What Will It Take to Come Home to the Democratic Party?

June 17, 2022

Tags: 2024, Beto, Biden, Buttigieg, Democrat, harris, Ohio, Republican
Posted in: Democracy, Trump

Raised in 1970s Ohio meant I was raised Democrat. In my area of industrial northern Ohio, Republicans were old people, or those younger, good natured guys from the Jaycees who always joked about “next year” at the get-out-the-vote rallies. It’s true. I used to write for The Nation, even a couple of articles for The New York Times. I didn’t change much, but my party did and one day a few years ago I woke up being yelled at by women in pink hats clamoring I was a racist if not an outright Nazi for supporting free expression they ignorantly called “hate speech.”

I didn’t leave the Democratic party as much as I was abandoned. With the midterm crushing of the party coming as sure as the good guy wins in professional wrestling (big in Ohio) I can’t say I’m ready to go home. But if the Dems want to lure people like me back, here are some things they’ll need to do.

Abortion. I am a practical person, and one in favor of people making decisions not government, and support some level of access to abortion. It is obvious in cases of the horrors of rape and incest. What beast wants a woman already victimized to be forced to give birth to her attacker’s child — hey, look, he has his father’s glowing red eyes! I understand religious objections, but remember the 1A protects all religion, even that which isn’t really religion. I understand Roe as an imperfect mess of judicial creative writing, but representing a distasteful flavor of compromise I could live alongside. But Dems, third trimester abortions? And because I support limited abortion rights you say I also have to buy into a whole full-meal deal of unrelated-to-everyone-but-you LGBETC rights and trans stuff? Didn’t you get the memo that trying to bundle all these things with the Equal Rights Amendment and with various abortion measures cost you support, not earned it? Stick with the basics post-Roe.

Jettisoning the Blue-Anon rhetoric is a natural follow-on. I barely made it through four years under Trump hearing daily the sky was falling, the walls were closing in, and that damn clock would not stop tick-tocking. Every tweet by Trump was not the end of democracy, fall of the Republic, wrap party for the rule of law, etc. When the Supreme Court moves against your wishes, I don’t need to wake up to a headline like “The Supreme Court is a Tool of Tyrants” or worse, “Time for Canada to Offer Gender Asylum to American Women.” Same for when the Electoral College or the Senate does not bounce your way. These institutions were crafted by the Founders to achieve a balance of power, and they do it fairly well. Accept that “balance” means occasionally things will go the other way. The same court that rewrote society implementing Roe can do it again taking down Roe without you losing our mind.

I just can’t support a party where people like Elizabeth Warren go on national TV and act like they just mainlined a warm syringe full of Tourette’s every time something goes wrong. So no more Op-Eds demanding a packed Court, or a change to equal representation in the Senate, or the end of the EC, or more weight on the popular vote, or any of all that. Instead shut down MSDNC and its hemophilia of fake news. I’m tired of the media taping a transcript the chosen candidate’s debate performance on the national refrigerator door.

The Founders, speaking of them, still matter as examples of the more perfect Americans despite their flaws. As a group they were only in the 20s, kids, who for the first time in history created a nation based on a synthesis of ideas; they wrote the code running underneath the United States matrix. They risked “Our Lives, Our Fortunes And Our Sacred Honor” to do that, a dandy example for pols today not willing to stand up and offer an opinion without polling advice. Yes, yes, most of them participated in the ugly slave trade of their day. They weren’t perfect but they are deserving of those school names. Find something more important to fritter away political capital on. What we see in modern wokeness is the difference between a small mind and a great mind, between people who ignore their own flaws to pick at others’ out of time and out of context. Men like Jefferson were prime movers, the thing that lead to the next thing. That is worthy of a statue.

The party should be a Big Tent, but that does not mean we all have to give up our seats for the meme-o-the-day. The Democratic party’s pandering to one racial group (black lives do not matter any more than any other lives, such as my own) or gay folks until they got boring and the party switched to the All Trans Network. Don’t leave more people out, leave more in. Stop elevating shallow clowns like AOC and her Squad. They are hypocrites, demanding we not judge by color or gender while demanding white men to the back of the bus. Look back to the 1950s and 60s Civil Rights movements, which stressed the inclusivity of human rights, not special treatment for every high school kid wanting to annoy his parents by wearing dresses junior year.

Many of us currently outside the tent care as much about the First Amendment as any of the above issues. The 1a — speech in all its forms — is the fundamental right, the one that supports and drives forward all the others. That beautiful haiku of the 1A embraces everything from Jefferson’s eloquence to rotten pornography. It certainly protects what you call hate speech, something that if it started with good intentions has gone on to suck dirt in hell and mean anything that offends anyone anytime. The Supreme Court has found over and again nasty stuff is protected by the 1A, rightfully so, as in the past simply using words like “gay” has been prohibited. Let them sing, the rude and radical, and get back to fighting bad speech with better speech. And leave Elon alone. Twitter before him sold censorship, the promise your pretty little flower people would never encounter challenging ideas in that social media stream, an anathema to a democracy that must thrive on the marketplace of ideas. Right now social media isn’t a barometer, it’s a mirror.

No more wars, okay? Nobody, after two decades of failures and lies and body bags in the Middle East, voted for Joe Biden to restart the Cold War. The United States, I thought, had learned some sort of lesson in the pathetic finale in Kabul, until Old Joe reminded us it was 1980 again by his watch. How in the hell did I end up worrying about nuclear war again? Trump (say what you will, I’ll wait) did not restart the Cold War. He did not go to war as you said he would with China, Venezuela, or Iran. He even tried to make peace with North Korea. I want more of that, not this.

And please, Dems, if you want some of us back, really retire Hillary. She represents little beyond corruption, from the sleazy Arab “contributions” to the Clinton Foundation (which dried up alongside her political chances, funny thing) to a near-endless appetite that lead her to make terrible decisions on things as mundane as running her own email server to avoid FOIA requests. In 2016 we asked for change and we instead watched the party drive Bernie out to the marshes (leave the gun, take the lox.) In 2020 we asked for change and we got the sad skeleton of Joe Biden. So no more rigged primaries. No more Hillary and her “debates” with Martin O’Malley playing the role of the Washington Generals. Learn the lesson before 2024. Take a second look at some of the bright minds on your back bench to see if they might be part of the party’s future if you would like people like me to be part of the party’s future. Otherwise we’re going to vote Trump, or sit it out.

That’s a lot of ask. And spare us “but the other party does…” because that line of argument sounds like “did to, did not” and that failed even fourth grade logic. People understand nobody is perfect, as is no party. Give it all some thought as you’re licking your wounds over the loss of Roe, and the very likely thumping of the midterms. You still have two years to find a real candidate and avoid the easy outs of clones like Harris, Beto or Buttigieg. It’s a hint when someone does not have what it takes when they’re available to run for the White House because they lost locally and were given a patronage job for four years.

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