The political reformers of the 1960s brought us the modern primary system along with a vast array of grassroots- and foundation-supported activist political organizations. It was all intended to usher in a time of increased political engagement based on values and ideology rather than simple party power and patronage supported by the supposed, if imaginary, "pocketbook voters" of the past.
It was to be a new dawn for democratic politics - think about Common Cause - and it essentially replaced the smoke-filled back rooms full of shrewd old politicos with the money-people of today that purists, but few money-hungry candidates, now bitch about.
Jon Shields, in In Praise of the Values Voter in The Wilson Quarterly, explains that the (largely) left-tilted activists of the time believed that an ideological intensification of the parties, with an increase of "values voters," would culminate in the grand debate between liberals and socialists, which the socialists would win - leaving nobody motivated to build new businesses or to create new, profitable ideas.
It didn't turn out that way, because, while the Left took over the Dem Party which embraced their new values, the gradual rise of a mainstream Conservative America arose as a powerful force with its own values. Shields explains the disenchantment of the Left with "values voters:"
The chief answer is that they lost their enthusiasm for “values voters” because those voters turned out to have the wrong values. One of the great political ironies of the past few decades is that the Christian Right has been much more successful than its political rivals at fulfilling liberal thinkers’ hopes for American democracy. Liberals built an array of well-funded public-interest groups such as Common Cause, Environmental Defense, NARAL Pro-Choice America, and the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. But most of these organizations asked little more of their supporters than checkbook activism, and some were entirely supported by foundations. The Right, on the other hand, built genuinely grassroots organizations, including Operation Rescue, the Christian Coalition, and Concerned Women for America, whose members mobilized millions of disaffected evangelical citizens through church-based networks. In his famously despairing account of Americans’ civic involvement, Bowling Alone (2000), Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam conceded the point, without appearing to find much solace in it: “It is, in short, among Evangelical Christians, rather than among the ideological heirs of the sixties, that we find the strongest evidence for an upwelling of civic engagement.”
Read the whole thing. I think it explains a lot. Conservative-Libertarian as I am, I think I would prefer to see less ideological parties. (I'd also offer the observation that generally, as one moves from the national stage to more local politics, ideology becomes less prominent and less important. In my town, you could not tell who is Dem or Repub from our discussions of the school budget: they are all trying to figure out ways to extract more money from State and Federal grants.)
Image: No "values" there: you can read about the history of NYC's Tammany Hall here.
