Victor Davis Hanson turns his gaze on domestic politics, and identifies the issues where the DNC might be able to make gains with the electorate: Strange Politics.

The per-capita American use of petroleum is probably unsustainable in the long run, while right now our profligacy means sending dollars to terrorist abettors who wind up helping to kill Americans. In 1970 we could say that the market could, if necessary, “correct” the American idea of driving a 7,000 pound, 13 mile-per-gallon gas hog by a simple increase in the gas price. Of course, it can and will do that eventually, but in the meantime a lot of American dollars are going to the wrong people at the wrong time and making energy a question of national security rather than market economics.

More important, we are losing some of the competitiveness and domestic material production that allows us the cash to pay for our imported petroleum. So a renewed policy that ties necessary drilling in the Arctic and nuclear power to fuel efficiency and conservation offers a lot of political room for future candidates, especially if couched not in green rhetoric but in hard-headed terms of America’s national security. It will be interesting to see whether the Right embraces conservation before the Left sees the need for increased energy production; but the first to combine the two approaches will gain the greater political advantage.

Most Americans do not trust the Democratic party’s foreign policy, its commitment to a government-mandated equality of result rather than of opportunity, and its divisive identity politics that seek to cobble together angry interest groups — radical gay activists, ossified D.C. civil-rights insiders, abortion-rights advocates, and Moveon.org types who distrust the United States — in lieu of a grassroots national majority. Yet even such political self-destructiveness does not necessarily mean that the Democrats cannot regain the presidency even without a centrist candidate like Zell Miller or Joe Lieberman. In 2008, we could see another splintering of conservatives as happened in 1992 and 1996. A sober, stable Ross Perot-like national populist could well siphon off discontents — perhaps 5 to 7 percent of the conservative electorate — furious about immigration, deficits, and a sense of American financial impotence abroad.

In response, a liberal triangulating Clintonian — and there is one still left — could suddenly talk about sober spending limits, faith-based initiatives, the need to enforce immigration laws, moderation on abortion, American energy independence, and an end to unnecessary corporate subsidies, and win by capturing 45 percent of the voters.