in part, by the money the conservative justices unleashed, the conservatives took over state legislatures across the country. In power, they enacted a series of measures that should make Hosni Mubarak blush. They redrew the legislative maps to guarantee that they would hold a majority of the legislatures, state and federal, regardless of whether they failed to gain a majority of actual votes. (The design of the Senate, favoring sparsely populated rural states, already way overrepresents the Republicans.) Using a panoply of legislative strategies, they made it infinitely harder for the Democrats to register their supporters and for the Democratic voters, even if registered, to vote. Voters must be reported within 24 hours of being registered or penalties will be levied on the laggard registrars. Would-be voters must produce a fistful of identity documents, notoriously more common among old white (Republican) voters than the youthful and nonwhite Americans likely to support the Democrats. If they run the registration gauntlet, they must again verify their identity on Election Day, with the same culturally skewed set of papers. In the swing state of Florida, the New York Times reports, the activists have given up registering new voters: Too perilous.

True, the Democrats have not been models of political virtue. Cowardly when confronted by their powerful adversaries, confused about the moral grounding of their political vision, faithless to their allies, racketing from one trendy policy initiative to another, without anything resembling long-term planning — with enemies like the Democrats, who needs friends? But blaming the victim is way too easy. Democrats made the mistake of behaving as if the American rules of representative government still applied. Confronted with the lawless conservative Republicans, their fate was sealed.

How can this be? We’re in the middle of a Republican presidential primary, normally a time for conservatives to beat their chests over social and culture-war issues. And the most recent Republican Party platform promises to amend the United States Constitution to prohibit any further gay nuptials.

Freedom to Marry, which led the campaign against the repeal bill, credits its success in part to inroads it has made nationally with Republicans. Freedom to Marry’s founder, Evan Wolfson, credits conservatives like Ted Olson — who led the challenge to Proposition 8 in California — and former Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman with accelerating that trend. Mehlman, newly out a year or two ago, was “very effective,” Wolfson says, in guiding them in New Hampshire. And polling showing an overwhelming opposition to the bill in New Hampshire certainly did not hurt.

What this conventional analysis misses is how weird the New Hampshire Legislature is. As a result of a failure to agree on redistricting 10 years ago, the New Hampshire Supreme Court brought in an outside consultant, who created large multi-member districts for the state. Under his plan, there are an unbelievable 403 members of the statehouse. Many districts have as many as four or more members representing them. If the U.S. Congress were constituted like the New Hampshire Legislature, it would be just shy of 100,000 members. New Hampshire pays its 400-plus legislators almost nothing for their service, and they don’t have to be in session very much. Taken together, these characteristics make for a very unusual legislative population.

First, they’re almost always newbies. Multi-member districts like New Hampshire’s tend to vacillate wildly between parties, because there is no partisan gerrymandering to protect the status quo. Predictably, New Hampshire went astonishingly Democratic in 2006 and then unbelievably Republican four short years later. Second, the people who go to the Legislature regard it as more like a civic duty than the first step on the road to a career in politics. Random people, say, angered by a power plant or by the treatment of the mentally ill can run for office, and win with just a few thousand votes. As a result, the 297 Republicans in the 2012 New Hampshire House of Representatives actually function more like a plebiscitary democracy than a representative government organized by party.

Given the Republican legislators’ plebeian roots, the results in New Hampshire are more promising than the jubilant headlines and the conventional explanations. It suggests a support for gay marriage in actual communities — a support that might be obscured if these communities’ representatives were elected in a way that required them to stick more strictly to the GOP’s anti-gay party line.

To be sure, New Hampshire is not a pure sample of the national Republican Party. But for some time, polling has been hinting at a steady increase in support for same-sex marriage even among Republicans. The recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll not only showed 49 percent of Americans in favor (with only 40 percent against) but a 9-point rise in Republican support for marriage, to 31 percent in favor.

It’s not that Republicans have suddenly turned into agents of social change. Rick Santorum is legendary for his enmity to same-sex marriage, and Mitt Romney sketched out his position recently in a press release describing same-sex marriage as against “our values.” Even in New Hampshire, Ovid Lamontagne and Kevin Smith, the 2012 Republican candidates for governor, who are running conventional campaigns with all the political constraints missing in the weird New Hampshire Legislature, both say they would sign a bill repealing same-sex marriage if the Legislature produced one.

But here’s the point: They’re not shouting over each other with anti-gay positions. Lamontagne says the issue is “not a top priority,” as he doesn’t think it “concerns residents” as much as other issues, and Kevin Smith doesn’t want it on his agenda, either.

In fact, even Romney and Santorum aren’t pushing their anti-gay-marriage lines as aggressively as they are other social issues regarding women’s health. When asked how Republicans could be moving in the direction of gay rights while fighting a scorched earth campaign against women, Wolfson noted that one important factor is that at the end of the day gay rights don’t threaten the private regime of white male power the way racial and feminist movements do. And of course it doesn’t hurt the gay cause that fearless advocates relentlessly extract a price for attacking their community. Google “Santorum.”

I’d rather hear from the Nigerians with unclaimed millions in African banks than from anyone remotely associated with the Democratic campaign that insists women are the key to victory in 2012. At least at some point there was probably some money in some African bank. The last time women picked a federal government men didn’t want was the midterm election of Bill Clinton in 1996. And that was within the margin of error.

It’s probably not entirely the Campaign Committee’s fault. It takes a real imaginative leap to be a Beltway player and not believe the Washington Post and the New York Times when they tell you Republican misogyny is the Dems’ ticket to reelection. It’s not just an errant opinion column here and there, it’s a deafening drumbeat of wishful thinking. So many women, so many votes. On March 10, the Times “reported” that centrist women were disenchanted with Republicans. Within a day, a front page Times headline proclaimed, “Obama Plans Big Effort to Build Support Among Women.”

