BOOK REVIEW : Evangelist’s Manifesto of Race, Class, Fear : MINORITY PARTY: Why Democrats Face Defeat in 1992 and Beyond <i> by Peter Brown</i> , Regnery Gateway, $21.95, 317 pages

In a world where the flag of the czar flies over Red Square, the Berlin Wall crumbles and Arab and American soldiers fight side by side in the sands of Arabia, it is possible that a Democrat will be elected to the presidency of the United States.

Possible, yes, but not bloody likely--or so says Peter Brown in “Minority Party,” an in-your-face manifesto of the politics of race, class and fear that blames “white flight” for the persistent failure of the Democrats in presidential elections over the last three decades.

Brown argues that Democrats have ignored the anxieties and aspirations--and thus forfeited the electoral support--of the all-important white middle class in their ardent courtship of black voters and their foolish advocacy of the have-nots at the expense of the haves. The only hope for victory, according to Brown, is to persuade “the average guy” that the Democratic party no longer “bends over backwards for blacks.”

“The Democratic problem is not that the overwhelming number of white, middle-class voters don’t understand what the party is saying,” Brown writes. “The problem is that voters understand quite clearly. And they don’t agree.”

By way of example, Brown introduces us to a Detroit school teacher whose resentment toward her own black students burns white hot. “I would see the kids, whose families were on (welfare), walking around in designer jeans,” she told Brown. “And I’m breaking my buns. I guess that’s when I realized I wasn’t a Democrat anymore.”

Brown, a political reporter for the Scripps-Howard News Service, is a dogged fact-gatherer, an insider who knows all the players and a tough-minded political analyst. “Minority Party” persuades us--if anyone really doubted it in the first place--that the Democrats have been left high and dry by a sea change in their own electorate. The “odd coalition” of the Roosevelt era--”big-city ethnics, Southern rural whites, unions, minorities and those who felt left out,” as he puts it--has been eroded by the rising tide of the white middle class.

“That tidal wave was crashing up against the Democratic party,” he writes, “and washing it away.”

Brown must have one of the most impressive Rolodexes in the business, and he makes good use of it in tracking down the movers and shakers of what passes for the Democratic Party in the 1990s. He finds them dispirited and demoralized, but--like the evangelist he is--Brown has good news for the Democrats: The way to beat the Republicans, he seems to say, is to join them.

“Democrats must wait for a scandal, or economic collapse, or a foreign policy fiasco by the Republicans to stem their party’s losing streak,” he writes. “The wiser Democratic alternative is to make a meaningful change in the party’s message.”

Brown is disarming in his candor. He is quick to concede that some readers will find his book--or at least the motives that he attributes to disaffected white voters--to be overtly racist. But he is willing to take the heat in order to deliver what he sees as the life-and-death message to Democratic party: “retool” your image, by which he appears to mean, stop sucking up to the poor and the black and start pandering to the worst fears of the middle class.

“Minority Party” embraces an explicitly Machiavellian attitude toward politics, a cynical sense that winning elections isn’t everything, it’s the only thing. If the white middle-class voter has thrown himself into the arms of the Republicans, Brown seems to say, the Democratic party should run after him, tell him exactly what he wants to hear and woo him back again.

“Minority Party” may well become the Little Red Book of the Democratic party in the 90s, a handbook for born-again Democratic apparatchiks who yearn to win, win, win. But Brown’s market-research approach to politics has nothing to say to the poor and the powerless, proposes no solutions to the crisis of institutionalized poverty, and offers no hope at all to those pitiable innocents who thought that political parties were supposed to stand for something.

Next: Richard Eder reviews “The South” by Colm Toibin (Viking).