On the eve of another Republican presidential administration, the Democrats are in the midst of a crisis they do not fully seem to appreciate. The “party of the little man” cannot figure out why their traditionally effective strategy no longer seems to work.

Apparently finding no fault in themselves, their beliefs, or their strategy, party leaders “blame the voters.” Americans, we are told, are not ready for the party’s ideas. We are stupid, unsophisticated, and probably too religious. Apparently Democrats look down on the American voter.

How did this come to pass? Why are Democrats so confused and why is their traditional strategy no longer effective?

Maybe their confusion stems from the fact that an elitist class of lawyers, entertainers, and media people currently controls the Democratic Party. Many of those people are among the richest and most glamorous people in America, and they lead lives the rest of us can only imagine. Products of their own extraordinary experiences, they are all but completely divorced from the daily experience of middle class America. The “party of the people” is completely out of touch with the people.

Strategically, the Democratic Party has spent the last 50 years dividing Americans into special interest groups claiming they alone can fairly represent their interests. The strategy worked well during the heyday of the civil rights movement when it was easy to present themselves as champions of civil liberties. However, more recently, the strategy has backfired.

Creating groups of self–interested people has had the effect of pitting the groups against each other: women against men; blacks against whites; Hispanics against Anglos; Jews against gentiles; homosexuals against heterosexuals; non–religious against religious, etc. The righteous either–or polarization of the civil rights era no longer unites the Democrats. What they are left with is a collection of self–interested groups, destructively competing for their own influence in the party.

Nationally, the Democratic Party is at a historical crossroad. It has two choices. It must either create a new mega group that unites the existing, self–interested constituent groups (thereby dissolving the groups it has heretofore created) or it must find a way to keep all the existing groups intact and happy. The problem for the mega group scheme is that the values, goals, and interests of one group are often at odds with the values, goals, and interests of some other group.

Fortunately, there is an obvious and easy way to keep the existing groups intact and happy: The Democrats must become champions of state’s rights . With state’s rights as their rallying cry, the Democrats could conceivably please their existing constituents while making tremendous inroads with voters they have heretofore alienated.

• If the majority of the people in New York want to ban handguns, then let it be. If the majority of people in Arizona want to carry handguns to church, so be it.

• If the people of Georgia want to make abortion illegal, and the people of Massachusetts want to provide taxpayer–funded abortions on demand, why not support them both?

• Californians could declare open borders and require bilingual education at the same time that Idaho sealed its borders and declared English its state language.

Hillary Clinton has already taken a “step toward the right” with her recent denunciation of “illegal immigration.” While perhaps shrewd, hers is the tactic of a single politician and not the strategy of a national party. It will take a commitment on the national level to bring the party back from the brink.

In the South, particularly SC, the Democratic Party is already well on its way toward political irrelevance. By becoming champions of state’s rights, the Democrats can reverse this trend. Ironically, adopting a state’s right platform will actually make the Democratic Party the “party of the people” by ensuring that the people, at least locally or regionally, are free to do as they choose.

Nothing less than a bold, strategic, and national initiative will revitalize the Democratic Party. The Democrats must seize this opportunity and move forward. The choice is theirs: either continue to blame the stupidity of the American people for their failures at the polls or resurrect their faded leadership by working on behalf of the majority of the people in every region of the nation.

Walter Rolandi is a proponent

of individual freedom. He owns a consulting

company in Columbia that specializes in

speech recognition computer systems.

His Ph.D. is in

psychology.