The Democrat Party Knows Who You Are

March 3, 2019

 

The “Democrat” Party knows who you are.  It knew the moment those biting words escaped your lips.  You’re the kids who made life miserable on the playground.  You’re the adults that looked the other way.  You’re the kid who threw an eraser at the teacher’s back, and blamed it on the quiet child in the corner.  You’re the kids that snickered and sneered.  And now you’re coming to the table with a not-so-subtle epithet, clearly with no intention to engage in civil, serious, or adult conversation.  But you’re no adult, either.  You’re just the same insecure bully you were decades ago.

The Democratic Party knows who you are.  It’s full of kids who spent their formative years avoiding you, heads-down and wary beneath the shadows of those who enabled your cruelty.  The Democratic Party endured their endless Sunday piety, an all-too-thin veneer concealing the meanness and hypocrisy just beneath the surface.

But the Democratic Party knew it wouldn’t last forever.

The Democratic Party worked hard, it read books, accumulated knowledge, gained empathy and understanding, and spread its wings.  It traveled abroad, experienced the cultures of the world, eventually revitalizing our own urban cores and reinvigorating the technological and economic power of the United States.  It formed bonds with people it had never known before, and found warmth, encouragement, and acceptance in their embrace.  And the Democratic Party, in the end, wanted little more than to share what it had found with everyone.

The Democratic Party thought it had escaped small-mindedness and simmering resentments.  It believed it had finally succeeded in lifting the aspirations of our Founding Fathers to the surface, and in bringing them into the bright light of the world’s gaze.  But the bullies returned.

They mocked our voices.

They belittled our heroes.

They burned our bridges.

They derided our professionalism.

They basked in their own ill-preparedness.

And when they rose up, their shadows darkening our path once more, they had the nerve to defiantly and indignantly insist that they’d done nothing of the sort, and that everything was perfectly normal. 

It is not.  It is not normal.  Not in America.

Writes Eliot Cohen of Johns Hopkins University and The Atlantic, “The Republican Party has placed its bets against young people, people of color, urban populations, the college-educated, and moderates.”  Understanding that the trendlines are against them, they have suppressed voting, improperly influenced elections, flooded the airwaves with disinformation, and in so many places gerrymandered their opposition into near irrelevance.  To the envy and delight of banana republics and brutal dictators, their inflammatory rhetoric and brazen duplicity have enabled a criminal destruction of our democratic norms and traditions in America that could scarcely have been envisioned by public servants and citizens alike not that long ago.  They’ve ripped open and cast aside the lid of a Pandora’s Box of intolerance, ineptitude, and willful destructiveness which will be difficult to refasten during the lifetimes of current generations.

Given this bizarre and otherworldly political reality around us, the Democratic Party knows it occupies uncharted territory for which it is ill-equipped.  How can it extend its hand to those who will not take it, no matter what?  Is America like Germany before her indeed waking up, in the words of page and screen pillar Werner Herzog, “to the awareness that one-third of your people would kill one-third of your people while one-third watches…”? Are such questions unfair when "very fine people" carry torches, chant Nazi slogans, and swear loyalty to our president? When children are ripped from the arms of their parents by those with no intention of ever reuniting them?  Such ominous questions cannot, in any stretch of logic, be uniquely German, nor Soviet, nor Ottoman, nor colonial.  Cravenness is unconfined by culture.  Cruelty is contained by neither border nor cage.

While the Democratic Party, for the safety of our children and future generations, works for pragmatic and reasonable firearm legislation, the occupant of the nation’s highest office openly and proudly boasts that he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and lose no support; indeed, after all we have witnessed together, we seem to have found his floor of obsequious and servile support at around one-third.  Though, as Cohen also writes, “winning over 80 percent of 31 percent of the country is not a winning formula, and the Republican Party will deservedly find that out the hard way.”

Will it?  This former Republican is unconvinced.  No matter the course, our country takes the hit.