When actual pollsters sniffed around, the same week, they found that women were moving away from their erstwhile defenders at the Democratic estrogen-fest — even as the birth control debate was at its height. A CBS/NYT poll showed that while most women recognized the birth control ban as an issue of women’s health, women respondents nonetheless favored allowing employers to opt out on moral or religious grounds. If the New York Times had sampled women’s opinions other than by asking its 2012 friends and families it might have noticed the distinct lack of disenchantment with the Republicans among centrist women. Once in a while women affect elections. In the Alabama and Mississippi primaries last week, they formed the overwhelming majority of support for that well-known woman’s champion Rick Santorum.

The polls were a little weird. But they conform to a dispiriting insight. The Republicans don’t have a woman problem. It’s the Democrats who have the woman problem. Women aren’t fickle. Despite 30 years of trying (the gender gap first surfaced in polling in 1980) women don’t identify with the Democrats in numbers large enough to offset the Republicans’ overwhelming popularity with men. Democrats can’t even win a majority of white women in national elections. Legal abortion didn’t do it. At the moment even such a retrograde program as opposing contraception isn’t changing the numbers. If not birth control, then what? Breast cancer? The Violence Against Women Act?

There is no magic potion to unleash the mythic power of the female voter. As historian Michael Kazin so brilliantly describes in his book on the left, “American Dreamers,” like many liberal American social movements, feminism changed people’s behaviors and their beliefs about behavior. But, for a majority of female voters uninflected by race, feminism did not change their beliefs about the legitimate distribution of political power. Most women don’t grow up thinking they’re entitled to govern. Judging from their electoral behavior, most white women don’t care if the men they elect hope to deprive them of health insurance that includes birth control, if not keep them barefoot and pregnant. And without the jet fuel of anger and resentment, no social movement has ever changed elections.

I’m a pundit, so I will say that Barack Obama will probably win the 2012 election. He may even be the first president to win even while losing among men, technically a gender victory. (In 2008, the men split almost exactly in half.)  But it will not be an estrogen tsunami, no matter how many hysterical emails the DCCC sends to hapless female Democrats out here in cyberspace.

These revelations are hardly news. At least six years ago, Garner’s New York Times obituary included a clear description of the two individuals (and the jealous lover) involved, including the winsome tidbit that the lover had been beaten to death in 2000, and that Garner had been arrested for assault at least twice.

People who challenge criminal laws are almost never candidates for on-screen portrayal by Tom Hanks. Consider Ernesto Miranda, of Miranda warnings fame. Miranda was arrested while still in the eighth grade, was in and out of reform school, and died in a knife fight at a card game at the age of 35. He was so clearly guilty of the offense at stake in Miranda v. Arizona that he was convicted again in a trial where the state could not even use the confession they had extracted without warning him. Norma McCorvey, the Roe of Roe v. Wade, abused both drugs and alcohol and had already produced two children who had to be raised by others when she agreed to challenge the law against aborting her third pregnancy.

And people who want to challenge sex laws often have to force the issue. After two abortive tries to challenge Connecticut’s centuries-old prohibition on birth control, a Yale med school professor had to open a flagrantly illegal birth control clinic and sit down waiting to be arrested. The result was the famed constitutional decision Griswold v. Connecticut. Like the laws against sodomy, prohibitions on adultery, fornication and, most recently, birth control work by intimidation rather than by lawful enforcement. If brought to the light of day by the dispatch of policemen into the bedroom, such laws quickly fail the test of basic principles of a liberal democracy. But, as the Carpenter book reveals, the fact of criminality made all same-sex relations perilous and suspect, while the law remained unenforced and therefore unexposed to the cold light of a constitutional test.

It was a devilish predicament, which the gay revolution faced again and again. When the police raided the illegal, Mafia-run bar called Stonewall in 1969, the New York liquor authorities had long since stopped threatening to pull the licenses of bars with a gay clientele. Yet the constant pressure of the police on the bars that catered to gays created an informal oppression that only ended when the Stonewall patrons rose up.  Indeed, long before Lawrence, a posse of gay activists in Los Angeles had to cook up a citizens’ arrest of six admitted sodomites in order to force the issue of the constitutionality of California’s sodomy law, in face of local authorities’ unwillingness to enforce the darn thing.

Lawrence and the rest didn’t have to be paragons of virtue. Comparing them to the Lovings is a categorical mistake. They weren’t asking, as the Lovings were, to be included in one of the most morally freighted, traditional institutions of social approval, marriage. They were asking to be left alone, a founding principle of any liberal democracy. When the time came for the gay revolution to take on the constitutionality of fortress marriage, activists correctly pursued a completely different course. No beer-swilling pornography collecting random plaintiffs for the uber-respectable Republican icon Ted Olson and his Democratic sidekick David Boies. The named plaintiff in the California gay marriage case,  Perry v. Schwarzenegger is a soccer mom who actually ran the state’s program advocating for children newborn to 5 years old.

Realizing that the gay movement was harvesting the appeal of their Cleaver-style family litigants, Rush Limbaugh recently tried to get some traction against same-sex marriage by pointing out that one of the iconic couples married when California allowed it was divorcing. In the American tradition of simple equality, if heterosexuals like the serial marriers Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich can avail themselves of the institution, gay and lesbian fiancés, however unappealing, should be able to do so as well. The gay movement has been brilliantly strategic in its choice of symbols in the marriage fight. But victory will surely be at hand when someone as raffish as John Lawrence and Tyron Garner can stop by the Elvis chapel and tie the knot.