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.

Old Warhorses

 

February 24, 2019

 You know Robert S. Mueller III.  Perhaps not personally, but you know him and you trust him.  You’ve known and trusted men like him your whole life; they were ever present during your childhood: quiet, steady, serious in demeanor and sober in manner.  Community leaders and professionals clad in perpetually dark suits, ushers on Sundays, Scout leaders on Mondays, honing and shaping the characters of young men.  They lived unassumingly, in pleasant neighborhoods with fine families, predictably mowing their well-kept lawns on Saturday mornings.  They were almost always veterans, calm under fire, now somber pilots of Buicks in unremarkable colors.  They were honorable, benevolent, and never bragged nor beat their chests.  Not once.  And never, ever, did they mock nor belittle others.  Such men had no time for those who did.  You trusted them, and you knew they were made of a hardened metal as dependable as time itself.

So when the findings of the Special Counsel’s Office are finally released, you’ll reflect on the quiet character of Mr. Mueller, recalling the steady old warhorses of your childhood, and you’ll trust them, whether or not you want to believe, and whatever they may reveal – be it more, or less, than anticipated.  It is, however, quite likely that many will not enjoy what they read nor what they hear.  Indeed, after everything we have witnessed it may already be too painful for some to acknowledge the gravity of error in judgement for elevating this indignity to such commanding heights, and the natural, human inclination is to rant and rail against the uncomfortable but obvious conclusions piling up like cars in a multi-vehicle accident on a treacherous highway.  But the accident has happened, and nothing will change that now.

The folly of our present national course has been hiding in plain sight for so very long.  We may not have preferred many of the choices arrayed before us in 2016, but most were competent if uninspiring, and offered serious and steady leadership, however disinclined they might be toward appreciably moving the needle.  Instead, we lobbed a grenade into the room.  No one should therefore be surprised by any of what is happening, as many millions saw the danger tumbling toward us from the moment this unfit, despot-loving showman descended his brassy escalator under so little power of his own.

The cruel buffoonery on almost hourly display in the Oval Office is beneath the dignity of our nation and of its people.  It must end; and whatever our initial hopes or justifications during the fall of 2016, it is now up to us all to bravely face it, to openly acknowledge it, and to work together to fix it.  It is now up to us all to return the old warhorses to the historically revered halls of our legislatures and administrations - the type of serious men and women we once trusted and admired when, it seems, America was great. 

It is time to return to the serious and steady work of the United States.

 

Through the Looking Glass

 

February 23, 2019

 

When you’ve spent a decade and more immersed in bizarre conspiracy theories, suddenly finding oneself on the other side of the mirror must not feel much different.

Millions of Americans however – indeed the majority of voters – are daily alarmed by the bewildering antics on display in our Executive branch.  Government by tweet storm, cabinet scandals, bizarre interviews, constant haranguing of perceived enemies, trampling of norms of constitutional democracy and comportment, legislatures of primates willfully blocking any sensory perception – they are disappointing, frightening, and indeed altogether overwhelming to most of us.  There is, however, a noisy and resentful minority of Americans who gleefully relish the chaos on the canyon rim.  But why?  How, having lived alongside one another through decades of imperfect yet capable and professional leadership, can they suddenly countenance and even support such a national abasement?

Here's at least part of the answer: in the last decade, neither physical evidence nor proximity have proven a match for manufactured media bubbles.  President Obama never made Americans to submit to a shadowy new world order, nor hand over their guns, nor convert to Islam.  He was not a Kenyan-born Muslim bent on the destruction of the United States, and he never barred any of his fellow Christians (even his ironically controversial pastor in Chicago) from attending church on Sunday.  And again, with no small measure of irony, we can observe that he never deployed the U.S. Army to invade Texas, nor did he round up anyone and put them in FEMA cages atop Walmart stores.  He did not destroy the economy nor the equity markets – quite the contrary – which following an historic rise in valuations during his tenure, did not then perform an ignis fatuus about-face upon his departure.  Hillary was not found responsible for the violence in Benghazi, despite years of fruitless investigations, nor did the highest echelon of the Democratic Party operate a child sex ring out of a pizza joint in Northwest Washington, DC.   Any of us who remain connected to once-conservative America knows full well that all of these bizarre tales – and more – were incessantly peddled as truth for nearly a decade, stirring anger, spreading division, inspiring violent crimes, and sending armed men into the midst of horrified families. 

