I wrote yesterday that I hadn’t seen any Democrats talk of a permanent majority. Well, now I’ve found one.

“This was not just a change election, but a sea-change election,” Robert Borosage, co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future, said during remarks at the National Press Club. “This is the end of the conservative era.”

“What you’re seeing in the nation is the emergence of a center-left majority,” Borosage continued. “We are witnessing the creation of a permanent progressive majority.”

Let’s forget the word “permanent,” shall we? That’s nonsense. The pendulum will continue to swing. But the rest of the Politico article linked above makes some critical points.

The groups Democrats were successfully able to court in 2008, including Hispanics, single women, Asians and youth voters, are a growing part of a electorate, said [Stan] Greenberg, while the base voters Republicans have depended on have become a proportionately smaller part of it.

Conservatives ought to be worried that 66 percent of voters under 30 voted for Barack Obama. A clear majority of voters between the ages of 30 and 64 voted for Obama. Only the 65+ voters preferred John McCain. This doesn’t bode well for the future of the Republican Party.

Certainly, many of those young voters might be persuaded to vote Republican in the future. However, this election shows us that this group won’t be won over by Atwater-Rove style “fear and smear” campaigns. This means the current Republican establishment has no clue how to campaign to them. Also, I think Republicans have bleeped up so badly that younger voters will be wary of them for a very long time. They are not likely to switch allegiances until Democrats bleep up really badly. Which, of course, they are capable of doing.

Back to Stan Greenberg:

“A lot of Republican voters were brought in with gimmicks,” the pollster said. “They had their base and then would try to pick off specific groups of voters on narrow issues.”

Greenberg insisted meanwhile that those who voted for Obama “share a world view.”

I think this is critical. I’ve lectured many times on the patched-together nature of the Reagan coalition. People calling themselves “conservatives” in America really do not share a worldview in the intellectual sense. They share a lot of resentments and biases, yes. They are attracted to the gauzy glow of a shared mythos, and the imagery (e.g., cheesy eagle art), narratives and slogans that go with it.

Other than that, however, conservatives don’t make sense. They want “small government” but a big military. They support war as a solution to foreign policy problems, but they don’t want to raise taxes to pay for war. They want “liberty” but support warrantless wiretaps. They want “free markets” but mostly support corporate welfare. They want government “off our backs” but in our bedrooms. (One could do a lot with that last one, metaphorically speaking, but I think I’ll leave that to your imaginations.)

In other words, they have a laundry list of positions (on which they do not all agree), but the positions do not make an integrated whole. They don’t see how the parts fit together. Well, they don’t fit together. But they should, if they’re going to come together as a philosophy of governance. This give us a clue why a Republican Congress, working together with a Republican president, totally bleeped up large parts of the planet.

Frankly, after the New Deal coalition broke up in the early 1970s, Democrats didn’t have much in the way of a worldview, either. Less ideological than Reagan Republicans, Dems have been great at thinking up programs to solve this or that problem, but beyond “good government” they had no glowing worldview to unite them or make the Dem brand distinctive. They had no talent for pointing to the shining city on the hill.

Republicans, on the other hand, were great at pointing to the shining city on the hill. They developed a religious faith that if they were true to their ideology, it would lead them to the Promised Land. But, as I’ve said, their ideology is a disjointed mess. And as the luminous Saint Ronald fades from memory, if not from rhetoric, they’ve forgotten the shining city and have fallen back on stoking hate, fear and wedge issues to keep the coalition together.

[Update: Yes, I know Saint Ronald stoked hate, fear and wedge issues also, but he made these nasty things sound virtuous and positive. A large part of Reagan’s appeal was that he could make bigots feel good about themselves again. There was genius to that. No one who has come after has been able to match him.]

The hopes many of us have pinned on Barack Obama is that he personifies the best of both sides. He has the rhetorical skills to show us the shining city, while at the same time he’s got the smarts to see how the parts fit together, how the details add up to a big picture. If he gets anywhere in the ball park of being the president he promises to be, he’ll be a great president.

(This morning I changed the default blog category, the stuff that is listed after “Filed Under,” from “Bush Administration” to “Obama Administration.” Boy, did that feel good.)

I’ve been having a lot of fun reading conservative commentary on where conservatism should go from here, and I hope to write about that sometime over the weekend.