Via NRO:

I am a lifelong Democrat, and I have always loved the ethnic, religious, and regional varieties of Democrats and all their rhetorical exuberance and excess. When Zell says he hasn't left the Democratic party, the Democratic party left him, I nod my head vigorously and want to pound the pew saying, Say it louder, brother, say it louder! Say it loud so they all can hear! ....

[Our party] was destroyed by leading Democrats of the left and by the educated class into whose hands the party's leadership increasingly fell. It became the new party of the rich and the movie-actor/professor/journalist axis, claiming to speak for the poor: the frauds....

As I listened to Miller in the Garden that night, I asked myself, how can the Democrats reply to this? It is so manifestly true. They are not the war leaders Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy were. They are not the party I still love and admire, and wish existed still...

It is the Democrats who have called their own passion this year hate, and argued publicly that hate is a suitable and defensible passion to have toward George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Zell began by pointing that out. Those of us born Democrats in the years of FDR don't remember Democrats who hated, as this year's Democrats do. Democrats used to be the cheerful party, the "happy days are here again" party. We don't remember obsessive hatred. We used to poke fun at the opposition, not hate them. We felt a little sorry for them.

As a conservative, I'm sad at the death of the old Democratic party, though it probably helps the Republicans in the short run. For one, I want to be tempted by two parties. I don't want one of them to be so obviously nutty that the other can sit complacent and count on my vote. That's bad for everyone.

For another thing, even though there are many Democrats like Pataki and Miller who will vote against Kerry and for Bush, because they're concerned about terrorism, that worries me in the long run. I don't want the "conservative" party to become any more pro-huge-government that it already is by catering to disenfranchised Democrats whose reasonable concerns have been abandoned by their own party.

Sadly, that's the way it's become, so I see the vote as being one more oriented around supporting fascism (Democrats) or opposing it (Republicans).