History will record that even the chronic and tired Republican specter, the mainstream media (or “MSM”) was itself complicit in the spread of disinformation, for years, as it regularly hosted Republican pundits, politicians, strategists, and agitators spewing half-truths, conspiracy theories, manufactured grievances, and outright lies, rarely questioning the veracity of such assertions or even pushing back at all, in some vain and misplaced effort to appear “fair and balanced” to a cohort of heel-dug Americans who would never acknowledge that same media’s impartiality or good faith, regardless.  Such tolerance, by 2016, had only served to erode the trust of those less inclined to critical thought.

Our friends, our grandmothers, the men from church – so many of them seem to inhabit some alternate reality we struggle to understand.  But one’s perception of normality is a product of one’s environment; it can of course be a virtual environment of our own choosing, and in today’s ubiquitously connected society, with its limitless trove of digital rabbit holes, our environment and thus our reality can be uniquely crafted to fit any individual preference.  And in the vast reaches of red post-Soviet America, absent the compelling immediacy of a cultural, intellectual, and socioeconomic mélange, it often is.

We are now – all of us – thrust through the looking glass, carried off by our own demons into a world where down is up, cruelty is cute, freedom is fealty, bully is best, and most of us scarcely recognize our fellow countrymen.

 

Not Thing A, and Not Thing B

 

February 16, 2019

Any functioning society engages in some degree of state intervention – much like any functioning adult maintains some measure of self-control.  In its purest form, the state acts as guardrails for commerce and comity, enabling freedom of movement, expression, creation, and transaction within defensible bounds.  And that is what it is meant to do.  Without the state, there is no money, no legal framework for any contract.  No shared infrastructure, no common defense.  Thus fails the hackneyed “government is bad” cliché routinely trotted out over these last forty or so years during which we’ve watched our bridges crumble while much of our society languished in a downward socioeconomic death spiral and we achieved a level of disparity and division not witnessed in a century.

The intellectual laxity of the current “capitalism vs. socialism” question is therefore exasperating.  Employment of these terms so monolithically diminishes any measurable credit in economic and public policy debate.  Ideology, like policy, is a continuum - not a binary set of choices.  The appropriate debate concerns the degree to which we have state intervention, not if we have state intervention, nor whether one’s ideology is either thing A or thing B.   The chronic trope that the center-left would prefer the United States become another Venezuela via “socialism” is as absurd as suggesting one’s neighbors would prefer a tin shack to their comfortable suburban colonial.  No one wants that.  Similarly, one cannot credibly assert that Nordic countries, with their comparatively higher standards of living and superior metrics to the U.S., are at once both unlike socialist Venezuela, and yet unworthy of study and some possible emulation because that would be socialism.

Should we provide some sort of social safety net, or not?  Do Social Security and Medicare count?  Or, as they are state interventionist and redistributive of income, should they be scrapped?  Where does that leave you?  Your parents?  If we can agree that education is a public good, should we continue to support it?  And if we observe that a healthy citizenry is a productive and comparatively inexpensive one, should we support that, too?  Is healthcare thus a public good, like education?  Every other industrialized nation seems to think so. 

The sooner we all acknowledge that government – wherever we choose to place it around the center of the chart – is the least worst of narrow options, the sooner we can all work together on discerning (absent self-destructive hyperbole) which necessities, rights, and public goods require policy intervention and to what degree those policies are most effective for our progress and competitive advantage as a nation of thoughtful and neighborly citizens committed to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.