As many observers have remarked, the debate among Democrats about the reasons for their defeat on November 2 has been remarkably civil as these things go. In particular, the vituperative exchanges between so-called Old and New Democrats have been refreshingly absent.

There's a good reason for this. That debate is increasingly irrelevant to where the Democratic party needs to go and increasingly foreign to a new breed of Democrats--"Newer Democrats"--who represent the party's future.

Here's an excerpt from an article I wrote before the election, "Old Democrats and the Shock of the New" (forthcoming in a Hoover Institution volume, Varieties of Progressivism in America, edited by Peter Berkowitz), that lays out the ways in which the Democratic party has evolved away from both Old and New Democrats. The basic argument holds up pretty well, I think, in the aftermath of the 2004 election.

...[M]ost Democrats were understandably tepid about signing up on either side of the [populist-centrist] dispute [after the 2000 election]. Both sides seemed more interested in rehearsing old debates and defending old positions than in grappling with the election that had just happened and building on the Clinton synthesis in all its complicated glory. There was simply no appetite among most Democrats for rerunning the faction disputes of the 1980s; Democrats knew their party had changed dramatically in the 1990s, and an argument that was detached from that reality seemed uninteresting at best and downright destructive at worst. Moreover, the Republican Party under Bush, with an ascendant hard Right and its willingness to say or do anything to win, seemed a formidable enemy that called for a fresh Democratic approach, not just old wine in new bottles. This has lead to the emergence of what I call “Newer Democrats.”

...Newer Democrats saw ...the DLC and the liberals/populists, as continuing to provide important insights and useful tools for building the party. And both groups were clearly important parts of the party that were not going to go away. But neither New Democrats nor populists, in this emerging view, seemed to know how to beat Bush and the no-holds-barred conservative Right that was taking over the Republican Party. Both groups seemed stuck in the past, even though the urgent task was to transform the actually existing Democratic Party, with its updated vision of progressivism and new coalition, into an instrument that could beat the Bush Republicans.

You can read the whole article by following the link above. And you may want to check out the whole volume, Varieties of Progressivism in America, because it also contains excellent essays by David Cole, Thomas Edsall, Franklin Foer, William Galston and Jeffrey Issac. In addtion, Hoover has already published a useful companion volume, Varieties of Conservatismm in America, also edited by Berkowitz, with essays by Randy Barnett, Joseph Bottum, Richard Epstein, Jacob Heilbrunn, Mark Henrie and Tod Lindberg, that is well worth a look.