"Judge Alito Must Not Be Confirmed." That's the headline atop the web site of People for the American Way.

"Oppose Alito," proclaims Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. And The New York Times editorial page worries, "Judge Alito's record appears extreme."

Yes, you read that right: The Times, the bastion of Manhattan ideology, which never met a social-engineering program it didn't like, is now delivering lectures to Americans on what should be considered centrist.

But a strange thing has happened on Alito's way to the Supreme Court: nothing. After the first day of Senate hearings, he is still moving forward. In the two months since his nomination was announced, Judge Samuel Alito has been relentlessly battered and bludgeoned by the left, and yet his support is still solid. According to a poll in yesterday's Washington Post, the public supports his nomination by 53 percent to 27 percent.

All of which suggests that the left, and the Democrats who follow the left's lead, will fail in their bid to stop Alito, just as they failed to block John Roberts last year.

Why this likely double failure? One reason is the conservative pro-confirmation machinery is more effective than it was two decades ago, when conservative Robert Bork was defeated.

But, even so, a casual glance through the newspaper headlines and op-ed pages shows, once again, hostility to a Republican judicial nominee. Alito is increasingly being painted by his liberal foes as a careerist authoritarian tool of Republican presidents. What could be worse than that?

Unlike Roberts, Alito is no star on TV. The Washington Post's Dana Milbank dubbed him "bobblehead," and the Post reporter had a point--even if, of course, it's extremely unlikely that a Postie would have made a disparaging characterization of any physical characteristic of a nonwhite, male nominee.

What's the source of Alito's strength? Simple. To a degree that should alarm his detractors, Alito represents America. He represents the mainstream of American opinion, which has shifted from Democratic to Republican in the decades since Alito was born in 1950.

An Italian-American--which is to say, an "ethnic" in political parlance--Alito is from a middle middle-class family in New Jersey. In the last century, such folks were overwhelmingly New Deal Democrats--fans of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman--and they formed the big majority.

So what happened? As Ronald Reagan, another Democrat of Catholic heritage, born about the same time as Alito's parents, always said, "I didn't leave the Democratic Party--the Democratic Party left me." By that he meant that the party of FDR and "Give 'Em Hell Harry" Truman, substantially working-class in its values, changed enormously in the '50s and even more in the '60s.

How did the Democratic Party change? Most obviously, it changed on social issues, exactly the category of issues that brought Alito to Capitol Hill yesterday. The old Democratic Party was conservative on social issues because it was dominated by Northern Catholics and Southern white Protestants--the folks who, like Alito, are now mostly Republicans.

Social issues, as we think of them now, rarely came up back in New Deal days. Issues such as abortion and homosexuality were barely discussed in national politics; they were local concerns, the province of vice squads, not professional civil libertarians. And oh, by the way, it never occurred to anybody to sue to eliminate school prayer or force the removal of Christmas decorations from town squares.

In other words, on social issue after social issue, today's Democrats have used litigation to overturn the status quo that was upheld by the Democrats of a couple generations ago--when, by the way, the Democrats controlled the White House and Congress.

That's the choice today's Democrats face: After throwing away their majority in the name of a left-liberal litigation vision, do they wish to oppose, once again, the natural conservative majority that dominated politics then--and dominates politics now, albeit under the banner of a different party?