Peggy Noonan, Come Home : Politics: The marriage of blue-collar and moneyed Republicans is fragile, but Democrats still can’t find the message that will break it.

Millions of working-class Americans can still name the towns in Ireland, Italy or Poland that their parents came from. For them, the Democratic Party used to be a lot like the Catholic Church; they occasionally strayed from the one true faith but they always came home.

But in the 1970s, these people began to leave the Democratic Party on a more regular basis, adding their votes to those of white Southerners who had defected to Barry Goldwater, George Wallace and Richard Nixon a decade before. By 1984, when the daughter of a working-class Irish family from Massapequa, N.Y., Peggy Noonan, joined Ronald Reagan’s White House staff as a speech-writer, so many Democrats had strayed for so long that they were never going home again.

“What I Saw at the Revolution” is Peggy Noonan’s book about her life in the Reagan White House. But it could be the story of a political generation, because the subtext is about one woman’s political journey. Like many other political journeys, it is remarkable only because so many people took the same trip at the same time.

It begins on the New Jersey Turnpike. Noonan is on a bus going to an anti-Vietnam War demonstration in Washington and listening to the rhetoric which was, you may remember, filled with contempt for America and what it was doing. A sample of the rhetoric: “We’re a racist, genocidal nation with an imperialistic lust for land that isn’t ours . . . “ A sample from Noonan’s reaction: “And get me off this bus! . . . What am I doing with this contemptuous elite? . . . From here on in, I would use my McGovern button as a roach clip.”

I, too, was on those buses, and for some of us, our profound disappointment with America came across as contempt. We stayed Democrats, while Noonan and others left the party.

The cultural divide that opened up between the working-class kids who had fought the war and the privileged ones who had protested it might have vanished in the ‘70s, along with memories of Vietnam, had it not been reinforced by economic events. By the end of the decade, slow growth, inflation and high taxes were having a devastating effect on blue-collar, non-college-educated workers in particular. Prosperity for the working man--the most important reason to be a Democrat--was gone by 1980, and the Reagan revolution was born.

When Noonan tells her mother that she is going to work for Ronald Reagan, her mother says: “My father always said, stick with the Democrats, they’re the party of the working man.” Noonan replies, “When Grandpa said that, it was true. It’s not anymore, Mom.” I’ve read statements like that a million times, and they always hurt. Did we Democrats lose our voice, or did they stop listening?

When you stop feeling at home in one party in American politics, you don’t have too many options available. So the sons and daughters of immigrant families who put plastic slipcovers on the brocade furniture from Sears and statues of Our Lady of Lourdes on the front lawn, and the Southern sons and daughters of “yellow-dog Democrats,” joined those who had grown up on antique silver, faded chintz and the Episcopal Church to form the new Republican Party.

Lance Tarrance, a Republican pollster and analyst, calls the old-style Republicans “Establishment” Republicans; they account for about 67% of the GOP vote. The new-style Republicans he calls the populists; they account for about 26% of the Republican vote and that 26% has given them the margin of victory in presidential elections. Not surprisingly, the two parts of the coalition clashed in style and substance in the Reagan White House.

The style differences between the Establishment and the populist Republicans were paralleled by policy differences. Like all converts, Noonan and the other populists were true believers in Reagan’s conservative revolution, and were frequently at war with the pragmatist, Establishment types.

Noonan tells the story of a White House conservative named Gary Bauer who used his time at a staff luncheon with the President to tell him about a Southern girl who wanted to make her valedictory speech on the importance of God in her life. School authorities said no. The pragmatists, who accept a strict separation of church and state in a way that the new populists do not, responded to Bauer with embarrassed silence and laughter. Except, of course, for Ronald Reagan, the original populist Republican, who decided to send the girl a letter.

This is the Republican coalition that survives today. The Bush White House is filled with pragmatic secularists who believe, for example, in a woman’s right to abortion, while others in the Administration hold to a resolutely anti-abortion stance. Southern good ol’ boys like Lee Atwater work alongside Ivy Leaguers. But prominent conservative leaders like Paul Weyrich fear the “re-emergence of the old-style Republican Party, a party which doesn’t like Catholics, evangelicals or other people of strong religious persuasion.”

Can this marriage survive? The issue of abortion, of course, can split this coalition right down the middle. And so can economics and the legacy of regressive taxation from the Reagan years. I would love to find a Democratic presidential candidate who could figure out a way to explain to the new populist Republicans that they pay more taxes than the old Establishment Republicans. He might be able to win back some of the populist Republicans.

George Bush is, after all, related to more British royalty than any other American President. He is the embodiment of the Republican Party that Noonan’s Irish relatives especially used to dislike. But right now, he is an enormously popular and lucky man, managing to hold this rather odd coalition together because the Democratic Party is still searching for the mainstream.

I like to think that the Democrats will rediscover that mainstream and then those of us who stayed in the party will be able to say to those who left, “Hey, Peggy, welcome home.”