What is the point of being a Democrat?

"Is it a mystery that academics tend to vote for the Democratic candidate, despite this lack of coherent ideas?" asks Ann Althouse, commenting on Former Senator Bill Bradley's flawed but interesting analysis in a NYT op ed of what went wrong in the last election and what the Democrats should do about it.  Bradley looks to the Republicans:

When the Goldwater Republicans lost in 1964, they didn't try to become Democrats. They tried to figure out how to make their own ideas more appealing to the voters. As part of this effort, they turned to Lewis Powell, then a corporate lawyer and soon to become a member of the United States Supreme Court. In 1971 he wrote a landmark memo for the United States Chamber of Commerce in which he advocated a sweeping, coordinated and long-term effort to spread conservative ideas on college campuses, in academic journals and in the news media.

In Powell's blueprint, big individual donors and large foundations were the base of a pyramid, funding conservative think tanks that developed ideas at the next level. Then came political strategists to turn the ideas into soundbites and partisan news media to get the word out, with the president at the top of the pyramid. According to Bradley, the Democrats have an inverted pyramid, based upon one charismatic leader able to win the presidency. Without him -- read Bill Clinton in the last two elections -- the pyramid topples.

But as Gerry at Daly Thoughts [via Ann] points out:

If [the Democrats] are really serious, they would examine which came first -- conservative ideas and philosophy, or the "pyramid' structure Bradley describes. Which came first, Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative, or the structure Bradley says was developed after Goldwater’s loss in 1964?

The book came first. The movement did not generate the coherent vision; the coherent vision drove the movement.

Which gets us back to Ann, who says "Perhaps intellectuals are more comfortable with freewheeling, pragmatic politics than the average citizen":

But Bradley is still right: the Democrats should develop a coherent ideology in order to speak persuasively to that average citizen, who longs for ideas that make sense.

We don't know nothin' 'bout "freewheeling, pragmatic politics," but if Democrats don't have a coherent ideology, what is the point of being a Democrat? Or do they, in fact, have an ideology -- the failed nanny-state, socialism-lite agenda that dare not speak its name, the L word?

One more thought.  Bradley's essay doesn't acknowledge the fact of human nature that fat cats oil the machinery on both sides of the aisle. Has he bought the liberal myth that the Democrats are a party of "the people"? The real story behind the "grassroots" finance "reform" movement comes to mind. As we blogged here, citing Ryan H. Sager's exposé, campaign finance reform was "a plot by ideologues to restrict the speech of their fellow citizens while reserving a special free-speech zone for themselves," stealth funded by over $140 million of ultra-liberal foundation money from the likes of the Ford Foundation and George Soros' Open Society Institute. The Democrats have got their pyramid, all right, but it's not so much inverted as perverted.